We're already past the beginning of the Nazi/Holocaust, we're already several stages in.

[Ms. Toad]

81. If we ignore the similarities to the past, we are doomed to repeat it.

The "concentration camp" and "holocaust" language and comparisons are clearly intended to make a direct comparison to the millions and millions murdered by the Nazis. But this comparison is not accurate. It's not correct. It's demonstrably false.

Although this thread is my first comment on the matter, the comparison I am making is not to the millions murdered - it is to the actions of the murderers. (I can't speak for the intent of others in comparing Trump to Hitler.) Our current leaders are calling on the same sentiments in their followers that Hitler called on - race purity/superiority of white cis-males. They are increasingly using tactics that Hitler used: Purging long time leaders and replacing them with incompetent loyalists; speaking of immigrants and trans people as non-human; passing laws which criminalize/strip citizenship from those they consider undesirables; rounding up dumping (or threatening to dump) those who are different in concentration camps - either in the United States or by deportation to concentration camps in other countries like El Salvador and South Sudan.

My comments about Auschwitz, specifically, were a response to your insistence that concentration camps aren't concentration camps unless they include death chambers, crematories, and mass graves. I recently watched a documentary which included the information that Auschwitz (Auschwitz I, not the Auschwitz complex which later developed) was not primarily a death camp. That was new to me, since the name Auschwitz immediately brings to mind the millions who died in Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II). In response to your post about the inherent nature of concentration camps and my recollection from the documentary, I went to fact-check my memory. The information I included in my post was from https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/auschwitz. It wasn't an attempt to minimize the horror which Jews experienced at the hands of Hitler. It was a reminder that, even if it was his ultimate plan from the beginning, Hitler didn't start with mass murder.

Concentration camps - even when not designed primarily to kill - were an early tool used by Hitler. And they are now a tool being used by Trump. If we insist that Trump's use of concentration camps (both in other countries and those being built in Florida) - currently for the purpose concentrating "undesirables" is nothing like what Hitler was doing, we risk being in denial. That denial is part of what allowed Hitler's mass murder to proceed unchecked.

I hope we won't go farther down that path, but insisting that Trump (and even more, the people responsible for feeding the worst of his impulses) is nothing like Hitler supports the lie that it can never happen here. It can, and if we don't wake up and stop it, it will.