| i get what you're saying but "the left" has basically zero political power in the united states. it never has. the closest we ever were was with FDR but i wouldn't consider a leader who operated concentration camps to be leftist by any stretch. we have a right wing and then a righter wing. bernie sanders is an anomaly, elizabeth warren is just left of center, and i can't think of too many other current politicians at the national level who actually lean left. i guess nominally "the squad" but they mostly present fairly centrist platforms by worldwide standards. no current politicians at the national stage are talking about meaningful economic reform (as in, away from capitalism), police abolition, nationalized health care, or any other typical leftist ideas - not that i'm trying to argue any of these points in this thread - just providing examples of what i mean by "leftist". whether or not "the left" weaponizes commitment to free expression, "the right" is the only side of that binary who has ever wielded serious political power, and they use it to extremely destructive ends at all times. maybe someday if we ever have a political party that actually represents leftwing politics we can judge them as harshly. i'll wait. |
| > but i wouldn't consider a leader who operated concentration camps to be leftist by any stretch. I consider myself a leftist, but it's a bit naive to think that "this bad, horrible thing" must be associated only with right-leaning ideology. Leftists can do bad, horrible things just as much as right-wing folks can. "Putting people in concentration camps" isn't a right-wing or left-wing thing, it's a totalitarian/anti-human-rights thing. We can argue that, as of late, right-wing people seem to have more of an appetite for that sort of thing, and I'd probably agree, but that doesn't make concentration camps a "right-wing thing". I would absolutely consider FDR to be one of the most (if not the most) leftist presidents the US has had. His putting people in concentration camps doesn't change that; it just makes him a racist piece of shit, like so many others of his time (not that the time period excuses it). |
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| ▲ | ceejayoz 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America... > During World War II, the United States forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese descent in ten concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), mostly in the western interior of the country. > During World War II, the camps were referred to both as relocation centers and concentration camps by government officials and in the press. Roosevelt himself referred to the camps as concentration camps on different occasions, including at a press conference held on October 20, 1942. > In a 1961 interview, Harry S. Truman stated "They were concentration camps. They called it relocation but they put them in concentration camps, and I was against it. We were in a period of emergency, but it was still the wrong thing to do." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp > Not to be confused with Extermination camp. A concentration camp is a prison or other facility used for the internment of political prisoners or politically targeted demographics, such as members of national or ethnic minority groups, on the grounds of national security, or for exploitation or punishment. | | |
| ▲ | CamperBob2 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Very good, you've addressed half of the proposition. Now do the other half, specifically the part about how True Leftists don't do things like that. | | |
| ▲ | 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean, they don’t. Just like True Conservatives don’t leverage the government to interfere like this. People are more contradictory than pure theory. FDR was progressive in some aspects, regressive in others. A leftie, he wasn’t, and there’s more to politics than mere left/right, or we wouldn’t have trans Trump supporters. | | |
| ▲ | CamperBob2 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | How about Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot? Were they lefties? | | |
| ▲ | suzdude 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | By U.S.A. standards, authoritarian leaders who use violence as a means of political gain does not align with the Democratic Party of today. During Jim Crow, at the State level in the south, it would be applicable, but that doesn't mean much in today's terms. | |
| ▲ | GuinansEyebrows 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Hi Bob, we’re talking about American politicians. | | |
| ▲ | CamperBob2 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | 'Sup, 'brows. Tell me, what's special about American politicians as opposed to those in the rest of the world, in your view? Education? Religious values? Neanderthal versus Cro-Magnon genelines? A more-enlightened electorate? Nothing but your own empty prejudices and comforting assumptions? It can happen here, and it can happen to your party, too. It just didn't this time. |
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| ▲ | ceejayoz 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Same shit as Trump - the self-proclaimed label and the actions are wildly disparate. They - and Hitler - are notable for their totalitarianism. I bear no illusions that folks like Stalin wanted anything more than power. | | |
| ▲ | brandall10 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Communism is far left, fascism far right. Both often slide into totalitarianism, which commonly includes camps. FDR’s era, the furthest left the U.S. has been, true to form had this element... showing how concentrated state power, left or right, risks curtailing freedom. In modern times, we've seen Guantánamo survive multiple admins on both sides. | | |
| ▲ | wqaatwt 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well far-right and far-left usually put people in camps due to ideological or related reasons. In this case I’m not sure if that was inherently related to Roosevelt’s progressive/left policies. A moderate or rightwing government likely would have done something similar at the time. | | |
| ▲ | brandall10 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | They also tend to put the 'other' in them. My argument is that New Deal policies paved the way - culturally, institutionally, legislatively - for the United States to quickly mobilize for war, which also significantly reduced the friction for something like this to occur. So yes, it could have happened under more centrist regimes entering the war, but the scale and timing would likely have been minimized in comparison. | | |
| ▲ | wqaatwt 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | In the sense that the government had the logistical capacity and capability to do something like this, yes. Culturally I don’t see it as somehow exceptional. US government regularly employed highly authoritarian policies to suppress or remove people based on racial or ideological grounds since the very beginning. Even in WW1 German Americans had the benefit of being white and forming a very significant proportion of the population so anything like this was obviously infeasible. But their cultural and linguistic identity was suppressed and they were forced to assimilate under the threat of violence. When you take the Sedition Act and other similar policies in relation to how much of a threat US faced in WW1 compared to WW2 I’d day what Roosevelt did wasn’t that extreme. | | |
| ▲ | brandall10 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | I agree repression has always existed in the U.S, but the difference is scale. In WWI the country was smaller, less centralized, and suppression was cruder - local violence, language bans, mobs. By WWII the U.S. was far larger, more cohesive, and had a strong federal state; without that scale and central capacity, something like internment would have been much harder to pull off. |
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