That horse is VERY patient. It looks very stressed out (ears back is a tense horse if no one is riding it. Otherwise they might be listening to the rider)
That said, it’s clear that the horse could get away or lash out but is choosing to tolerate this weird animal, even lowering its head to balance the dog. My guess is a combination of good training and good friendship.
Just enough brain cells to put up with a cute animal, just like me
I don’t think I’ve seen an answer to the question of how close or far apart the things happening today (”send her back”, detention centers etc) are to the nazis quite as good or thorough as this answer on quora
This photo was taken sometime between May and December 1944. These people are enjoying a bit of “down time” before going back to work. At Auschwitz.
Not because I think what we’re doing is like what the Nazis were doing in 1944, but because this looks so normal. These people didn’t think of themselves as “evil,” any more than the people chanting at the Trump rally do.
Here’s the point: the Holocaust didn’t drop out of a clear blue sky in 1941. The concentration camps had been operating since 1933.
The first people sent to the camps weren’t Jews at all. It was socialists, communists (remember that if you run across someone who tries to claim the Nazis were actually socialists), Jehovah’s Witnesses (because their faith prevented them from swearing allegiance to the Reich or serving in the military), homosexuals, and other people considered “socially deviant.” The camps weren’t awful places in 1933. Guards who abused prisoners were disciplined and sometimes prosecuted.
By 1935, this changed. As Hitler consolidated power, he pardoned the guards who had been convicted for abusing prisoners and made it clear that that behavior was now acceptable. Jews were now sent to the camps, starting with ones who had come to “civilized” Germany as refugees from pogroms in Eastern Europe. They were described as “invaders,” accused of spreading disease and stealing jobs from Germans. I understand if that last sentence sent a bit of a chill down your spine.
There were dozens, probably hundreds of concentration camps in operation by 1937. Many prisoners died there from abuse or simply from being worked to death, but they still weren’t places people were specifically sent to die; it was just that no one cared whether they died or not.
By 1939, mass killings of Jews had started. Not in the camps; the Nazis weren’t bothering to round people up and transport them just to kill them. They would typically be rounded up by the Nazi army and shot en masse and buried in mass graves.
Mass killings of civilians proved to be bad for morale even for Nazi soldiers, which led to the Final Solution. Eight extermination camps were built and went into operation by 1941. None were in Germany proper, so the scale of what was happening could be more easily kept from the German people. Six were in Poland, one in Serbia, and one in Belarus. Some (like Birkenau, sometimes called Auschwitz II) were on the same site as concentration camps (Auschwitz), and some (like Treblinka) were completely separate. Most were in Poland because that was where the largest number of Jews in Europe lived.
These women worked as typists, telegraph clerks, and secretaries in Auschwitz, and were called Helferinnen, which means ‘helpers. Their racial purity had been established—should an officer be looking for a girlfriend or a wife, the Helferinnenwere intended to be a resource.”
The point of these photos is that the Nazis were not all Eichmann and Mengele. Their horror was possible because of the many, many people who went along with what they were doing or at least were willing to look the other way. And it didn’t start with Chelmno and Sobibor. It started with people being willing to vote for Nazis out of fear of the communists and responding to their appeals to “true Germans.”
This photo shows people reading the Nazi newspaper Der Stűrmer (The Attacker) in 1935. The sign above it reads “The Jews Are Our Misfortune”.
How far, really, are people who would chant “send her back” about an American citizen at a political rally from the people calmly reading that newspaper? Remember, that was still four years before the war, six before the extermination camps. It was when the groundwork for those things was being laid.
Let’s talk about our camps for a moment. Pro Publica recently published a long story about someone who works for the Border Patrol and spent time working at one of the camps. Here are a couple of excerpts:
The Border Patrol agent, a veteran with 13 years on the job, had been assigned to the agency’s detention center in McAllen, Texas, for close to a month when the team of court-appointed lawyers and doctors showed up one day at the end of June.
Taking in the squalor, the stench of unwashed bodies, and the poor health and vacant eyes of the hundreds of children held there, the group members appeared stunned.
Then, their outrage rolled through the facility like a thunderstorm. One lawyer emerged from a conference room clutching her cellphone to her ear, her voice trembling with urgency and frustration. “There’s a crisis down here,” the agent recalled her shouting.
At that moment, the agent, a father of a 2-year-old, realized that something in him had shifted during his weeks in the McAllen center. “I don’t know why she’s shouting,” he remembered thinking. “No one on the other end of the line cares. If they did, this wouldn’t be happening.”
No one on the other end cares. If they did, this wouldn’t be happening. Let that sink in for a moment.
The CBP agent in the story is in his late 30s, a husband and father who served overseas in the military before joining CPB.
It’s kind of like torture in the army. It starts out with just sleep deprivation, then the next guys come in and sleep deprivation is normal, so they ramp it up. Then the next guys ramp it up some more, and then the next guys, until you have full blown torture going on. That becomes the new normal.
This is how it happens. Step by step, we become the monsters. Look around the country. Try to remember how things were in 2012 or so. How many things that are simply accepted now, often with a “what can we do about it?” shrug, would have seemed possible then?
Referring back to the grim conditions inside the Border Patrol holding centers, he said: “Somewhere down the line people just accepted what’s going on as normal. That includes the people responsible for fixing the problems.”
“What happened to me in Texas is that I realized I had walled off my emotions so I could do my job without getting hurt,” he said. “I’d see kids crying because they want to see their dads, and I couldn’t console them because I had 500 to 600 other kids to watch over and make sure they’re not getting in trouble. All I could do was make sure they’re physically OK. I couldn’t let them see their fathers because that was against the rules.
“I might not like the rules,” he added. “I might think that what we’re doing wasn’t the correct way to hold children. But what was I going to do? Walk away? What difference would that make to anyone’s life but mine?”
When asked whether he simply stopped caring, he said: “Exactly, to a point that’s kind of dangerous. But once you do, you feel better.”
This man is a father. He watches hundreds of kids. He had to stop caring on order to do his job.
Let’s say that again: he had to stop caring in order to do his job.
Just like, I imagine, the Helferinnen had to stop caring. To look the other way. To learn helplessness against the system.
I know, there are a thousand reasons why we can’t change this. They broke the laws. The President says so. What will we do with all of them if we don’t do this? It will encourage others if we don’t do this.
Know this: those are all justifying inhuman behavior. I’m not saying the people running the camps or the people in the government are Nazis; every historical moment is different. But they’re using many of the same tools the Nazis used. And the same tools are being used against the Uighur in China. And the Rohingya in Myanmar.
Andrea Pitzer is a journalist who has written extensively about the history of concentration camps. Here’s what she had to say on Twitter this morning:
When I went into the Rohingya camps in Myanmar in 2015, I also talked to people in town who were happy their former neighbors were in camps. Insisting they weren’t racist or bigots, many said all they really wanted was for the government to deport the Rohingya to another country.
They claimed the Rohingya were illegal immigrants, rapists, and terrorists. If I mentioned a Rohingya they actually knew, they would sometimes acknowledge maybe *that* Rohingya person wasn’t a criminal. They often argued that the Rohingya should be deported as a group anyway.
It was heartbreaking. I was there just after Trump had declared his candidacy in the US, and it was the same rhetoric, almost word for word. A little over a year later in Myanmar, the military drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya over the border amid terrible atrocities.
Send her back. Send them back. We’re really not racists. Jews will not replace us.
At around
11 p.m. on May 15, Lauren pulled into the parking lot of a Hilton in
Lakeland, Florida. The air was damp and cool, and the 32-year-old was
nervous: She was there to meet a couple who had responded to an ad she
posted that day advertising sexual services. Lauren was new to sex work.
She had a 2-year-old child at home, and money was tight.
Inside the
hotel room, Lauren leaned against a dresser. “I gotta be careful,” she
remembered saying. “I’m glad you guys are who you say you are.”
At one
point that evening, Lauren went to the bathroom to freshen up. But after
she finished, she opened the bathroom door to detectives from the Polk
County Sheriff’s Office who arrested her.
To maintain her privacy, Lauren requested that her real name not be used.
The day
before Lauren’s arrest, the sheriff’s office vice unit initiated
“Operation No Spring Fling” in which undercover officers posted and
responded to ads soliciting sex work. “The primary goal,” Sheriff Grady
Judd said at a press conference
after the sting ended on May 19, “is to rescue victims of human
trafficking and to arrest people that are buying human beings, and
that’s what these guys were doing when they were seeking the services of
these ladies.”
Yet
according to a press release from the sheriff’s office, only three
people out of the 154 arrested as a result of the sting were considered
possible victims of human trafficking. Of those, two women, a
17-year-old and a 23-year-old, were charged with unspecific crimes.
The vast
majority of people arrested, including Lauren, were charged with
solicitation, and their mugshots were displayed on a banner during the
sheriff’s press conference and subsequently published online by local
newspapers.
After
officers read Lauren the Miranda rights, she told them she was “down on
her luck and needed money to buy diapers for her child,” according to
the affidavit for her arrest. Several women caught in the sting also
seemed to be engaged in survival sex work. A 22-year-old said she had
posted an ad online because she lost her job earlier in the day and
needed money immediately to pay her bills. A 45-year-old single mother
said she needed money to support her children.
When
reached for comment, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office directed The
Appeal to video of the press conference, where Judd insisted that many
of the women arrested were victims of human trafficking. “I suggest that
those that are on social media or any other media saying, ‘Well, it’s
just a business relationship by two consenting adults,’ don’t understand
or don’t want to understand or don’t care,” he said. “We care. We care
about every one of those folks, and we care enough to arrest them if
they don’t behave. We care enough to help them if they’ll let us help
them. But we will not give up, that’s our promise.”
***
Operations
that purport to target human trafficking but yield mass arrests for
prostitution-related offenses are commonplace in Florida counties.
On Feb. 19, multiple sheriffs offices and police departments raided spas across Florida’s east coast—including the Orchids of Asia Day Spa—resulting in nearly 300 arrests. The
operation garnered international attention because one of the arrestees
at that spa was New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who was charged with soliciting prostitution. “It’s manifestly obvious to us that this is human trafficking,” Martin County Sheriff William Snyder said of the massage parlors in late February. But in mid-April, prosecutors acknowledged that
nobody arrested in the Martin County raids had been charged with human
trafficking. “There is no human trafficking that arises out of this
investigation,” said assistant state attorney Greg Kridos.
On June 21, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office announced the arrests of 85 people
in “Operation Trade Secrets” which targeted massage parlors, hotels,
strip clubs, and adult bookstores. “The only way to get proof of victims
of human trafficking is to do an operation like this,” Sheriff Chad
Chronister said.
“You don’t know who’s there on their own free will and who’s being
forced to have sex.” But about half of the people taken into custody
were booked on prostitution-related offenses. Only one was arrested for
sex trafficking.
Despite the failure of such investigations to identify human trafficking, Governor Ron DeSantis recently signed into law
a requirement that spas and hotels instruct staff on how to spot signs
of sex trafficking and that law enforcement officers complete four-hour
training on how to investigate trafficking. The law also creates a database of individuals who are convicted of soliciting prostitutes.
***
Florida is just one front in a national targeting of what one anti-trafficking nonprofit
calls “illicit massage businesses” that advocates say make women more
vulnerable. Womankind, a New York-based service provider for Asian
survivors of trafficking, told
The Appeal last year: “The reality we still face is that policing,
regardless of how creative and collaborative the approach may seem, does
not tackle the root causes of vulnerability and exploitation.”
The arrest of Jeffrey Epstein on sex trafficking charges
is likely to bring a renewed focus to trafficking that could yield even
more arrests—not of billionaire predators, said Kate D’Adamo, a sex
worker advocate and partner at Reframe Health and Justice, but
working-class women.
“Predators
don’t get caught in johns stings,” D’Adamo said, because they target
people who wouldn’t feel comfortable talking to police. The way to catch
these men, D’Adamo said, is to form connections with the sex worker
community, but “that doesn’t happen when your connection to them is
arresting them for a low-level crime.”
Instead,
D’Adamo said such investigations often punish women who have no option
but to engage in survival sex work. “What happens when you go in to find
a job to try to stabilize your life and your name gets Googled and what
comes up is a prostitution arrest?” D’Adamo said. “They’ve taken
someone for whom that [sex work] was the best option for meeting what
sounds like incredibly basic resource needs … [who is] traumatized by
violence, and now [has] a criminal record that’s going to leave them in
economic instability for a very long time.”
***
After
Lauren’s mother posted her $2,000 bond at the Polk County jail, she
struggled to find transportation to her home in Hillsborough County,
about 30 miles away. Officers had seized her phone, and because a search
of her vehicle allegedly yielded a pink pouch containing syringes with
cocaine, the sheriff’s office also impounded her car.
Lauren now
faces two misdemeanor charges for solicitation, a misdemeanor charge
for possession of drug paraphernalia and a felony charge for cocaine. If
convicted, she could spend up to five years in prison plus probation
and have to pay tens of thousands of dollars in fines.
“I’m so
fortunate that I had my mom to help me get out,” Lauren said. “Some of
these girls don’t have that option. They’re literally gonna be stuck in
jail, doing time, and they’re gonna come out with nothing. They’re not
gonna know what to do but what they did before. They’re literally having
to start over.”
[Ethan Brown @ethanbrown72
Florida sheriffs are conducting what they describe as human trafficking raids, netting 100s of arrests. But in Polk County Sheriff’s recent “Operation No Spring Fling” there were *3* possible victims of human trafficking out of 154 arrests. 1/1
One of the arrestees told @mintamolly that she was engaged in survival sex work; and indeed, according to an arrest affidavit in her case she told law enforcement that she was “down on her luck and needed money to buy diapers for her child.” 2/2
Molly Minta @mintamolly Jul 25
In one run-of-the-mill prostitution sting in Florida, a sheriff’s office arrested over 150 people under the guise of saving victims of human trafficking. But only three people are considered victims, and two of those were still charged with crimes. For @theappeal
The Appeal @theappeal Jul 25
When Lauren was arrested as part of a prostitution sting, she told police finances were tight & she needed to buy diapers for her child. She’s one of the many women doing sex work arrested in raids police claim rescue victims of human trafficking.
Molly Minta @mintamolly
I read 154 affidavits for this story. In a typical story, one woman I interviewed said she posted an ad because she needed to make money to buy diapers for her 2-year-old. The sheriff’s response? “We care enough to arrest them.”]
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
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