[fit2rule]

Great Barrier Reef. Concentration camps. Awful pollution stats. Heinous censorship laws. Rotten politics. Racism.

There are many things to change about Australia. Sunny dispositions are one thing; true grit to make the effort to change things, something else ..

[ericmay]

This is the first I’m hearing about concentration camps in Australia. Could you elaborate? When I think concentration camps I’m thinking about what’s going on in China - what is going on in Australia?

[fit2rule]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_immigration_detenti...

See also:

https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/our-detention-centres-are-int...

[ericmay]

Those aren't concentration camps. You might be able to argue on a technical definition that they are, but that's not how the term is used in everyday language.

I'm kind of getting annoyed by everyone throwing around the term concentration camp. It's like when we were calling everyone a Nazi.

Concentration camps are what's going on in China. People in their own country are being rounded up, murdered, raped, harvested, forced to work, and other horrific things because of their religious beliefs, nationality, or political beliefs.

When someone gets on a boat and tries to immigrate to Australia or any other country without the proper paperwork and then they are held in a center until the government figures out what to do with them (i.e. not harvesting their fucking organs) that is absolutely not a concentration camp.

When you try and create this false equivalency between a real concentration camp and a detention center, you devalue what a concentration camp is, and the terrible experiences of the victims of the holocaust. When people think concentration camp, they are horrified. When you call these detention centers concentration camps, they start forgetting what a concentration camp actually is, and start associating it with these detention centers. It actually enables white supremacists; what great gift you're giving them when they can gaslight us into thinking that Jews were just held at these detention centers and not these horrific concentration camps.

That's not ok. These aren't concentration camps. It's not even close to the same thing, and be propagating this idea that they are, you devalue past experiences, lessen the horrors that people are currently experiencing, and generally make the world a worse place to live.

[fit2rule]

Well, you have a right to disagree, but there is absolutely no reason for these camps to be called anything other than concentration camps, since their purpose is to concentrate refugees off-shore in order to deny legal access to them, and to ensure international laws on the subject of refugees do not apply.

You may not like it, but given Australia's history for inspiring tyranny, these concentration camps are a heinous thing for the Australian people to be supporting - in any way.

I live within spitting distance of your 'real' concentration camps - Mauthausen - and I have worked with refugees from the Wests' illegal wars for over a decade now.

I'm very much afraid that calling the Australian camps 'dention centres' is a propaganda effort by the Australian government to ensure its own people have no responsibility for what happens in them. If these camps were on the mainland, Australian civic society would have oversight - and this is a can of worms for which Australians, particularly its war-monger classes, are ill-prepared.

[ericmay]

It's ok to be critical of how Australia is handling people trying to cross into their country without going through the proper process. I don't think it's ok, at all, to call these detention centers "concentration camps" given what's currently going on in the world and what has happened in the past. It's simply not ok. That you live next to Mauthausen and you still think it's ok is baffling to me.

I've gone to places like the Holocaust Museum in the United States and witnessed the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis, people being executed, starved to death, gassed, forced into slavery (many of which currently going on with China's new Holocaust of Muslims) and I simply don't see those same activities being systematically conducted by the Australian (or any western) government. It's just not even remotely the same and I don't know how you can justify coming to that conclusion.

Even if you thought that these governments were doing much worse than what may be in view of the public, I'm bewildered as to why you would think that intentionally equating concentration camps (Nazis and Chinese) with detention centers is in any way helpful. Do you think when the Nazis rounded up Jews they gave them medical care and food and water?

Maybe you should revisit Mauthausen and get a more proper perspective. To me it seems that your work has clouded your judgement.

[petre]

Read this then:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/worl...

Sorry about the amp link. NYT paywall bypass.

[fit2rule]

Australia's Mauthausen: Rottnest Island. A place of vomiting teenagers and little else.

Austrias Mauthausen: a real memorial to the victims, out in the open. (Occasional vomiting teenager notwithstanding.)

Australians hide their crimes against humanity in places nobody reasonable will ever visit, because they don't want to know about Australias crimes against humanity.

The Austrian people maintain Mauthausen, because they never want to forget the atrocities.

The history of The Australian State is rife with injustices and crimes against humanity. The Australian Genocide is a real thing.

[petre]

They're not in Australia but offshore in Nauru and other islands.

https://g.co/kgs/Ju5EzM