That (initially) $175 billion/year will pay for itself in forced labor. I think most countries with large-scale systems of concentration camps converged on that solution, when the costs of those systems ballooned into something unsustainable.
Modern China has that. Their system makes use of their (reportedly millions) of incarcerated Uyghurs as low-skill forced labor, mainly in textiles/clothes. Few talk about it, but a significant fraction of Western clothing comes out of these camps.
The 1940's Germans were efficient: in extremis, they realized you could optimize value from concentration camps by starving the workers to death, extracting value from the final months of their lives with minimal operating costs. That was "extermination through labor".
Hacker News, being what it is, will be most focused on the impact on their 401k's. Their grandchildren will read these comments.
It is important to understand that the methods selected for the “Final Solution” were intended to minimize costs. It is dangerous for crime at this scale to become cheap.
The experience of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland showed that mass execution with guns used too much material and was too stressful for the perpetrators. Camps allowed operational costs to be amortized while individual responsibility was diffused.
> They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’
[...]
> "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
> They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’
Ah, well in that case, it's clear to me Austria is actually the one on the brink of fascism. It's clear to me, having extensively eaten a lot of strudel (makes me an expert in Austria), that it's now a fascist country.
And if you say: ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’ then clearly you're just in denial.
You've lost me. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, could you rephrase your point in a more coherent way please?
But also, yes, Austria was on the brink of fascism not too long ago. Our far-right party almost got to form a government and their plans were quite sinister.
Thankfully, disaster was averted due to egos and greed - the far-right and center-right couldn't agree on who gets to pilfer to country more, so they didn't end up forming a coalition.
> They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’
It provides no way to distinguish between when the thing is happening and when it isn't. If people say you're an alarmist, by what mechanism do you evaluate whether they're correct?
Except that argument admits a means to evaluate it. You take the thing repeated ad nauseam and subject it to an evidentiary requirement. Are people actually being held without habeas corpus? Are people actually being executed based on their ethnicity? If anything in this nature is happening, has the rate of it significantly increased recently or has it been going on for decades?
The last question is pretty important if your argument is "Trump is a fascist and all we have to do is get him out", because then that argument is erroneous and you have to actually change the status quo instead of returning to it.
He never does. If you go through his comment history all he does is shill for Germany and EU how they're the best, and shit on Trump and the US how they're the worst and that's it. He never has any arguments beyond appeals to emotional manipulation of "look at the fascists" based on fake or one sided articles. Best treat him as a troll.
Your entire argument boils to the fact that you live in Austria and that makes you an expert on fascism and if anyone tries to refute you then it immediately means they're in denial.
That isn't true at all. Some of the argument relies on the experience of an Austrian education, but we are also encouraged to refer to other provided sources if we choose to seek other opinions.
Italian here, and I know a few things about fascism not just because of that. Yes, what is happening in the US is the rise of a fascist state controlled by a small minority of very wealthy and powerful people purely for economical reasons with Trump being just a tool in their hands. As with happened in my country back then, there are only two possible reasons for endorsing it: being part of the cult, or being part of the club.
That's why I stopped long ago any attempt at reasoning with apologists.
Having one of grandparents being part of the resistance and the other one helping it covertly, then spending a lot of time talking with them, something new generations miss a lot, counts however. This made me later extremely biased, of course, however as with many teens fascinated by fake ideals just because they make you look cool I experienced the fascism lure back in the early 80s, and actually embraced it for years because of immaturity, so I wasn't exactly immersed in a one sided environment (did I mention that my father sold his very profitable business because he feared that communists would rise in power and nationalize it?). What is happening in the US has been clear since January-February when they reached the point of no return; there are points a government must follow to become an oppressive regime, and the US govt checked all of them long ago. Once they start they can't stop until they either reach a tipping point of self preservation North Korea style, which is the more likely scenario, or they escalate further and further tightening their grip on the population to the point they screw it up entirely and a full scale revolution is ignited. One thing is certain: they can't go back: they broke so many laws that going back would mean prosecution for many of them.
Of course it is. States that overcame fascism put a lot of emphasis in detecting the early stages of fascism and how to stop it from take it over again in their educational system.
States that haven't had that issue before, on the other hand, have a population that is woefully naive to the dangers.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past." - Jean Paul Sartre.
Also, ICE has a bigger budget now than most of the world's militaries[1]. But let's not talk about that.
[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/immigration-ice-bill-trump-2093456