It’s an old saw that when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. It’s apparently an old saw that nutjob “Christian Libertarian” badhair-blogger Vox Day never learned.
You may recall his op-ed piece on Worldnet the other day, which argued about the feasibility of rounding up illegal aliens and deporting them with reference to the ease the Nazis had in rounding up and killing them:
Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens. . .
Today, when visiting the General’s fine weblog, I learned that WorldNet had edited out the reference to the Nazis “ridding themselves” of 6 million unwanted Jews in just 4 years. But I also learned that Vox Day didn’t see anything necessarily wrong with turning to the Nazis for some good old how-to:
So, there are no lessons to be learned from the National Socialists?
He then defends his use of the gruesome analogy of the Germans “ridding themselves” of 6 million Jews to the US deporting millions of aliens:
Yes, because getting rid of six million people is a logistical task rather similar to getting rid of 12 million people. Whether you kill them at the end or buy them all haciendas complete with margarita bars, the task is largely the same.
Which isn’t true at all, since finding 12 million people haciendas would itself be an enormously complicated logistical task. After empty banter about his supposed superior knowledge of history, which is ironic precisely because the Nazis found the logistical task of expatriating Jews quite difficult, and the task of annihilating them far easier in comparison. In fact, my primary criticism of his use of the analogy, apart from the abhorrent racism apparent in the manner it was phrased, was that it was ignorant.
Peppering Vox’s several posts, he calls his critics “morons,” “illiterates,” and “cretins” for failing to acknowledge the elegance of his holocaust-t0-illegals analogy, his supposed knowledge of German history:
I compared it [deporting Messkins] to what the National Socialists did between December 1941 and June 1945. Perhaps you’ve never heard of concentration camps - really death camps - such as Dachau and Auschwitz. Before they killed the Jews, the National Socialists had to identify them and transport them. The point, as seems to have escaped you and many other morons, is that it is quite clearly possible to enact deportations on the scale required.
Ironically, this once again demonstrates the writer’s ignorance. Yes, the Nazi’s identified and transported their victims in order to implement the Final Solution, but the “deportations” employed were not deportations in the common sense, the were “deportations” from one German controlled territory to another, rather than sovereign nations. The largest of the death camps were located in occupied Poland. The General Government of Poland was not a Polish goverment at all, it was purely a German administrative organization responsible for the occupation of Poland, and facilitating the murder of millions of its people. And they built the death camps where they did largely because of their proximity to the largest Jewish populations.
Apart from the more sinister implications of Vox using reference to the Holocaust to assess the feasibility of mass deportation of illegals, Vox is an ignorant buffoon precisely because the deportation the Right wants is to other countries, while the the “deportations” the Nazis executed in 1941-1945 as a preliminary to mass execution were merely transportation within administrative units of the same country.
Moreover, the logistical task facing the Nazis involved transporting people from contiguous countries comparatively short distances over ground routes. Although most bigots see a brown person and think “Mexican,” there are large numbers of illegal immigrants from many different countries. The Nazis stuffed their transportees in box cars; the United States would likely have to charter aircraft to deport large numbers over much greater differences. The very fact of analogizing the “logistics” inherent in transporting Jews to their death camps and aliens to other countries ignores the brutality of the often lethal conditions under which the Nazis victims were moved from placed to place.
In short, it was a stupid analogy, and one which denies the brutality of mass relocations by the Nazis.
So, to sum up, Vox Day: 1) still doesn’t see anything amiss in using Nazi exemplars on the ease of “ridding” oneself of unwanted populations; 2) is arrogant beyond any realistic self-perception; and 3) an ignorant ass.
