Matthew 2:16-18
16 Then Herod, when he saw that he was deceived by the wise men, was exceedingly angry; and he sent forth and put to death all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the wise men. 17 Then was fulfilled what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying:
18 “A voice was heard in Ramah,
Lamentation, weeping, and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children,
Refusing to be comforted,
Because they are no more.”
An 8-year-old boy from Guatemala died in United States custody early Christmas Day, according to the United States Customs and Border Protection.
The boy died just after midnight on Tuesday at a hospital in Alamogordo, N.M.
Moral leadership:
In a Christmas morning question-and-answer session with reporters, President Trump touted his administration’s immigration policies and demanded further funding for a border wall. While he castigated migrants, the president did not bring up the boy’s death hours earlier.
I’m not going to belabor the obvious: we all know that America is led by monsters, and that it falls to us to do what we can, large or small, to beat them back.
Yeats’ “The Second Coming” has become almost a cliché, but its early lines, read as I choose to do now, are less a report than a challenge:
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
I don’t know if I’m the best (Narr: he’s not), but I hold this conviction absolutely: American concentration camps are evil. And I feel my intensity rising: the House is just the beginning.
And with that, cherish those you love today — and my apologies for harshing the mellow of the season.
Images: Peter Paul Rubens, The Massacre of the Innocents, 1612.
Jerg Ratgeb, Flight into Egypt, between 1515-1521.
Baud
Evil doesn’t take a holiday, Tom. Neither can we. No apologies needed.
Lex
It was the right thing to do.
zhena gogolia
Don’t worry, Tom, you didn’t ruin my holiday. The evil regime did.
SiubhanDuinne
Slaughter* of the Innocents. How awful it continues, two millennia later.
A few weeks ago, I asked — and am asking again, now — if anyone can point me to a wonderful, chilling, heart-wrenching recording of an arrangement of The Coventry Carol (“Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child”) in which each verse ends, properly, in a horrid discordant scream of anguish. I heard it on the radio several years ago, failed to note the arranger or performers, and have sought it ever since. Any help greatly, and gratefully, appreciated.
*It’s never lost on me that the words “slaughter” and “laughter” differ by only one letter.
Gin & Tonic
While what is being done in our name by our employees is inexcusable, this is still a long, long way from a gulag.
schrodingers_cat
While BS bros, assorted media hacks (from Guardian to NYT) are out attacking Beto, he has been protesting at the tent city at Tornillo, trying to shut it down. For some who loves to talk, the sage of Vt has been glaringly silent on this issue.
Brachiator
@Gin & Tonic:
Probably depends on whether you’re observing or being held captive.
We’re also seeing practically all GOP politicians and most Trump supporters take the position that the immigrants are bringing this on themselves. They have decoupled the Trump administration from any responsibility for what happens, and implicitly accept the idea that anything can be done to prevent people from entering the United States. Anything.
schrodingers_cat
@schrodingers_cat: *someone
Luthe
@Brachiator: No, not anything. If that were the case they would be addressing the root causes of the migration, like the crime and political instability in Honduras. The Administration wants simple solutions like “deterrence” not complex ones like “address lack of economic development in Central America.”
Ksmiami
@Brachiator: then they will reap the whirlwind- show trials then hang the perpetrators. Merry Christmas you goddamn gop murderers
debbie
@SiubhanDuinne:
The Coventry Carol is plenty haunting without any screams. I’m not sure if I could listen to what you’re looking for.
Brachiator
@Luthe:
We are largely on the same page here, but this level of introspection is the stuff of fuzzy headed liberals.
Trump is a punk. He is a coward. He wants to show how tough he can be as he keeps out non-white trash from shit hole countries.
He encourages cruelty. And it can’t be bad, even if children die, because America is the greatest country in the world, and true patriots are good Christians who have been given a pass from Jesus Christ himself.
Dev Null
I am not sufficiently naive to believe that anyone will be held accountable, ever, for this Admin’s crimes against humanity (speaking morally, not legally), but srsly, karma should be a bitch.
They have accomplished less evil than Nazis circa 1933-1945 only because the legal system has kept them from being quite as bad.
Well, that, and the fact the Admin has had only two years, not 12+, so the comparison isn’t entirely fair to German Nazis.
By way of comparison, plenty of peeps reporting in 1935 thought that the more fevered critiques of Nazi Germany were overblown. Hyperbolic.
It is hardly a novel insight, but in retrospect those 1935 critiques way understated the evil.
Brachiator
@Ksmiami:
No one was ever punished for the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during WW 2. No one will be punished for this.
We are Americans. At most, we make mistakes. We don’t commit atrocities.
The Thin Black Duke
@Brachiator: Native Americans would disagree with you, I think.
Gib & Tonic
@Brachiator: Not every mass murder is a holocaust, not every mass imprisonment is a gulag.
Gin & Tonic
@Brachiator: Not every mass murder is a holocaust, not every mass imprisonment is a gulag.
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator: To add to what Brachiator said, two things:
(1) it’s early days. The death camps of WWII were just punishment camps, and weren’t used to intern Jews specificaly, in 1933. It takes time to get the population used to having a certain segment identified and treated as foreiign and eliminable. The anti-Jewish boycott of 1933 was a failure, from what I’ve read. Too soon, it was. Too soon.
(2) Eric A Johnson’s _What We Knew_ (I think that was the book) has a nice conclusion section where he talks about how the massive totalitarian state in Germany was tolerated and even celebrated by average Germans because to them it wasn’t ANY SUCH THING. They knew (and he backs this up with stats from police records, IIRC) that if a “good German” got caught up in it, he’d be given clemency, and they had reason to believe it. They knew that the remorseless machine would only be directed at undesirables, not at at good Gemans.
Over at LG&M Erik Loomis has a visit to the grave of Andrew Goodman (of the three killed in Philadelphia, MS). It’s a timely reminder that for black Americans, it was a totalitarian state in all but name for decades even *after* slavery was abolished, and arguably even today (Sandra Bland, say her name [and yeah, too many others]).
But to the point: the goal of all these measures is to terrorize immigrants [whether documented or not]. It’s widespread and systematic, and it ramps up over time. Just like in Nazi Germany. It’s worth reading about the Nazis, to see the parallels in how immigrants are being treated today. No, it’s not 1938. Yet.
Brachiator
@The Thin Black Duke:
I’m sorry that I did not make the irony more clear or emphatic.
@Gin & Tonic:
Again, it depends on which side of the prison, or grave, you are.
Trump promises cruelty without end. We will see how far he goes. And we will see to what extent people will excuse him.
How many deaths have we had so far? How many children still not returned to their families?
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy:
Inarticulate, that is. I mean to write that in 1933, the camps that would end up being death camps weren’t intended to be that, but rather as punishment camps for all manner of undesirables (e.g. socialists). It took time, opportunity, need, and acceptance [by the population] to turn them into death camps. Heck, Kristallnacht was in 1938.
To argue that 2018 America is unlike 1940 Germany, and hence we have nothing to worry about is to be blind to the way things actually developed, to be historically blind. And it’s not just that the holocaust was “mass murder”. It was “mass murder for political ends”. Just like this time. Just like this time.
ruemara
The genocide is the point. We MUST hold media & government officials accountable and insist on prosecutions for human rights violations and genocide from these people.
No more government by gentlemen’s agreement
Cermet
And so it was said in the bible “For god was so stupid (or simply cruel), he warned king Herod by prophecy; so the king murdered many hundreds of innocent babies/children because god needed the notice so future generations would stupidly believe this insane story. ”
For some reason, people edited this out of the new testament – or so I’ve heard.
Cermet
@Brachiator: Or the very well documented amerikan gulag developed after the civil war (and extended to the 1940’s) that imprisoned blacks in not figurative death camps (also called a state prison.) For one year imprisonment for not having proof of a job (what a crime!), south Carolina work camps around 1910 had 40% death rates. Many similar camps ‘only’ had death rates of just 20%. Again, in one year!
ksmiami
@Brachiator: Time’s change. No quarter. No reaching across the aisle. Sorry.
Dev Null
@Cermet: I have read that the Nazi Judenfrei campaign adopted practices of the American South post-Reconstruction.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator: The odds are certainly in favor of a very unsatisfactory outcome such as that.
I hope for better. Donald must pay for his crimes.
Villago Delenda Est
@Dev Null: The Nazis adopted a number of American “innovations” in the repression of “undesirables”. Such as “eugenics laws” they applied to the disabled.
Kathleen
@Brachiator: The key is preventing brown people from entering the United States.
Gin & Tonic
@Chetan Murthy: I need no education about holocausts or gulags, TYVM.
Neldob
I wish we could get the yellow vest virus and March on Washington. Postcards seem sort of passive at this point, not in a good way.
CarolDuhart2
To me the ironic blesslng of the shut-down is the people being released into El Paso. Because there is no money to pay the contractors in private prisons, folks are being let go. Because Federally run facilities can only consider security staff as “essential” a lot of places are probably short-handed. Easier to let them go than feed them, or much of anything else, or just ignore them and don’t apprehend in the first place.
Maybe they think these people will be catchable later or something, but a lot of them may find an underground railroad of sorts that helps them stay.
Another thing to realize-a difference that makes all the difference: millions are standing with Trump’s targets helping them in many ways.
J R in WV
@Dev Null:
Among them — the fabled New York Times — which strongly supported Mr. Hitler until Germany declared war on the USA, after the US declared war on the Japanese Empire, after they attacked out navy base at Pearl Harbor.
ruemara
@Neldob: I won’t be getting any yellow vest virus until they decide that they don’t want alt-right folks involved. And considering it’s a financial protest and not a civil one, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Y’all too ready to find allegiance because people are shouting.
sm*t cl*de
@ruemara:
In Ireland and the UK a yellow jacket is fast becoming synonymous with a Q-Anon badge.
ruemara
@sm*t cl*de: Yeah. Lefties over here are just orgasmic over protests against oligarchs & won’t hear any criticism. It’s “beyond left and right”. Disgusting.