CAMPS, CONCENTRATED

(NOTE: this item discusses, in part, concentration camps and the Holocaust, which might be upsetting for some people, and if you don't think you can handle that maybe jump down to the next header. But, on the other hand, the camps were probably more upsetting to the people stuck in them.)

The last few weeks in America have mostly, from a political standpoint, been about the concentration camps the American government is imprisoning refugee claimants within. Before we even start to talk about that whole situation, I first want to address the fact that I choose to call them concentration camps. Bear with me, as I dust off my history degree!

Now, some Jewish commentators (and notably the current director of the Holocaust Museum) have suggested that it is inflammatory to call these camps "concentration camps" because, well, the Holocaust and all. There is a problem with this argument, of course, which is that concentration camps predate the Holocaust, and that concentration camps aren't necessarily the death camps that people identify with the Holocaust.

Like: the term "concentration camp" isn't just an unpleasant phrase. It has a firm meaning: it's a camp where a government detains civilians - who have not been found guilty of any crime, because otherwise it's a jail or prison - on an ongoing basis in large numbers. Hence "concentration" camp: you are concentrating people. Their use predates the Holocaust by decades: they were used in the Cuban War of Independence from Spain, in the Boer War, and of course by the United States itself when they interned Japanese-Americans during World War II. (The American government called those camps both "internment camps" and "concentration camps" in official documents.)

It's actually important even in terms of the Holocaust itself to remember that German concentration camps weren't the same thing as German death camps. Of 68 concentration camps run by the Germans during World War II, only 11 were death camps. This doesn't mean that people didn't die at "regular" concentration camps, because at "regular" camps the Nazi plan was to work prisoners as hard as possible and preferably to death. For example: Mathausen-Gusen, a concentration camp in Austria, had somewhere in between 122,000 and 320,000 deaths during its operation, which put it above about half of the death camps.

It is fair to note, I think, in 1998 that when the Japanese American National Museum ran an exhibit about World War II Japanese internment camps in the United States, they called them "concentration camps" and the only request from Jewish groups at that time was that the exhibit contain a note explaining that concentration camps weren't necessarily death camps as occurred in the Holocaust - a request to which the Museum agreed. Apparently nobody seems to be satisfied with a note this time around.

Anyway, let's get away from the Holocaust and to the present day, where thousands of refugee claimants and illegal immigrants and in-betweens are currently being held in American concentration camps. Perhaps you have questions about this! Let me attempt to answer some of them.

Where are these people coming from?

There's a common misperception that all of these people are a flood of Mexicans, and while there are certainly Mexicans - there can't not be some Mexicans, it's a nation of 130 million people and some of them will always want to head north - the big flood of people is actually coming from Central America, and specifically El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala (the "Northern Triangle"), where enormous organized gangs called maras effectively run large parts of these countries, and do so about as gently as you would expect a criminal gang to do. The murder rates in these countries are comparable to war zones. On top of that, all three of these countries have been suffering from extended drought conditions for years (climate change makes everything worse), and when your average farmer works at a level just above subsistence, droughts can create crippling poverty. So what to do, if not leave?

Why are they all going to the USA? Why not elsewhere?

Well, they are going elsewhere. Migrants aren't stupid and they just want to live somewhere safe, which is why asylum applications in the safer countries surrounding the Triangle - Mexico, Nicarauga, Costa Rica, Belize - have all quadrupled over the past few years. And, like, calling Mexico "safe" is probably kind of a stretch. Canada has a travel advisory to Mexico right now because half of it has the same gang problem that the Triangle does.

(Aside: this happens basically every time there is a refugee crisis. The surrounding countries take in the bulk of the refugees, then a small percentage of the human overflow makes its way to Europe and America and Canada, and Europe and America and Canada freak the fuck out and start whining about how these people should just go to Next Door Country or whatever, ignoring the fact that millions of them already did and those countries are a lot poorer and less able to handle the flood of people looking for safety. This happened with Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s and with Syrian refugees a few years ago and it's happening now with the Central American refugees and when climate change creates a flood of refugees from the Indian subcontinent - which could happen in the next ten years or so - it'll happen again, because it happens every time.)

But, more importantly: for years and years, the USA recognized that people fleeing these countries as asylum seekers. This was always a bit of a stretch because the rules for seeking asylum are specifically about fear of persecution, and the people running away from the gangs aren't really being persecuted in that sense and also, yes, there's some economic motivation for fleeing their country, because the motivations of refugees and migrants don't necessarily fit neatly into simple yes/no binary diagrams. But common sense prevailed and the USA put programs in place to help people from these places apply for asylum in the USA, because "it's just really shitty and awful where I'm from and I don't want to get randomly killed" is simply a good reason to let people come in as refugees.

So what happened to that program?

What do you think happened?

This is going to be a Trump thing, isn't it.

He ordered it killed his first year in office, yes. But the refugees keep coming, because, well, where the hell else are they going to go? The surrounding "safe" Latin American countries are taking in about eight times as many people and are basically at capacity, and because of those programs a lot of these refugees have friends and family in America already. Why wouldn't they head for America?

And they're crossing the border illegally.

Well, yes, but that's because - in a classic First World dick move - the USA ordered official border checkpoints to stop accepting refugee claimants. So the asylum seekers are trying to cross the border illegally so they can present themselves and formally request asylum somewhere else.

Isn't that against international law for the USA to do that?

Pretty much. It's certainly in contravention of the UN Refugee Convention.

Why isn't anybody doing anything about that?

Because the USA is the world's only military superpower and nobody can force them to be decent about this.

Is this the part of the news item where we talk about how it's bad in the camps?

Sure. It's awful in the camps. If it was simply what was recently demonstrated during Mike Pence's tour of an American concentration camp it would be bad enough: men (and it was all adult men, and if you think that wasn't a specific choice for an inspection where press would be in attendance I have a bridge to sell you) crowded together in cages that were standing room only, where officials conceded they hadn't been allowed to shower for ten or twenty days. And, remember: this was the camp they were willing to let people see.

After you get past that, there's the horrible track record with child separation, which has been effectively admitted by the administration to be an active tactic being used to disincentivize asylum seekers from coming to the USA, and which has led to multiple child deaths and children being kept in what can only be called "squalor." (If the USA was at war, this would literally be classified as a war crime, by the way.)

It is worth remembering, by the way, that ICE, the government agency that runs the camps, was recently revealed to have a secret Facebook group that shared racist and anti-refugee memes where they could discuss how much they hated asylum seekers in private. Half of the agency belonged to that group, including its chief.

But the asylum seekers can just go, right? They can leave if they give up trying to enter the USA.

True, except for two things. First, most of the asylum seekers' personal belongings - which usually includes whatever money they have - have been confiscated by the American government and there have been a laundry list of complaints that if you volunteer to leave, you don't get your money and things back when you go. They just kick you out the door. And second, if you leave, you're ceding your right to ever claim asylum in the USA ever again, which is a pretty bad deal.

This all sounds terrible. Is there a plan to deal with this?

Well, the Trump administration has been trying to negotiate a safe-third-country agreement with Guatemala for some time now. A safe-third-country agreement can mean different things depending on which countries have the agreement, but in this case the basic idea would be something along the lines of what Australia does with the island nation of Nauru: it dumps its refugee claimants there (and treats them mostly pretty badly) while processing them, and pays Nauru for the assistance.

...wait, but aren't people running away from Guatemala? It's one of the countries you mentioned.

Well, yes, I see you have identified the problem with this cunning plan. Another problem with this plan was that Trump is widely hated in Guatemala (and the rest of Latin America, for that matter) what with him being an obvious massive bigot and all, so it was political suicide, and then on top of that Guatemala's supreme court made it clear that if the government signed such an agreement they would strike it down anyway. (This last bit happened just as I was writing this, incidentally.)

So there is no good plan to fix anything, and reasonably speaking, the Trump administration probably doesn't care much about fixing it anyway. Most of the camp facilities they're holding asylum seekers in are privately contracted operations, so the possibilities for graft and kickbacks are kind of exceptional.

The Democrats running for President mostly all have the same idea, which is "a Marshall Plan for Latin America" by which they mean massive investment in Latin America in order to stabilize their economies and hopefully break the maras, which is if nothing else an ambitious plan. I'm not sure how well it would work, because there's no white paper out there on the possible costs of such a plan that I've read. But it's at least a commitment to try to do someting not-shitty.

This is depressing.

Yup.

FORD MORE BEERS

(Information for people outside Ontario about background on this bit: if you want to buy non-beer booze in Ontario, most of the time you go to a Liquor Control Board of Ontario store and buy your alcohol there. You can actually buy beer there too - when my wife and I buy beer we usually buy it there, because it's better for rarer/odder stuff than the Beer Store is and it has most of the regular stuff as well - but the Beer Store is generally the provincial semi-monopoly of choice for regular beer drinkers who just want a two-four of Molson Canadian. Oh, and if you're wondering: the LCBO is honestly pretty good, all things considered.)

So, now that the non-Ontarians are caught up: the LCBO is currently undergoing inventory shortages in stores. The media are suggesting this is an exceptionally big problem rightnow because it is summer and people like to drink refreshing cool alcoholic drinks in summer, of course, but really it would be a problem any time of year because people like to drink all the time if we're being honest, and also all of that booze the LCBO sells is government revenue, which the government traditionally needs. The shortages aren't major - most of the time it's "your local store has run out of Common Alcohol Type X" rather than "everything is empty and there are tumbleweeds blowing through the store." But people want the drinks they want so they're understandably annoyed, even if this is reasonably minor.

Technically, the inventory shortages aren't actually inventory shortages, because the LCBO hasn't, like, run out of booze or anything. They're shortages caused by delivery issues as a result of an implementation of new warehouse management software, and said implementation is obviously not going that well. Now, when I started to write this piece, my first instinct was to say "look, I will trash Doug Ford and the Tories whenever it is fair to do so, but the odds that they are fully to blame for a new warehouse management system being poorly implemented only a year into their tenure is unlikely." But, it turns out the system was only installed in June and its use decided upon last summer. This did, in fact, happen under Doug Ford's watch. Accordingly, it is entirely kosher to blame him for this relatively minor problem if you like.

Anyway, this sort of thing usually sorts itself out within a month or so. It'll just be another month of the Ford regime fucking up something else - while they're on special vacation in order to avoid fucking up things so they don't fuck up Andrew Scheer's chance of winning the federal election in the fall, mind you. (As an aside: the government's negotiations with the unionized workers at the Bruce Power nuclear plant are going poorly and the union has voted to strike in the event that the negotiations fail. If they do, that should happen right before the govermment's negotiations with the Ontario public schoolteachers' union probably also fail. Man, that'll look great for the Conservative Party in this province. I should probably also mention that recent polling shows that Doug Ford's favorability rating is a net negative 49 percent and nearly sixty percent of the province thinks his government is corrupt.)

JUSTIN TRUDEAU SAID HE THINKS THE LIBERALS WILL PICK UP SEATS IN ALBERTA IN THE COMING ELECTION

....oooooooooooookay then.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

Aladdin (2019, Guy Ritchie, theatre) - 2/5

We also finished the first season of The Expanse and I would definitely recommend it to people who like the idea of near-future space colonization fiction, because it's pretty great in that regard.

See you in seven.