Comment by somenameforme
21 days ago
You're engaging in banal semantics, in lieu of any form of logical or meaningful debate. When I say "citizen" obviously I am referring to the contemporary usage where you'd call somebody who is of a country - a citizen of that country. In the past this was not the case in many places where people could be legally within their own county, yet not considered civilians. An example you may be more familiar with is slaves in America.
These banal semantics are the legalistic excuses used by genocidal regimes to justify the unjustifiable and to assuade the conscience of collaborators.
A close mirror of what is happening in this thread, if you will.
Deporting illegal aliens as literally every single country in existence does has no need of justification. You're the one that needs to justify claims of deporting people, for free, back to their home country as being an 'unjustifiable genocide', but in the end that's fundamentally illogical which leaves you with hyperbole, misrepresentation, and of course these sort of semantic games.
Run me the numbers on how many people sent to el salvadore were illegal salvadoreans.
> which leaves you with hyperbole, misrepresentation, and of course these sort of semantic games.
> They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’
> "And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic.
[...]
> 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 Thought They Were Free - The Germans, 1933-45; Milton Mayer
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