aka14kgold:

[The original post reproduced the full article; I’ve copied some excerpts. Go to the link or the OP for the whole thing.]

Some who criticize drawing parallels between the United States today and Germany of the 1930s suggest that doing so demeans the memories of the Jews, political dissidents, LGBT, disabled and Romani people and others targeted by the Nazis - that not every instance of oppression is genocide, and using this kind of language diminishes the suffering under Hitler.

But the Holocaust didn’t begin with gas chambers, and it’s not business as usual in America right now. 

[…] Concentration camps have a history beyond just the Nazis, too. Pitzer’s definition also puts CBP centers in the context of other such camps in France, South Africa, Cuba, the Soviet Union and, of course, here in the United States during World War II, targeting Japanese Americans.

[…] We have long asked the question about why good Germans didn’t intervene earlier, when it was “just” about discriminatory laws, detention, boycotts. Before things got murderous.

Now we have to ask ourselves: Why aren’t we?