Internment Camps Quotes

One detail that’s impossible to miss? Just like in the train station, every person with a gun is white, and not white like maybe they’re Bosnian—the kind of white that thinks internment camps are going to make America great again.

I believe in the sun even when it’s not shining. I believe in love even when not feeling it. I believe in God even when he is silent...

Many signs point to the fact that the youth of the Third World will no longer tolerate living in circumstances that give them no hope for the future. From the young boys I met in the demobilization camps in Sierra Leone to the suicide bombers of Palestine and Chechnya, to the young terrorists who fly planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we can no longer afford to ignore them. We have to take concrete steps to remove the causes of their rage, or we have to be prepared to suffer the consequences.

There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad...To produce this horrible confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves to the rulings of the International Criminal Court. The result should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.

That war [Bosnian war] in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.

Boy everyone in this country is running around yammering about their fucking rights. "I have a right, you have no right, we have a right." Folks I hate to spoil your fun, but... there's no such thing as rights. They're imaginary. We made 'em up. Like the boogie man. Like Three Little Pigs, Pinocio, Mother Goose, shit like that. Rights are an idea. They're just imaginary. They're a cute idea. Cute. But that's all. Cute...and fictional. But if you think you do have rights, let me ask you this, "where do they come from?" People say, "They come from God. They're God given rights." Awww fuck, here we go again...here we go again. The God excuse, the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument, "It came from God." Anything we can't describe must have come from God. Personally folks, I believe that if your rights came from God, he would've given you the right for some food every day, and he would've given you the right to a roof over your head. GOD would've been looking out for ya. You know that. He wouldn't have been worried making sure you have a gun so you can get drunk on Sunday night and kill your girlfriend's parents. But let's say it's true. Let's say that God gave us these rights. Why would he give us a certain number of rights? The Bill of Rights of this country has 10 stipulations. OK...10 rights. And apparently God was doing sloppy work that week, because we've had to ammend the bill of rights an additional 17 times. So God forgot a couple of things, like...SLAVERY. Just fuckin' slipped his mind. But let's say...let's say God gave us the original 10. He gave the british 13. The british Bill of Rights has 13 stipulations. The Germans have 29, the Belgians have 25, the Sweedish have only 6, and some people in the world have no rights at all. What kind of a fuckin' god damn god given deal is that!?...NO RIGHTS AT ALL!? Why would God give different people in different countries a different numbers of different rights? Boredom? Amusement? Bad arithmetic? Do we find out at long last after all this time that God is weak in math skills? Doesn't sound like divine planning to me. Sounds more like human planning . Sounds more like one group trying to control another group. In other words...business as usual in America. Now, if you think you do have rights, I have one last assignment for ya. Next time you're at the computer get on the Internet, go to Wikipedia. When you get to Wikipedia, in the search field for Wikipedia, i want to type in, "Japanese-Americans 1942" and you'll find out all about your precious fucking rights. Alright. You know about it. In 1942 there were 110,000 Japanese-American citizens, in good standing, law abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That's all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had was...right this way! Into the internment camps. Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most...their government took them away. and rights aren't rights if someone can take em away. They're priveledges. That's all we've ever had in this country is a bill of TEMPORARY priviledges; and if you read the news, even badly, you know the list get's shorter, and shorter, and shorter. Yeup, sooner or later the people in this country are going to realize the government doesn't give a fuck about them. the government doesn't care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety. it simply doesn't give a fuck about you. It's interested in it's own power. That's the only thing...keeping it, and expanding wherever possible. Personally when it comes to rights, I think one of two things is true: either we have unlimited rights, or we have no rights at all.

Given the choice between bedlam and a dictatorship, what do you think the American people will choose? Driven by fear of another attack, in a state of terror, they'll do the terrorists' work for them. They'll destroy their own freedoms. Accept, even applaud , the the suspension of rights. Internment camps. Torture. Expulsions. The liberal agenda, women's equality, gay marriage, immigrants, will be blamed for the death of the real America. But thanks to the bold action of a patriotic few, the white Angle-Saxon Christian, God-fearing America of their grandparents will be restored. And if they have to slaughter a few thousand to achieve it, well, it is war, after all. The beacon that was America will die, by suicide. Frankly it was coughing up blood anyway.

10 PLACES TO NEVER, EVER, EVER GO UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES Rooms lit by a single hanging light bulb. Rooms lit by nothing. Any graveyard that isn’t Arlington National Cemetery. Summer camps whose annual counselor murder rate exceeds 10 percent. Maine. “The old_____________.” Hotels/motels that aren’t part of giant international chains. Upstairs. Downstairs. Any log cabin anywhere on the face of the earth.

San Francisco Chronicle went the other way for three days, editorializing: “It is not necessary to imitate Hitler by herding whole populations, the guilty and the innocent together into even humane concentration camps.

significant concentrations of Hutu Power military and militia members among the IDPs [International Displaced Persons] made the camps themselves a major threat ... As in the border camps, interahamwe agents didn't hesitate to threaten and attack those who wished to leave Kibeho, fearing that a mass desertion of the civilian population would leave them isolated and exposed.

War crimes, you say? No matter how many policies you put on paper, in reality, there are no rights and wrongs in war. War itself is a crime. War cannot be justified. I believe, the only people, in this world, whose opinions matter, are the ones who go the extra mile to help other people expecting nothing in return. Soldiers who fight fiercely for their country, the doctors in Sri Lanka's public hospitals attending to hundreds of patients at a time for no extra pay , the nuns who voluntarily teach English and math to children of refugee camps in the north, the monks who collect food to feed entire villages during crises, they are the people worth listening to, their opinion matters. So find me one of them who will say: they wish the war didn't end in 2009, that they wish Sri Lanka was divided into two parts. Find me one of them who agrees with the international war crime allegations against Sri Lanka, and I will listen. But I will not listen to the opinions of those who are paid to find faults in a war they were never a part of, a war they never experienced themselves. I will not listen to the opinions of those who watched the war on tv or read about it on the internet or were moved by a documentary on Al Jazeera. The war is over. The damage is done. Let Sri Lanka move on. So our children will never have to see what we've seen.

Gossip in Henryetta spread faster than a smallpox plague in an internment camp.

But other countries have gone the other way. Australia is now building internment camps for Covid quarantine. It calls them “centers for national resilience.”14 George Orwell would be proud.

Some Russian anticommunist writers such as Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, and many U.S. anticommunist liberals, maintain that the gulag existed right down to the last days of communism. If so, where did it disappear to? After Stalin's death in 1953, more than half of the gulag inmates were freed, according to the study of the NKVD files previously cited. But if so many others remained incarcerated, why have they not materialized? When the communist states were overthrown, where were the half-starved hordes pouring out of the internment camps with their tales of travail?

There I had been for three-quarters of a year caught in that mousetrap of a France, unable to get permission to leave the country. Now, for a second time, I was to taste the pleasures of an internment camp.

Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons and internment camps, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized.

That concentration camps were ultimately provided for the same groups in all countries, even though there were considerable differences in the treatment of their inmates, was all the more characteristic as the selection of the groups was left exclusively to the initiative of the totalitarian regimes: if the Nazis put a person in a concentration camp and if he made a successful escape, say, to Holland, the Dutch would put him in an internment camp. Thus, long before the outbreak of the war the police in a number of Western countries, under the pretext of "national security," had on their own initiative established close connections with the Gestapo and the GPU [Russian State security agency], so that one might say there existed an independent foreign policy of the police. This police-directed foreign policy functioned quite independently of the official governments; the relations between the Gestapo and the French police were never more cordial than at the time of Leon Blum's popular-front government, which was guided by a decidedly anti-German policy. Contrary to the governments, the various police organizations were never overburdened with "prejudices" against any totalitarian regime; the information and denunciations received from GPU agents were just as welcome to them as those from Fascist or Gestapo agents. They knew about the eminent role of the police apparatus in all totalitarian regimes, they knew about its elevated social status and political importance, and they never bothered to conceal their sympathies. That the Nazis eventually met with so disgracefully little resistance from the police in the countries they occupied, and that they were able to organize terror as much as they did with the assistance of these local police forces, was due at least in part to the powerful position which the police had achieved over the years in their unrestricted and arbitrary domination of stateless and refugees.

It takes an enormous amount of internal security to begin with the spirit of adventure, the spirit of discovery, the spirit of creativity. Without doubt, you have to leave the comfort zone of base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness. You become a trailblazer, a pathfinder. You open new possibilities, new territories, new continents, so that others can follow.

Months later, in the internment camp, Mariko would tell me she believed there were two kinds of mirrors. There was the kind you looked into to see what you looked like, and then there was the kind you looked into and saw what other people thought you looked like.

We now dwelt in a very large prison, without walls, bounded by Canada, Mexico and two oceans. There were the jailers, the turnkeys, the informers, and somewhere in the Midwest the solitary confinement of the special internment camps. Most people did not appear to notice. Since there were no literal walls or barbed wire, since they had committed no crimes, had not been arrested or taken to court, they did not grasp the change, the dread transformation, of their situation. It was the classic case of a man kidnapped while standing still. Since they had been taken nowhere and since they themselves had voted the new tyranny into power, they could see nothing wrong. Anywho, a good third of them, had they known, would have thought it a good idea…Their freedom to do as they were told had been preserved.

Those who came from internment camps in Belgium told how they had been transported across France in sealed cars. No one had paid any attention to the trains and the occupants had been left without food or water. Their Belgian guards had robbed them of everything they possessed.

I’ve never seen a soul here. No one shows themselves in the dismal wet fields, patchworked into sections by wire fences. No one toils behind the tufted vestiges of hedgerow. Few birds mark the sky beside the desultory spectre of a crow. As for trees, only spindly copses sprout on higher ground, shorn or shattered into piteous last stands; the woods have been whittled skeletal behind the wire of internment camps, to make room for more empty fields. And cement barns. Telegraph poles. Litter in the roadside ditches. Burst animals on tarmac, smeared, further compressed. Denatured land. Denuded. Scrub grubbed out, scraped away. Ugly and too neat. Empty. Industrial even. Blasted. Nowhere for anything to nest, take root, hide. Green but made desolate by the impact of the nearest settlement’s conquest. These are factory-farmed lowlands orbiting a city. A ring of ice encircling a blackened planet.

The United States has always been shadowed by practices that contradict our most cherished principles. The genocide of native peoples, slavery, racial apartheid, Japanese internment camps, and the subordination of women reveal that our basic creed that “all men are created equal” was a lie, at least in practice.

And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.

That Huey built roads and bridges and provided free schoolbooks nobody will deny, but nobody knows how much they cost or how much money was stolen in the process,” wrote one nationally syndicated columnist. “Huey was gradually copying the Hitler state, but Louisiana was not quite ready for blood purges and internment camps.

Driven by fear of another attack, in a state of terror, they’ll do the terrorists’ work for them. They’ll destroy their own freedoms. Accept, even applaud, the suspension of rights. Internment camps. Torture. Expulsions. The liberal agenda, women’s equality, gay marriage, immigrants, will be blamed for the death of the real America. But thanks to the bold action of a patriotic few, the white Anglo-Saxon Christian, God-fearing America of their grandparents will be restored. And if they have to slaughter a few thousand to achieve it, well, it is war, after all. The beacon that was America will die, by suicide. Frankly it was coughing up blood anyway.

answer. She told him that she agreed with him and said, “A democracy which does not serve all its people could not long survive.

His conclusion, preserved for posterity, was that the experiment of interning families of suspected nationalities—German, Japanese, Italians, and others—was a failure. Nonetheless,

The history of America is the history of overcoming hardships and that was never more true than during World War II.

Shikata ga nai.” The phrase was as familiar to Sumi as Nobu’s face and meant: “It cannot be helped.” Teenagers

Paris had by now extended its internment decree to include Austrian and Czecho-Slovakian refugees, so in the days that followed hundreds of new arrivals appeared in our camp.

In the second Boer war 26,000 Boer women and children perished in British concentration camps.

It was not known precisely how many labor camps there were in North Korea, although the international consensus was six. The fact that they were numbered and those numbers reached at least as high as twenty-two was an indicator of their pervasiveness. At least two hundred thousand North Koreans, or nearly one percent of the entire population, called these labor camps home.

The words of Hannah Arendt, written to describe her own sense of statelessness and exile in the turmoil of World War Two, ring as true in the supposedly new reality of the “global village” today as the day they were written. “Contemporary history,” Arendt wrote, “has created a new kind of human being—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and internment camps by their friends.”22

Outside of your relationship with God, the most important relationship you can have is with yourself. I don’t mean that we are to spend all our time focused on me, me, me to the exclusion of others. Instead, I mean that we must be healthy internally—emotionally and spiritually—in order to create healthy relationships with others. Motivational pep talks and techniques for achieving success are useless if a person is weighed down by guilt, shame, depression, rejection, bitterness, or crushed self-esteem. Countless marriages land on the rocks of divorce because unhealthy people marry thinking that marriage, or their spouse, will make them whole. Wrong. If you’re not a healthy single person you won’t be a healthy married person. Part of God’s purpose for every human life is wholeness and health. I love the words of Jesus in John 10:10: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” God knows we are the walking wounded in this world and He wants the opportunity to remove everything that limits us and heal every wound from which we suffer. Some wonder why God doesn’t just “fix” us automatically so we can get on with life. It’s because He wants our wounds to be our tutors to lead us to Him. Pain is a wonderful motivator and teacher! When the great Russian intellectual Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was released from the horrible Siberian work camp to which he was sent by Joseph Stalin, he said, “Thank you, prison!” It was the pain and suffering he endured that caused his eyes to be opened to the reality of the God of his childhood, to embrace his God anew in a personal way. When we are able to say thank you to the pain we have endured, we know we are ready to fulfill our purpose in life. When we resist the pain life brings us, all of our energy goes into resistance and we have none left for the pursuit of our purpose. It is the better part of wisdom to let pain do its work and shape us as it will. We will be wiser, deeper, and more productive in the long run. There is a great promise in the New Testament that says God comes to us to comfort us so we can turn around and comfort those who are hurting with the comfort we have received from Him (see 2 Corinthians 1:3–4). Make yourself available to God and to those who suffer. A large part of our own healing comes when we reach out with compassion to others.

...fascism is more plausibly linked to a set of "mobilizing passions" that shape fascist action than to a consistent and fully articulated philosophy. At the bottom is a passionate nationalism. Allied to it is a conspiratorial and Manichean view of history as a battle between the good and evil camps, between the pure and the corrupt, in which one's own community or nation has been the victim. In this Darwinian narrative, the chosen people have been weakened by political parties, social classes, unassimilable minorities, spoiled rentiers, and rationalist thinkers who lack the necessary sense of community. These "mobilizing passions," mostly taken for granted and not always overtly argued as intellectual propositions, form the emotional lava that set fascism's foundations: -a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions; -the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it; -the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external; -dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences; -the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary; -the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the groups' destiny; -the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason; -the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success; -the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle. ...Fascism was an affair of the gut more than the brain, and a study of the roots of fascism that treats only the thinkers and the writers misses the most powerful impulses of all.

Fundamentalism therefore reveals a fissure in society, which is polarized between those who enjoy secular culture and those who regard it with dread. As time passes, the two camps become increasingly unable to understand one another. Fundamentalism thus begins as an internal dispute, with liberalizers or secularists within one’s own culture or nation. In the first instance, for example, Muslim fundamentalists will often oppose their fellow countrymen or fellow Muslims who take a more positive view of modernity, rather than such external foes as the West or Israel. Very often, fundamentalists begin by withdrawing from mainstream culture to create an enclave of pure faith (as, for example, within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Jerusalem or New York). Thence they will sometimes conduct an offensive which can take many forms, designed to bring the mainstream back to the right path and resacralize the world. All fundamentalists feel that they are fighting for survival, and because their backs are to the wall, they can believe that they have to fight their way out of the impasse. In this frame of mind, on rare occasions, some resort to terrorism. The vast majority, however, do not commit acts of violence, but simply try to revive their faith in a more conventional, lawful way.

We create ourselves to be almost blind walking dead, where we are led by both negative aspects of religion and cultural conformity to gloss over people. We gloss over the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire. We gloss over the Japanese internment camps that most likely would have been far worse had the war continued longer. We often marginalize those besides the ethnic and Jewish descent that died in the Nazi holocaust of World war II.

Chinese authorities have placed as many as 1.5 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Hui into a system of medium- to maximum-security “reeducation” camps since 2017—making it the largest internment of a religious minority since World War II.

So I just think about all the children who have been separated from their parents, and there's a lot of us, past and present, and some under more traumatic circumstances than others--like those who are in internment camps right now--and I just imagine us as an army of mutants. We've all been touched by this monster, and our brains are forever changed, and we all have trees without branches in there, and what will happen to us? Who will we become? Who will take care of us?

In a 1986 Time magazine cover story on Reagan, reporter Lance Morrow droned on about the sainted FDR, saying he “explored the upper limits of what government could do for the individual”—evidently by putting Japanese in internment camps and fighting a war against a race-supremacist regime with a segregated military. Reagan, by contrast, Morrow said, “is testing the lower limits”5—one assumes by ending Soviet totalitarianism and bequeathing America two decades of peace and prosperity.

Ronald Reagan, the most beloved conservative in recent memory, was the one who signed legislation apologizing for the Internment and authorizing $1.6 billion in reparations to be paid to those who lost their homes and livelihoods in the camps. Case closed.

What do these decades-old international organizations see in an arcane digital technology built by the crypto-libertarians and Cypherpunks who gave us Bitcoin? It’s the prospect that this decentralized computing system could resolve the issue of social capital deficits that we discussed in the context of the Azraq refugee camp. By creating a common record of a community’s transactions and activities that no single person or intermediating institution has the power to change, the UN’s blockchain provides a foundation for people to trust that they can securely interact and exchange value with each other.

Marshall also called upon the left-leaning Florida senator Claude Pepper to exert his influence in the case. Invoking patriotism, Marshall reminded the senator that the War Department had recently confirmed stories of American servicemen who had been tortured by the Japanese in Philippine prison camps and argued that the lynching of a fifteen-year-old boy would taint America’s international reputation: “the type of material that radio Tokio [sic] is constantly on the alert for and will use effectively in attempting to offset our very legitimate protest in respect to the handling of American citizens who unfortunately are prisoners of war.” Claude Pepper refused to get involved.

Researchers have shown that the flooding of stress hormones resulting from a traumatic separation from your parents at a young age kills off so many dendrites and neurons in the brain that it results in permanent psychological and physical changes. One psychiatrist I went to told me that my brain looked like a tree without branches. So I just think about all the children who have been separated from their parents, and there's a lot of us, past and present, and some under more traumatic circumstances than others--like those who are in internment camps right now--and I just imagine us as an army of mutants. We’ve all been touched by this monster, and our brains are forever changed, and we all have trees without branches in there, and what will happen to us? Who will we become? Who will take care of us?

...The gulag—with its millions of victims, if you listen to Solzehnitsyn and Sakharov—supposedly existed in the Soviet Union right down to the very last days of communism. If so—as I've asked before—where did it disappear to? That is, when the communist states were overthrown, where were the millions of stricken victims pouring out of the internment camps with their tales of torment? I'm not saying they don't exist; I'm just asking, where are they? One of the last remaining camps, Perm-35—visited in 1989 and again in '90 by Western observers—held only a few dozen prisoners, some of whom were outright spies, as reported in the Washington Post. Others were refuseniks who tried to flee the country. The inmates complained about poor-quality food, the bitter cold, occasional mistreatment by guards. I should point out that these labor camps were that: they were work camps. They weren't death camps that you had under Nazism where there was a systematic extermination of the people in the camps. So there was a relatively high survival rate. The visitors also noted that throughout the 1980s, hundreds of political prisoners had been released from the various camps, but hundreds are not millions. Even with the great fall that took place after Stalin, under Khrushchev, when most of the camps were closed down...there was no sign of millions pouring back into Soviet life—the numbers released were in the thousands. Why—where are the victims? Why no uncovering of mass graves? No Nuremburg-style public trials of communist leaders, documenting the widespread atrocities against these millions—or hundreds of millions, if we want to believe our friend at the Claremont Institute. Surely the new...anti-communist rulers in eastern Europe and Russia would have leaped at the opportunity to put these people on trial. And the best that the West Germans could do was to charge East German leader Erich Honecker and seven of his border guards with shooting persons who tried to escape over the Berlin Wall. It's a serious enough crime, that is, but it's hardly a gulag. In 1955[sic], the former secretary of the Prague communist party was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. 'Ah, a gulag criminal!' No, it was for ordering police to use tear gas and water cannons against demonstrators in 1988. Is this the best example of bloodthirsty communist repression that the capitalist restorationists could find in Czechoslovakia? An action that doesn't even qualify as a crime in most Western nations—water cannons and tear gas! Are they kidding? No one should deny that crimes were committed, but perhaps most of the gulag millions existed less in reality and more in the buckets of anti-communist propaganda that were poured over our heads for decades.

The world powers made it clear in 1994 that they did not care to fight genocide in central Africa, but they had yet to come up with a convincing explanation of why they were content to feed it. The false promise of protection represented by the camps placed Hutu civilians, as well as Tutsis and everyone else in the region, in mortal peril, and it was no comfort that this state of affairs was not brought about by a malevolent international policy in central Africa but by the lack of any coherent policy.

I’m setting up the American flag centerpiece, watching John lug a table closer to the center of the room at Stormy’s direction, when Alicia sidles up beside me, and then we’re both watching him. “You should date him.” “Alicia, I told you, I just got out of a relationship,” I whisper back. I can’t take my eyes off him in that uniform with that side part. “Well, get into a new one. Life is short.” For once, Alicia and Stormy are on the same page. Stormy is now straightening John’s tie, his little hat. She even licks her finger and tries to smooth his hair, but he ducks away. Our eyes meet, and he makes a frantic face like, Help me. “Save him,” Alicia says. “I’ll finish the table. My internment camp display is already done.” She’s set that up by the doors, so it’s the first thing you see when you walk in. I hurry over to John and Stormy. Stormy beams at me. “Doesn’t she look like an absolute doll?” She swans off. With a straight face John says, “Lara Jean, you’re an absolute doll.” I giggle and touch the top of my head. “A cinnamon roll-headed doll.

He felt as though he were standing on the edge of a giant hole – a hole filled with the black despair of nothingness. I am alone now. I am all that is left of my family. His father, who had sent Salva to school . . . brought him treats, like mangoes . . . trusted him to take care of the herd . . . His mother, always ready with food and milk and a soft hand to stroke Salva’s head. His brothers and sisters, whom he had laughed with and played with and looked after . . . He would never see them again. How can I go on without them? But how can I not go on? They would want me to survive . . . to grow up and make something of my life . . . to honour their memories. What was it Uncle had said during that first terrible day in the desert? ‘Do you see that group of bushes? You need only to walk as far as those bushes. . .’ Uncle had helped him get through the desert that way, bit by bit, one step at a time. Perhaps . . . perhaps Salva could get through life at the camp in the same way. I need only to get through the rest of this day, he told himself. This day and no other.

I hate to admit it," she said, "but for all we hear about the States, Canada's capacity for racism seems even worse." "Worse?" "The American Japanese were interned as we were in Canada, and sent off to concentration camps, but their property wasn't liquidated as ours was. And look how quickly the communities reestablished themselves in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We weren't allowed to return to the West Coast like that. We've never recovered from the dispersal policy. But of course that was the government's whole idea—to make sure we'd never be visible again. Official racism was blatant in Canada.

Americans are Americans and everyone else is sorry. Half the time we don't even know what we're sorry about, it just squeaks out of our sorry gaps before we've even clues into the conversation. Well, I'm sorry YOU'RE all so sorry. You have to know when to be sorry. You can't really be sorry for something you don't want to remember, can you? Selective memory, isn't it? Let's be honest, hell, you can't even apologize for the shit you did yesterday never mind fifty years ago. Indian residential schools, Japanese internment camps, hell, and this is just in your neighborhood. But it's all right... everybody's sorry these days. The politicians are sorry, the cops are sorry, the priests are sorry, the logging companies are sorry, mining companies, electric companies, water companies, wife beaters, serial rapists, child molesters, mommy and daddy. Everybody's sorry. Everybody's sorry they got caught sticking it to someone else... that's what they are sorry about... getting caught. They could give a rat's ass about you, or me, or the people they are saying sorry to. Think about it... Don't be a sorry ass, be sorry before you have to say you are sorry. Be sorry for even thinking about, bringing about something sorry-filled. And the next time someone says, "There is one law for everyone." Say, "I'm sorry, you're an idiot." Just kidding, now that was harsh.

The corporatization of U.S. agriculture and the growth of international free markets squeeze growers such that they cannot easily imagine increasing the pay of the pickers or improving the labor camps without bankrupting the farm. In other words, many of the most powerful inputs into the suffering of farmworkers are structural, not willed by individual agents. In this case, structural violence is enacted by market rule and later channeled by international and domestic racism, classism, sexism, and anti-immigrant prejudice. However, structural violence is not just a simple, unidirectional phenomenon; rather, macro social and economic structures produce vulnerability at every level of the farm hierarchy.

Kissinger traces the balances made in foreign policy, including that of realism and idealism, from the times of Cardinal Richelieu through chapters on Theodore Roosevelt the realist and Woodrow Wilson the idealist. Kissinger, a European refugee who has read Metternich more avidly than Jefferson, is unabashedly in the realist camp. “No other nation,” he wrote in Diplomacy, “has ever rested its claim to international leadership on its altruism.” Other Americans might proclaim this as a point of pride; when Kissinger says it, his attitude seems that of an anthropologist examining a rather unsettling tribal ritual. The practice of basing policy on ideals rather than interests, he pointed out, can make a nation seem dangerously unpredictable.

Surprisingly, this line of thinking didn’t change even after I left office. A succession of Israeli leaders who came after me—Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert—offered the Palestinians and Syria unimaginable and dangerous concessions, even more than Rabin and Peres had offered before me. They all failed to get peace. Even then, the messianic diplomats in Washington still didn’t get it. They didn’t understand that the PLO, the so-called moderate faction in the Palestinian camp, would not abandon its goal of destroying Israel. It sought to first reduce Israel to indefensible boundaries by using American and international pressure. Once that was achieved, the ultimate goal—wiping out the Jewish state altogether—would be that much closer.

After four days, during which I bathed with gritty wet wipes and figured out the long odds, I got out of Camp Hell. I had seen no real government and little aid that mattered. The United States had set up a tiny base in the middle of Taliban territory and started firing off howitzers every night, a move that probably terrified any Afghans who might have wanted them around. The base wasn't protecting anyone or able to win any hearts or minds. Instead, it stirred up a hornet's nest, with no conceivable way to calm it down, no real alternatives to poppies, no government authority. The United States did not bear all the blame. The lack of resources and troops here was the product of years of outrageous neglect by the entire international coalition.

This wasn’t a POW camp. It was a secret interrogation center called Ofuna, where “high-value” captured men were housed in solitary confinement, starved, tormented, and tortured to divulge military secrets. Because Ofuna was kept secret from the outside world, the Japanese operated with an absolutely free hand. The men in Ofuna, said the Japanese, weren’t POWs; they were “unarmed combatants” at war against Japan and, as such, didn’t have the rights that international law accorded POWs. In fact, they had no rights at all. If captives “confessed their crimes against Japan,” they’d be treated “as well as regulations permit.” Over the course of the war, some one thousand Allied captives would be hauled into Ofuna, and many would be held there for years.

Throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthen the human relationships that formed that meaning. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining? Heading into my sophomore summer, I applied for two jobs: as an intern at the highly scientific Yerkes Primate Research Center, in Atlanta, and as a prep chef at Sierra Camp, a family vacation spot for Stanford alumni on the pristine shores of Fallen Leaf Lake, abutting the stark beauty of Desolation Wilderness in Eldorado National Forest. The camp’s literature promised, simply, the best summer of your life. I was surprised and flattered to be accepted. Yet I had just learned that macaques had a rudimentary form of culture, and I was eager to go to Yerkes and see what could be the natural origin of meaning itself. In other words, I could either study meaning or I could experience it.

There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing the others around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were built on the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of the government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in were often uninspected and leaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they too leaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensaries lacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe five thousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes and kidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and the pandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that.

On May 21, 1941, Camp de Schirmeck, Natzweiler-Struthof, located 31 miles southwest of Strasbourg in the Vosges Mountains, was opened as the only Nazi Concentration Camp established on present day French territory. Intended to be a transit labor camp it held about 52,000 detainees during the three and a half years of its existence. It is estimated that about 22,000 people died of malnutrition and exertion while at the concentration camp during those years. Natzweiler-Struthof was the location of the infamous Jewish skeleton collection used in the documentary movie “Le nom des 86” made from data provided by the notorious Hauptsturmführer August Hirt. On November 23, 1944, the camp was liberated by the French First Army under the command of the U.S. Sixth Army Group. It is presently preserved as a museum. Boris Pahor, the noted author was interned in Natzweiler-Struthof for having been a Slovene Partisan, and wrote his novel “Necropolis,” named for a large, ancient Greek cemetery. His story is based on his Holocaust experiences while incarcerated at Camp de Schirmeck.

In the future, white supremacy will no longer need white people,” the artist Lorraine O’Grady said in 2018, a prognosis that seemed, at least on the surface, to counter what James Baldwin said fifty years ago, which is that “the white man’s sun has set.” Which is it then? What prediction will hold? As an Asian American, I felt emboldened by Baldwin but haunted and implicated by O’Grady. I heard the ring of truth in her comment, which gave me added urgency to finish this book. Whiteness has already recruited us to become their junior partners in genocidal wars; conscripted us to be antiblack and colorist; to work for, and even head, corporations that scythe off immigrant jobs like heads of wheat. Conscription is every day and unconscious. It is the default way of life among those of us who live in relative comfort, unless we make an effort to choose otherwise. Unless we are read as Muslim or trans, Asian Americans are fortunate not to live under hard surveillance, but we live under a softer panopticon, so subtle that it’s internalized, in that we monitor ourselves, which characterizes our conditional existence. Even if we’ve been here for four generations, our status here remains conditional; belonging is always promised and just out of reach so that we behave, whether it’s the insatiable acquisition of material belongings or belonging as a peace of mind where we are absorbed into mainstream society. If the Asian American consciousness must be emancipated, we must free ourselves of our conditional existence. But what does that mean? Does that mean making ourselves suffer to keep the struggle alive? Does it mean simply being awake to our suffering? I can only answer that through the actions of others. As of now, I’m writing when history is being devoured by our digital archives so we never have to remember. The administration has plans to reopen a Japanese internment camp in Oklahoma to fill up with Latin American children. A small band of Japanese internment camp survivors protest this reopening every day. I used to idly wonder whatever happened to all the internment camp survivors. Why did they disappear? Why didn’t they ever speak out? At the demonstration, protester Tom Ikeda said, “We need to be the allies for vulnerable communities today that Japanese Americans didn’t have in 1942.” We were always here.

In addition to these international climbers, we were supported by a climbing team of Nepalese Sherpas, led by their Sirdar boss, Kami. Raised in the lower Himalayan foothills, these Sherpas know Everest better than anyone. Many had climbed on the mountain for years, assisting expeditions by carrying food, oxygen, extra tents, and supplies to stock the higher camps. As climbers, we would each carry substantial-sized packs every day on Everest, laden with food, water, cooker, gas canisters, sleeping bag, roll mat, head torch, batteries, mittens, gloves, hat, down jacket, crampons, multitool, rope, and ice axes. The Sherpas would then add an extra sack of rice or two oxygen tanks to that standard load. Their strength was extraordinary, and their pride was in their ability to help transport those life-giving necessities that normal climbers could not carry for themselves. It is why the Sherpas are, without doubt, the real heroes on Everest. Born and brought up at around twelve thousand feet, altitude is literally in their blood. Yet up high, above twenty-five thousand feet, even the Sherpas start to slow, the way everyone, gradually and inevitably, does. Reduced to a slow, agonizing, lung-splitting crawl. Two paces, then a rest. Two paces, then a rest. It is known as the “Everest shuffle.

Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox said in 2016, in the run-up to the EU referendum, that ‘the United Kingdom is one of the few countries in the European Union that does not need to bury its twentieth-century history.’ Funny, because Britain is in fact one of the few countries in the world that literally did bury a good portion of its twentieth-century history. During the period of decolonisation, the British state embarked upon a systematic process of destroying the evidence of its crimes. Codenamed ‘Operation Legacy’, the state intelligence agencies and the Foreign Office conspired to literally burn, bury at sea or hide vast amounts of documents containing potentially sensitive details of things done in the colonies under British rule.25 Anything that might embarrass the government, that would show religious or racial intolerance or be used ‘unethically’ by a post-independence government was ordered destroyed or hidden. The Foreign Office were forced to admit in court about having hidden documents, then were unforthcoming about the scale of what was hidden, to the point that you’d be a fool to trust anything that is now said. But from what we know, hundreds of thousands of pages of documents were destroyed and over a million hidden, not just starting in the colonial period but dating all the way back to 1662. This operation was only exposed to the public in 2011 as part of a court case between the survivors of British concentration camps in Kenya and the government.

Oh, without the brigade one could still somehow manage to survive the camp! Without the brigade you are an individual, you yourself choose your own line of conduct. Without the brigade you can at least die proudly, but in the brigade the only way they allow you even to die is in humiliation, on your belly. From the chief, from the camp foreman, from the jailer, from the convoy guard, from all of them you can hide and catch a moment of rest; you can ease up a bit here on hauling, shirk a bit there on lifting. But from the driving belts, from your comrades in the brigade, there is neither a hiding place, nor salvation, nor mercy. You cannot not want to work. You cannot, conscious of being a political [prisoner], prefer death from hunger to work. No! Once you have been marched outside the compound, once you have been registered as going out to work, everything the brigade does today will be divided not by twenty-five but by twenty-six, and because of you the entire brigade's percentage of norm will fall from 123 to 119, which makes the difference between the ration allotted to record breakers and ordinary rations, and everyone will lose a millet cake and three and a half ounces of bread. And that is why your comrades keep watch on you better than any jailers! And the brigade leader's fist will punish you far more effectively than the whole People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Now that is what spontaneous initiative in re-education means! That is psychological enrichment of the personality by the collective!

Then now let us consider what will be their way of life, if they are to realize our idea of them. In the first place, none of them should have any property of his own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither should they have a private house or store closed against any one who has a mind to enter; their provisions should be only such as are required by trained warriors, who are men of temperance and courage; they should agree to receive from the citizens a fixed rate of pay, enough to meet the expenses of the year and no more; and they will go to mess and live together like soldiers in a camp. Gold and silver we will tell them that they have from God; the diviner metal is within them, and they have therefore no need of the dross which is current among men, and ought not to pollute the divine by any such earthly admixture; for that commoner metal has been the source of many unholy deeds, but their own is undefiled. And they alone of all the citizens may not touch or handle silver or gold, or be under the same roof with them, or wear them, or drink from them. And this will be their salvation, and they will be the saviours of the State. But should they ever acquire homes or lands or moneys of their own, they will become housekeepers and husbandmen instead of guardians, enemies and tyrants instead of allies of the other citizens; hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, they will pass their whole life in much greater terror of internal than of external enemies, and the hour of ruin, both to themselves and to the rest of the State, will be at hand.

As Allied forces moved into Hitler’s Fortress Europe, Roosevelt and his circle were confronted with new evidence of the Holocaust. In early 1942, he had been given information that Adolf Hitler was quietly fulfilling his threat to “annihilate the Jewish race.” Rabbi Stephen Wise asked the President that December 1942 to inform the world about “the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history” and “try to stop it.” Although he was willing to warn the world about the impending catastrophe and insisted that there be war crimes commissions when the conflict was over, Roosevelt told Wise that punishment for such crimes would probably have to await the end of the fighting, so his own solution was to “win the war.” The problem with this approach was that by the time of an Allied victory, much of world Jewry might have been annihilated. By June 1944, the Germans had removed more than half of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews, and some Jewish leaders were asking the Allies to bomb railways from Hungary to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. In response, Churchill told his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, that the murder of the Jews was “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world,” and ordered him to get “everything” he could out of the British Air Force. But the Prime Minister was told that American bombers were better positioned to do the job. At the Pentagon, Stimson consulted John McCloy, who later insisted, for decades, that he had “never talked” with Roosevelt about the option of bombing the railroad lines or death camps. But in 1986, McCloy changed his story during a taped conversation with Henry Morgenthau’s son, Henry III, who was researching a family history. The ninety-one-year-old McCloy insisted that he had indeed raised the idea with the President, and that Roosevelt became “irate” and “made it very clear” that bombing Auschwitz “wouldn’t have done any good.” By McCloy’s new account, Roosevelt “took it out of my hands” and warned that “if it’s successful, it’ll be more provocative” and “we’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business,” as well as “bombing innocent people.” McCloy went on, “I didn’t want to bomb Auschwitz,” adding that “it seemed to be a bunch of fanatic Jews who seemed to think that if you didn’t bomb, it was an indication of lack of venom against Hitler.” If McCloy’s memory was reliable, then, just as with the Japanese internment, Roosevelt had used the discreet younger man to discuss a decision for which he knew he might be criticized by history, and which might conceivably have become an issue in the 1944 campaign. This approach to the possible bombing of the camps would allow the President to explain, if it became necessary, that the issue had been resolved at a lower level by the military. In retrospect, the President should have considered the bombing proposal more seriously. Approving it might have required him to slightly revise his insistence that the Allies’ sole aim should be winning the war, as he did on at least a few other occasions. But such a decision might have saved lives and shown future generations that, like Churchill, he understood the importance of the Holocaust as a crime unparalleled in world history.*

Hitler was a racist in a way that Mussolini wasn’t, with FDR occupying a position somewhere between the two of them. FDR was not an anti-Semite, as Hitler was, but he did share Hitler’s low view of Asians and blacks. During World War II, FDR ordered that many Japanese Americans, under suspicion of disloyalty, be interned in camps. There is, of course, an argument in wartime for holding captive those who pose a security risk. My point, however, is that FDR made no similar arrangements for Italians and Germans in the United States. So there was a clear racial element in FDR’s approach to security. FDR was culpable for doing exactly what progressive Democrats accuse Donald Trump of doing when he threatens to target violent Islamists. Yet Trump doesn’t single out radical Muslims while exonerating other groups who act like them. FDR, by contrast, treated Japanese Americans in a way he didn’t treat German Americans or Italian Americans. That, I’m suggesting, is because FDR, even during World War II, retained a soft spot for German and Italian fascism. Also FDR wasn’t turned off by the fascist idea of a racial hierarchy; indeed, here was FDR implementing one himself. Incidentally Japanese internment is another crime that Democrats blame on “America” when their own hero, FDR, is the one who ordered it. FDR, Mussolini, and Hitler all denounced the free market and blamed the problems of their society on private business. All vowed to use the state to combat the power of business, and offered themselves as the true manifestation of the collective good. If one ended as the enemy of the other two, it shouldn’t blind us to their earlier mutual admiration.

It wasn’t easy at first. He had expected difficulties with his parents and he wasn’t mistaken. His mother had a terrible fear of the bush—which had developed in the weeks when he had disappeared and she had had to believe he was dead. They talked many nights before she relented. He was older now, more seasoned, and she knew that. He had done well the past summer, when he had returned with Derek. With Caleb’s help, his mother came around. “How will you find the Smallhorns?” she asked. “The pilot, the man who flew me out, will know where they are.” Brian had kept the pilot’s name. The man had a one-plane operation working out of International Falls, on the Minnesota-Canada border, and Brian called. “The Smallhorns? Yeah—they’re up in the Williams Lake area in a fish camp but I’m not due to go up there until fall. I’m booked solid all summer with fishing charters. I can’t take the time to run you up there.” “How about getting me close? I can make my own way in a canoe.” “Just a minute.” Brian heard papers shuffling as the pilot went through his records. “Yeah, here. I’m due to take a couple of guys fishing in ten days. We’re going to the Granite Lake area and with my fuel I can take you maybe another hundred miles. That’s still a hundred miles short of the Smallhorns’ camp but it’s all chain lakes up there and you can do it without any really bad portages. I’ll give you a good map. How heavy is your gear?” “Maybe two hundred pounds, plus me and a canoe. Can you haul a canoe?” “Sure. On the floats. We’re taking one canoe and I can fit yours on the other float. When are you figuring on coming out?” “I’m not … sure.” “I’m due to make a supply run to them in the fall before trapping

If the first thing you see each and every morning is the eyes of your cellmate who has gone insane, how then shall you save yourself during the coming day? Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kozyrev, whose brilliant career in astronomy was interrupted by his arrest, saved himself only by thinking of the eternal and infinite: of the order of the Universe - and of its Supreme Spirit; of the stars; of their internal state; and what Time and the passing of Time really are. And in this way he began to discover a new field in physics. And only in this way did he succeed in surviving in the Dmitrovsk Prison. But his line of mental exploration was blocked by forgotten figures. He could not build any further - he had to have a lot of figures. Now just where could he get them in his solitary-confinement cell with its overnight kerosene lamp, a cell into which not even a little bird could enter? And the scientist prayed: "Please, God! I have done everything I could. Please help me! Please help me continue!" At this time he was entitled to receive one book every ten days (by then he was alone in the cell). In the meager prison library were several different editions of Demyan Bedny's Red Concert , which kept coming around to each cell again and again. Half an hour passed after his prayer; they came to exchange his book; and as usual, without asking anything at all, they pushed a book at him. It was entitled A Course in Astrophysics! Where had it come from? He simply could not imagine such a book in the prison library. Aware of the brief duration of this coincidence, Kozyrev threw himself on it and began to memorize everything he needed immediately, and everything he might need later on. In all, just two days had passed, and he had eight days left in which to keep his book, when there was an unscheduled inspection by the chief of the prison. His eagle eye noticed immediately. "But you are an astronomer?" Yes." "Take this book away from him!" But its mystical arrival had opened the way for his further work, which he then continued in the camp in Norilsk.

If the first thing you see each and every morning is the eyes of your cellmate who has gone insane, how then shall you save yourself during the coming day? Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kozyrev, whose brilliant career in astronomy was interrupted by his arrest, saved himself only by thinking of the eternal and infinite: of the order of the Universe - and of its Supreme Spirit; of the stars; of their internal state; and what Time and the passing of Time really are. And in this way he began to discover a new field in physics. And only in this way did he succeed in surviving in the Dmitrovsk Prison. But his line of mental exploration was blocked by forgotten figures. He could not build any further - he had to have a lot of figures. Now just where could he get them in his solitary-confinement cell with its overnight kerosene lamp, a cell into which not even a little bird could enter? And the scientist prayed: "Please, God! I have done everything I could. Please help me! Please help me continue!" At this time he was entitled to receive one book every ten days (by then he was alone in the cell). In the meager prison library were several different editions of Demyan Bedny's Red Concert , which kept coming around to each cell again and again. Half an hour passed after his prayer; they came to exchange his book; and as usual, without asking anything at all, they pushed a book at him. It was entitled A Course in Astrophysics! Where had it come from? He simply could not imagine such a book in the prison library. Aware of the brief duration of this coincidence, Kozyrev threw himself on it and began to memorize everything he needed immediately, and everything he might need later on. In all, just two days had passed, and he had eight days left in which to keep his book, when there was an unscheduled inspection by the chief of the prison. His eagle eye noticed immediately. "But you are an astronomer?" "Yes." "Take this book away from him!" But its mystical arrival had opened the way for his further work, which he then continued in the camp in Norilsk.

With the false claim that the Germans murdered six million Jews, mostly in gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland during WWII, since the end of WWII, the world has been saturated with films, documentaries and books on the Holocaust. Anyone worldwide who dares to investigate the Jewish Holocaust claims, is branded an Anti-Semite and Holocaust Denier. In our democratic world, a person who is accused of a crime is deemed innocent until irrefutable evidence proves them guilty. What has happened to democracy in Germany, Poland, France and Switzerland where people accused of Holocaust Denial are not allowed to provide any evidence that would prove that they are not guilty? In the Middle Ages, people accused of being witches, were also allowed no defence and were burned at the stake. As burning at the stake and crucifiction is not allowed in today's world, the best that the Jewish leaders and holocaust promoters can achieve is incarceration where no one can hear claims backed by years of very thorough research. The Jewish success in blocking my book "The Answer Justice", their failed attempts to stop the book "Chutzpah" written by Norman Finkelstein whose mother and father were held in German concentration camps, the incarceration of revisionists Ernst Zundel and Germar Rudolf in Germany and David Irving in Austria: these are all desperate attempts to end what they call Holocaust Denial. The English historian David Irving was refused entry to Australia in 2003 at the behest of the Jewish community (representing only 0.4% of the Australian population) thus denying the right of the other 99.6% to hear what David Irving has to say. Proof of Jewish power was the blocking of the public viewing of David Irving's film. The Jewish owners of the building locked the film presentation out which resulted in the headline in the "Australian" newspaper of: " Outrage at Jewish bid to stop the film by David Irving called "The Search For Truth in History" . Sir Zelman Cowan who was Governor General of Australia and a man much reverred in the Jewish community, has stated in the Jewish Chronicle (London) that "The way to deal with people who claim the holocaust never happened, is to produce irrefutable evidence that it did happen". I agree 100% with Sir Zelman Cowan. I am quite certain that he and other Zionist Jewish (Ashkenazim) world leaders are aware that a United Nations or International forensic examination of the alleged gas chamber at No. 2 Crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, would irrefutably prove the truth to the world that xyclon B cyanide has never been used as alleged by world Jewry to kill Jews. In 1979 Professor W.D. Rubenstein stated: "If the Holocaust can be shown to be a Zionist myth, the strongest of all weapons in Israels's propaganda armory collapses. The Falsification of history by Zionist Jews in claiming the murder of six million Jews by Germany, constitutes the GREATEST ORGANISED CRIME that the world has known.

Speech to the German Folk January 30, 1944 Without January 30, 1933, and without the National Socialist revolution, without the tremendous domestic cleansing and construction efforts, there would be no factor today that could oppose the Bolshevik colossus. After all, Germany was itself so ill at the time, so weakened by the spreading Jewish infection, that it could hardly think of overcoming the Bolshevik danger at home, not to mention abroad. The economic ruin brought about by the Jews as in other countries, the unemployment of millions of Germans, the destruction of peasantry, trade, and industry only prepared the way for the planned internal collapse. This was furthered by support for the continued existence of a senseless state of classes, which could only serve to transform the reason of the masses into hatred in order to make them the willing instrument of the Bolshevik revolution. By mobilizing the proletarian slaves, the Jews hoped that, following the destruction of the national intelligentsia, they could all the more reduce them for good to coolies. But even if this process of the Bolshevik revolt in the interior of Germany had not led to complete success, the state with its democratic Weimar constitution would have been reduced to something ridiculously helpless in view of the great tasks of current world politics. In order to be armed for this confrontation, not only the problems of political power but also the social and economic problems had to be resolved. When National Socialism undertook the realization of its program eleven years ago, it managed just in time to build up a state that did not only have the strength at home but also the power abroad to fulfill the same European mission which first Greece fulfilled in antiquity by opposing the Persians, then Rome [by opposing] the Carthaginians, and the Occident in later centuries by opposing the invasions from the east. Therefore, in the year 1933, we set ourselves four great tasks among many others. On their resolution depended not only the future of the Reich but also the rescue of Europe, perhaps even of the entire human civilization: 1. The Reich had to regain the internal social peace that it had lost by resolving the social questions. That meant that the elements of a division into classes bourgeoisie and proletariat-had to be eliminated in their various manifestations and be replaced by a Volksgemeinschaft. The appeal to reason had to be supplemented by the merciless eradication of the base elements of resistance in all camps. 2. The social and political unification of the nation had to be supplemented by a national, political one. This meant that the body of the Reich, which was not only politically, but also governmentally divided, had to be replaced by a unified National Socialist state, the construction and leadership of which were suited to oppose and withstand even the heaviest attacks and severest tests of the future. 3. The nationally and politically coherent centralized state had the mission of immediately creating a Wehrmacht, whose ideology, moral attitude, numerical strength, and material equipment could serve as an instrument of self-assertion. After the outside world had rejected all German offers for a limitation of armament, the Reich had to fashion its own armament accordingly. 4. In order to secure its continued existence in Europe with the prospect of actual success, it was necessary to integrate all those countries which were inhabited by Germans, or were areas which had belonged to the German Reich for over a thousand years and which, in terms of their national substance and economy, were indispensable to the preservation of the Reich, that is, for its political and military defense. Only the resolution of all these tasks could result in the creation of that state which was capable, at home and abroad, of waging the fight for its defense and for the preservation of the European family of nations.

That summer, Lee Harvey Oswald handed out pro-Castro literature stamped with the address 544 Camp Street, a commercial building. This was a blunder because Oswald actually was under the control of an anti-Castro operation headquartered there. W. Guy Banister, his controller, had connections in military intelligence, the CIA and a section of the World Anti-Communist League set up by Willoughby and his Far Pacific intelligence unit in Taiwan. In The Great Heroin Coup, Henrik Krüger disclosed that the International Fascista was “not only the first step toward fulfilling the dream of Skorzeny, but also of his close friends in Madrid, exile Jose Lopez Rega, Juan Peron’s grey eminence, and prince Justo Valerio Borghesé, the Italian fascist money man rescued from justice at the hands of the World War II Italian resistance by future CIA counterintelligence whiz James J. Angleton.

Precisely because the majority of Volksdeutsche were women and children, to have granted immunity from arrest to both would have been to accept that most of the ethnic German population could not be interned. Nor could the adults alone have been sent to camps without throwing the burden of caring for millions of young people on the detaining governments.

(objectionable though the principle of internment on ethnic grounds may have been, a third of the camps’ population was granted permission during the war to leave, for education or employment).

Periodically the International Red Cross, or some neutral—the Swedes, for example—will demand an inspection of a concentration camp. They are brought here. And so they are shown the bank, the cinema, the bakery, the shops—and they are asked for their approval. What are those Jews complaining about? The Führer has given them this beautiful city." "And they get away with it? The inspectors believe them?" Karl felt he was losing his mind. "Maybe they want to believe," Felsher said.

There were between eight and nine million survivors of the war to settle into Displaced Persons (DP) camps run by the army, or by voluntary agencies such as the Quaker Relief Team, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the Red Cross and the International Refugee Organisation

I believe the course of events is dictated by a Leninist and Stalinist political culture which has grown out of the precedents of czarism and Bolshevism, involving a bag of tricks in which six elements are used to achieve political and economic results: (1) provocation; (2) divide and conquer; (3) infiltration of the enemy camp; (4) disinformation; (5) controlled opposition; (6) and strategic deception. Various special formations and ideological sub-weapons have been developed by Moscow to amplify the working power of these six elements, including organized crime, drug trafficking, international terrorism, national liberation movements, revolutionary Islam, free trade, global warming, feminism, the homosexual movement, gun control and multiculturalism.

People quietly shuffle through the dust back to their Mercury Homes. Even though we are in an open-air camp, we breathe the recycled air of dread and anxiety. Like everyone else, I wonder about tomorrow. Hope. Fear. Anticipation.

The Palestinian leadership failed disastrously by not coming up with an alternative to the U.S.-Israeli position at Camp David and subsequent negotiations through the end of the Clinton presidency. It also failed by not explaining what was wrong with the terms being negotiated at Camp David, and how the whole process, from Oslo on, represented the subordination of international law to Israeli demands.

Raised on the meagre rations of the United Nations for their whole lives, schooled by NGOs and submitted to workshops on democracy, gender mainstreaming and campaigns against female genital mutilation, the refugees suffered from benign illusions about the largesse of the international community. They were forbidden from leaving and not allowed to work, but they believed that if only people came to know about their plight, then the world would be moved to help, to bring to an end the protracted situation that has seen them confined to camps for generations, their children and then grandchildren born in the open prison in the desert. But the officials in the grey room saw the world from only one angle.

It’s depressing at times, but I try to keep a sense of perspective. Sweet F.A. will never be more than a bunch of thugs and vandals, high in nuisance value, but politically irrelevant. I’ve seen them on TV, marching around their “training camps” in designer camouflage, or sitting in lecture theaters, watching recorded speeches by their guru, Jack Kelly, or (oblivious to the irony) messages of “international solidarity” from similar organizations in Europe and North America.

Al-Shabaab seemed right about many things. The newsletter said that international aid was brought to ruin Somali agriculture and to make people dependent on foreign food; both had indeed been side effects of the relief effort. They said that the West wanted Somalis to be held in ‘camps, like animals’, which could be an accurate description of Dadaab. Most of all though, it was the rhetorical question posed in the newsletter that had the biggest impact among Guled’s traumatized generation: ‘Why invade a country that has been fighting a civil war for a decade and a half the moment they have decided to live in peace?’ The Islamic Courts Union had brought peace. It had been wildly popular and Somalis resented the US-sponsored Ethiopian invasion. ‘The United States cannot abide a situation in which Islam is the solution,’ the newsletter argued. And to many that seemed like the truth. The

Xenophobic propaganda can take another sinister form. Its progenitor is that favorite taunt of the playground bully: “You’ve got cooties.” Grown-up bullies are notorious for fomenting hatred by branding the target of their aggression—usually a vulnerable minority—a parasite or other vehicle for transmitting infection. This tradition has deep roots. The ancient Romans vilified outsiders as detritus and scum. Jews—history’s favorite scapegoats—were depicted by the Nazis as leeches on society, setting the stage for the Holocaust. Meanwhile, in the United States, law-abiding Japanese American civilians were called “yellow vermin”—a slur that became a rallying cry for imprisoning them in internment camps. In 1994, Rwanda erupted in a genocidal bloodbath when Hutu extremists incited their followers to “exterminate the Tutsi cockroaches.

There was too much history he’d like to forget, but his memories were on the surface today, closer even than the woman across from him. For a single heartbeat the shop faded and Slocan appeared: huts in rows, men and women like cattle within its fenced boundaries.

Operation Reinhard's objective was the total annihilation of the three million Jews inhabiting the Generalgouvernement - the part of Poland under Nazi control. How to describe such an undertaking? Any generation that did not experience the Holocaust can learn about it only from words, and the knowledge thus gained is never complete. The right words, however, are difficult to find. People who perished had no voice, and those who survived were pushed into a realm of silence by the singular character of their experiences. The violence they had endured - in concentration camps, in hiding, or in prisons - destroyed for their capacity for making contact with the world. Their experience was and remains in great measure inexpressible, because pain and physical violence destroy language and cause a reversion to a state anterior to language. Still, trauma demands to be expressed. What is horrific remains horrific so long as it is not named. Once a name is attached to it, the horror retreats; it diminishes, since the very act of naming reconnects the victim to the world. Theodor Adorno wrote that what the Nazis did to the Jews was inexpressible. Yet a way of expressing it must be found if we do not want to doom the victims to oblivion. Their number was too great to name them one by one. This is why, Adorno believed, the concept of 'genocide' was invented. That term acknowledges the facts, codified and inscribed what was inexpressible into the international declaration of human rights, normalizing it and rendering it measurable But the codification did not render 'what the Nazis did to the Jews' easier to express.

Revolution, which is in the blood of Parisians, was not in the veins of the Viennese. In Hans's blood there was the Austrian amiability and the good manners learned in his nursery. He was not radical enough to come directly to final conclusions. Day and night, in his desolate prison barracks, while he was almost despairing of his coming home at all, he struggled to find a compromise. He found it in his decision to convince himself with his own eyes, as soon as he came home; the terrible reports reaching the prison camp might be exaggerated and aimed at convincing the prisoners that their camp was better than their home. But when he did see with his own eyes that it was far more terrible than anything he had heard, he did not allow himself any further evasion. Now at last he was ready for the final outcome. One of the first things to strike him was that people in Vienna did not realize what had happened, and it was like a slap in the face. They went about and expected to continue as usual. But there was nothing to continue! Vienna had been an imperial capital, and an imperial capital cannot do without an empire. But the empire no longer existed. Austria was the concept of a super-national nation uniting nationalities. The concept had been destroyed. “German Austria,” the little land with seven million inhabitants, carved out of an empire of fifty-five million, possessed neither money nor friends. Nevertheless, at St. Germain they had been cynical enough to pile the burden of a succession on them that had no basis for existence. Most incomprehensible of all to this returning prisoner was the attitude of Number 10. They were still calling die people begging in the streets “beggars,” because they either did not know or did not want to know that six out of every ten Viennese were compelled to beg and that Austria itself had been assigned a role which was nothing else than that of an international beggar. They carried on their businesses, continued to go to their offices, went on receiving their pensions.Revolution, which is in the blood of Parisians, was not in the veins of the Viennese. In Hans's blood there was the Austrian amiability and the good manners learned in his nursery. He was not radical enough to come directly to final conclusions. Day and night, in his desolate prison barracks, while he was almost despairing of his coming home at all, he struggled to find a compromise. He found it in his decision to convince himself with his own eyes, as soon as he came home; the terrible reports reaching the prison camp might be exaggerated and aimed at convincing the prisoners that their camp was better than their home. But when he did see with his own eyes that it was far more terrible than anything he had heard, he did not allow himself any further evasion. Now at last he was ready for the final outcome. One of the first things to strike him was that people in Vienna did not realize what had happened, and it was like a slap in the face. They went about and expected to continue as usual. But there was nothing to continue! Vienna had been an imperial capital, and an imperial capital cannot do without an empire. But the empire no longer existed. Austria was the concept of a super-national nation uniting nationalities. The concept had been destroyed. “German Austria,” the little land with seven million inhabitants, carved out of an empire of fifty-five million, possessed neither money nor friends. Nevertheless, at St. Germain they had been cynical enough to pile the burden of a succession on them that had no basis for existence. Most incomprehensible of all to this returning prisoner was the attitude of Number 10. They were still calling die people begging in the streets “beggars,” because they either did not know or did not want to know that six out of every ten Viennese were compelled to beg and that Austria itself had been assigned a role which was nothing else than that of an international beggar.

That whole freedom-of-speech thing? That right to petition your government? Yeah, doesn’t exist so much inside an internment camp.

Joel looked at Katie and thought about the fate that awaited her. More than four hundred Japanese American students had been forced to leave the university after Pearl Harbor and live in internment camps. Joel was certain Katie would be among them.

I looked outside the window, and in my mind's eye, I began to rove into the landscape, recalling my overnight conversation with Dr. Maillotte. I saw her at fifteen, in September 1944, sitting on a rampart in the Brussels sun, delirious with happiness at the invaders' retreat. I saw Junichiro Saito on the same day, aged thirty-one or thirty-two, unhappy, in internment, in an arid room in a fenced compound in Idaho, far away from his books. Out there on that day, also, were all four of my own grandparents: The Nigerians, the Germans. Three were by now gone, for sure. But what of the fourth, my oma? I saw them all, even the ones I had never seen in real life, saw all of them in the middle of that day in September sixty-two years ago, with their eyes open as if shut, mercifully seeing nothing of the brutal half century ahead and , better yet, hardly anything at all of all that was happening in their world, the corpse-filled cities, camps, beaches, and fields, the unspeakable worldwide disorder of that very moment.

The Japanese had poured into Singapore, and the mighty British troops fell apart under the onslaught. Singapore surrendered in seven days, and thousands of British, Indian, and Australian troops were captured and sent to internment camps.

The Japanese had poured into Singapore, and the mighty British troops fell apart under the onslaught. Singapore surrendered in seven days, and thousands of British, Indian, and Australian troops were captured and sent to internment camps. “I hear a Japanese submarine even shelled an oil refinery near California! The Americans want to retaliate, but what can they do? They have navy aircraft carriers in Hawaii, but they don’t have long-range bombers to fly across to Tokyo and return to Hawaii.

This is the court of Plessy v. Ferguson, of Dred Scott and fugitive slave laws, of trying to suffocate the New Deal in the cradle, of gutting the power of the 14th Amendment won with the blood of so many Americans during the Civil War, of Japanese internment camps, of Muslim bans, of billionaires and corporations and political gerrymandering and gutting voting rights.

I wanted to explore the relationships that make us who we are, as well as how we help and hinder one another. Language is a gate that we can open and close on people. The words we use shape perception, as do the books we read, the stories we tell one another, and the stories we tell ourselves. The foreign staff and subscribers of the Library were considered “enemy aliens,” and several were interned. Jewish subscribers were not allowed to enter the Library, and many were later killed in concentration camps. A friend said she believes that in reading stories set in World War II, people like to ask themselves what they would have done. I think a better question to ask is what can we do now to ensure that libraries and learning are accessible to all and that we treat people with dignity and compassion.

In the pages that follow I hope that readers similarly struggle to find their own balance within a history of injustice. Such pasts should be unsettling.

In Gethsemane, Jesus experienced the pains of a person dying of cancer. He experienced what it is like to be a queer kid who is constantly bullied. He experienced the birthing pains of every mother who ever lived or would live. He experienced the embarrassment of a gay boy having an erection at the sight of his school crush in the locker room. He experienced conversion therapy. He experienced rejection. He experienced the brutal physical and psychological attacks that trans women endure. He experienced the acid poured on a woman’s face for her defiance to the patriarchs. He experienced the fear, grief, and sorrow of every parent who has buried their child. He experienced sex slavery. He experienced his first period. He experienced menstruation, not simply from a vagina but from every pore of his body. He experienced rape. He experienced catcalls. He experienced hunger. He experienced disease. He experienced an ectopic pregnancy. He experienced an abortion. He experienced a miscarriage and stillbirth. He experienced the Holocaust. He experienced war – both the killing and being killed. He experienced internment camps. He experienced depression, anxiety, and suicide. He experienced sleeping on the street with the homeless. He experienced the slave master’s whip on his back and the noose around his neck. He knew the fear of every black mother who kissed her son before he left the house, praying he would return home safely. He experienced the effects of unrighteous dominion, corrupt politicians, and all manner of injustice. He experienced the migrant mother with no food or diapers for her baby as she desperately walked north in search of a better life. He experienced having his child taken away from him at the border due to “legal complications.” He experienced it all – every death, every cut, every tear, every pain, every sorrow, every bit of suffering imaginable and beyond imagination. He experienced an onslaught of suffering, which was so great that it took a god to bear it. He experienced death and came through the other side to show us the way.

Now how did he [Mukherji] marry me? Well, he married me for me not to be interned at the beginning of the war. If he had not married me, I would’ve been in a concentration camp. All people who were known to be against the British, known to have subversive ideas, were put into camps immediately after the war began... And we married, and we went, he to his house and I to my house. In the end, after several months, we took a flat: four rooms, two for me and two for him. And we had no kind of marital life at all. We were ideological co-fighters, friends, and that’s all. We used to meet now and then to discuss things, to read books together, and that was all... we decided not to have any family at all, and not to have any family at all means no intimacy at all. If you don’t want a family, you have no business having anything else but Platonic relations with your fellow beings. Ceasing Platonic relations is only when you want a family. We kept up to it. We kept up to it to the very end. Because we believe in that.

Free blacks and white abolitionists in the Union hailed the actions of Frémont and Hunter as gains for human freedom and brilliant strokes of military strategy. So did many of the Union’s substantial contingent of German-born troops. For them the American Civil War was an extension of a larger, international struggle against oppressive social and political institutions, a war that some of them had already fought (and lost) in Europe during the failed democratic revolutions of 1848. In their eyes, Frémont’s militant policy represented the right way to pursue the fight for freedom.24 Kindred sentiments were common among Union soldiers recruited in Kansas. Many of them were veterans of the already years-long guerrilla war there. Now serving in Tennessee, they continued to advise slaves to flee from their masters, and they welcomed into their camps those who did.25

in Germany today there were a prison built on top of a former concentration camp, and that prison disproportionately incarcerated Jewish people, it would rightly provoke outrage throughout the world. I imagine there would be international summits on closing such an egregious institution. And yet in the United States such collective outrage at this plantation-turned-prison is relatively muted.

Historically, on average international wars have lasted only six months. In contrast, the average civil war has been much longer, with estimates ranging from seven to fifteen years. If a family are going to be refugees for over a decade, their priority is not emergency food and shelter. It is to re-establish the threads of normal famiy life, anchored materially by a capacity of whoever is the breadwinner to earn a living. The camps run by UNHCR met the basic material needs of refugees, but they provided few opportunities to earn a living. Consequently, they left families bereft of autonomy.

could have just killed her straightaway. We know they have no issue with murder. Dead, she solves their problem. Alive, she’s still a pain in their asses. But they might have sweated her for information. If she knew too much about their plan, they could still cancel the whole thing. It could have been the Clan proper. They might be trying to stop the assassination attempt and would have a reason for kidnapping Rebecca, to find out all she knew about the assassination. But I don’t see them killing her.” “Hell,” Victor said, “the police chief himself might even have ordered her kidnapping as a personal matter just to bury her knowledge that he’s a Clan na Gael leader. If that were the case, why would he let her go?” There was no denying Victor’s logic, but the most immediate thing now was the threat to Maureen Brogan and her child. “We need to get to Maureen’s now. She’s in danger. When she’s safe, we can think about Rebecca. Can you arrange for someone to stay with Maureen if we put her in a hotel with the child?” “Of course.” Conor heard Dr. Camp’s voice from behind them in the hallway. “Mr. Dolan, there’s a Detective Flynn down at the information desk. He wants to see you. Should I have the nurse let him up?” So the case is already assigned to Flynn. The last thing Conor needed now was to deal with the murderous detective. “Do me a favor, Doc. Hold him there until I can get dressed and get out of here. Victor and I will find a side door.” *** On the cab ride to Maureen’s flat, Conor tried to get into Flynn’s head. The detective landed this case either because of its relationship to Kevin Dolan’s supposed suicide or because the police chief specifically wanted him on the investigation. In either case, his objective would be to go through the motions of an investigation while protecting himself, the chief of police, and his Clan associates. He would, of course, make certain the kidnapping was never solved. At the same time, he would use the investigation to figure out how much Rebecca and Conor knew about the Clan’s internal problems. Whichever Clan group