Except for that Little Detail...

[paft.livejournal.com]

Via Raw Story

Colin Heaton, 1/16/12 speaking to the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Convention, on how to finance building a secure wall between Mexico and the United States:

You take all these incarcerated illegal aliens, even some of the guys who are US citizens in the prison system who make about 27 cents a day doing ridiculous work, kick out the union labor charging $28 an hour, force these Mexicans and these other people to make $5 a day, making more money than they made in Mexico anyway, put them to work building security fence under military, local state law enforcement administration…eliminate the overhead…

I’m going to be polite, but let’s just say the only difference between Adolph Hitler and Barack Obama is that Barack Obama is not overtly ethically challenged with regard to various groups and paradigms but socialism is alive and well in Washington….

Build a large single federal detention system, it’ll cost a lot of money but it will save money in the long run. You collect all these people that you’ve gathered in these raids, you incarcerate, imprison… you take them all and stick them into one large detention center, like a KOA campground with walls (laughter.) That’s your labor force, to build a security fence at 1/6 the estimated cost.



…if the president of the United States, even worse, his Attorney General, does not uphold the Federal laws that he’s sworn to, such as not prosecuting the Black Panthers holding sticks doing voter intimidation in Philadelphia, what’s the difference between a Black Panther with a club intimidating white voters and a Klansman burning a cross in front of a polling station in Duluth? Nothing…

Click here for video.

So the South Carolina Tea Party hosted a speaker on Martin Luther King Day, one Colin Heaton, who advocates building a massive concentration camp for illegal aliens and some American convicts. It’ll be just like a KOA campground except for little details like guard towers, barbed wire, searchlights, and forced labor.

Honest, he says, it’ll be cheap because, you see, they won’t be using any stinking union labor and will eliminate “the overhead.” No details are offered about that overhead, but I suspect overhead eliminated would, along with adequate pay, include worker safety and reasonable working hours. It doesn’t look like there’d be any squeamishness about using child labor either, since Heaton talks about ferreting out undocumented students in the public school system. Sounds like the whole family will be involved, Mom, Dad, any aged relatives hanging around, the kids… Good thing we won’t be spending any money teaching those little illegals while they’re stuck in the massive gulag Heaton envisions, which will presumably also not bother with expensive propositions like medical care or sanitation. Gotta eliminate the overhead!

So after advocating setting up a massive forced-labor camp near our border, Heaton has the crust to compare the President to Hitler.

Except for that little detail about Obama not being a genocidal racist.

Heaton closes by leaving out a really big detail, leaving it up to his audience's imagination. I would love to hear the conclusion of Heaton’s “if” about the president or attorney general not prosecuting people Heaton wants prosecuted. Alas, he never finishes his thought. If the president didn’t do this…what? What does Heaton and his enthused audience (who crowded the room and gave him a standing ovation) think should happen to him?

It’s not just that this kind of stupidity is being proposed. As many oh-so-blasé liberals and moderates will hasten to tell me, there have always been people like Heaton saying stuff like this.

The problem is he’s not saying this to an audience of avowed Nazis and Klansman. He’s not speaking in some midwestern bunker or to a circle of robed yahoos in the piney woods of Georgia. He’s not consigned merely to some 4:00 am slot on an obscure talk radio station.

He’s talking at a meeting of a movement that presumably represents the base of the Republican party.

I’m willing to bet that many in Heaton’s audience would scorn the idea of joining either the Nazi party or the Klan. Unfortunately this scorn is rooted less in any actual understanding of the Nazis and Klan than it is in seeing villains dressed up like them in the movies and on TV. If the same old crap is packaged just right, if it’s not Jews or blacks, but illegal aliens whom they envision being rounded up from homes and schools and crammed into forced labor camps, then these people laugh and clap and give the speaker a standing ovation.

Here’s one more little detail about that audience. The website for this gathering includes the following caveat about attendees:

Attendees are required to be ‘vouched for’ by a tea party leader who knows them, in order to ensure no rascally renegades come along to disrupt.

Good thing no “rascally renegades” were there to disrupt things by asking for some of those pesky details Heaton left out.

Crossposted from Thoughtcrimes

Comments

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

I'm Senator McLaughlin and I approve this message.

[montecristo.livejournal.com]

Yes, and tomorrow it will still be you advocating giving governments more power over the lives and property of people, because, ya know, "we're the good guys" and the bad guys have no chance of ever getting hold of all this power... Lennin thought the same thing. (http://mises.org/daily/5850/The-Liberation-of-the-Demons)

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Lennin liked cats, I do too. Does that mean I'm a pinko-commie as well?

[kardashev.livejournal.com]

"Lennin liked cats, I do too."

Even when they shove their buttholes in your face? That just annoys the fuck out of me.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Lenin also liked food. I like food too.

That makes me a commie!

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Thank you for sharing your usual deep-fried nuggets of anti-government wisdom. Do you also come with side-dishes of advice on how to change the course of things or just the usual sprinklings of powdered sugar?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Lenin was put into power by Germans. Blame Germany for everything wrong that subsequently happened in the 20th Century. In fact due to creating the USSR *and* the Nazi Party there is literally no subsequent impact from either WWI or WWII that does not in the 20th Century go back to the German Army idiot damn fool Americans who think losing wars is awesome and thus admire so much did not at some basic level cause.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

If anyone were to every write a book about the most massive diplomatic fuck-ups in history the Treaty of Versailles would have to be number 1.

[kardashev.livejournal.com]

"So after advocating setting up a massive forced-labor camp near our border, Heaton has the crust to compare the President to Hitler.

Except for that little detail about Obama not being a genocidal racist."

And this is how Godwin's Law works. See?

"He’s talking at a meeting of a movement that presumably represents the base of the Republican party."

Define "base", plz. Are we talking about the 20% who will vote Republican even if the GOP decides to run an alcoholic mall santa or a much broader part of the Republican Party?

Also, this labor camp idea is dumb. What we really need is to do away with things like amnesties and laws that allow for anchor babies.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's how it works. You denounce even valid comparisons with Hitler to clear the way for completely invalid comparisons to Hitler. That way you can advocate forced labor camps while denouncing a moderate liberal president as an incipient Adolph.

Aren't you a fan of Hitler by the way, and Stalin? After all, they killed so very many of those icky humans you dislike so much.

[paft.livejournal.com]

By the way, the laws that allow for "anchor babies" are in our constiution's defintition of an American as someone born here. Changing that would result in an American born legal underclass.

But then, that would result in a lot of human suffering, and you do seem to be all for that.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Alcoholic Mall Santas have more self-respect than that.

[onefatmusicnerd.livejournal.com]

What the fuck is wrong with an alcoholic mall Santa?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Nitpick-the Soviets had camps just like what you describe. What Hitler had that nobody else did were the death camps. Of course the biggest, most glaring flaw in the "Obahitler" analysis is that Hitler wanted to turn Russia into his India/Wild West and anyone who advocates something different is of course not a Nazi. But expecting people to actually care what the real Nazis thought seems a bit of a lost cause.

Though to be honest I've never understood the whole "Everyone Is Hitler Who We Dislike" thing anyway. It's like he's the only dictator people can name.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Hitler fascinates because unlike Stalin or Mao, his dictatorship was not the result of a violent takeover. The German people threw freedom away with their own hands.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Apparently Hitler was all about socialism! Someone tell Stalin!

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

If the teabaggers want to build a fence in South Carolina, that's OK with me. However, I will not permit them to build one in the state of Texas. The GOP may be afraid of them. I'm not.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Why would that be okay with you?

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Btw "libtards" must be fair game, now that those are "teabaggers". Amirite?

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

How is this proposal for labour camps any different then the labour already done by imprisoned Americans? What upsets you more; the scale of these proposed labour camps or the blunt racism that American justice likes hidden?

[paft.livejournal.com]

I am no supporter of America's use of labor in prisons, but this is different because he's proposing the creation of a massive concentration camp incarcerating, not just prison inmates, but entire families rounded up because they were undocumented, including kids taken out of school. It's an expansion of our already enormous and badly run prison system and sure to be a human rights nightmare. And it would exist solely to provide forced labor with a completely helpless workforce who could be abused with impunity.

[dreadfulpenny81.livejournal.com]

I'm all for bringing back prison labor in general. If its a way for the country to get things done without government workers standing around doing NOTHING for two hours or more (don't act like that doesn't happen -- you know you've seen them) AND a way for them to work-off the cost of their incarceration, it's a win-win. I'm not just talking about illegal aliens who are arrested building a border fence or something, I'm talking about ANY criminals.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

.

[paft.livejournal.com]

A "win win" for who? The Americans who would be put out of jobs because they had to compete with what amounts to slave labor?

And are you telling me you like the idea of this concentration camp Heaton has proposed? You like the idea of rounding up kids from American schools and sticking them in a place like that, putting them to work building a wall rather than educating them? What about illegal immigrants who are elderly or too sick and inured to work building a wall? How would medical care be provided? What kind of housing would be offered the entire families who'd be rounded up? What kind of security to ensure that the prison inmates mixed in didn't prey on those who were guilty only of coming here illegally?

What Heaton is proposing is a human rights nightmare.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Prison labor became a racket which is why it went away. It is a model ripe for corruption. Which is why it's kept to a meaningless minimum.