Former President Donald Trump is expected to surrender himself to the Fulton County jail at the end of next week – on Thursday or Friday, a senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the surrender told CNN.

  • FreeLikeGNU@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think American citizens of Japanese descent would disagree with your good old days assessment of how Americans were treated by their own government during WW2. They certainly had their liberty and livelihoods taken from them. Furthermore people of color in general were still under the thumb of institutionalized racism that continues to this day. Do you believe they were better off back then too?

    • flossdaily@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You’re talking about oppression of minorities, and no one is going to argue that that was unconscionable. But I’m referring to the character if America as a whole. No part of our population was untouched by the darkness of the Bush administration.

      • Phlogiston@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I think FreeLikeGNU has a point here… the happier America as described has generally only been a reality for a subset of the population. Can we really suggest that is/was the ‘character [of] America’ as a whole?

        The whole “MAGA” thing feels related to this point. Its like a large group of American’s feel the oppression, fear and lack of optimism and, in their anger and frustration, have embraced a view that what made America great was the division and exploitation rather than the optimism.

        I’d argue causality — that they were purposefully led to that view by exploitative fuckwad Republican leadership that cared about Party more than the country and who used the fear, and exploited the crisis, to gain and maintain power and now don’t want to give it up. But we don’t really need to understand why or who led that change to also step back and be sad that the change happened.

      • FreeLikeGNU@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Pretty sure you said:

        Or: hey, we can label ANYONE we want as “ENEMY COMBATANTS” and they will have NO RIGHTS and we will torture them.

        You don’t think sending an entire ethnic group who are also American citizens to internment camps in the dessert forcing them to abandon their homes, work, friends, businesses is what you just described?

        • flossdaily@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          That’s slightly different. (Very slightly). Those American citizens actually did have the right to fight their incarceration in court.

          … It just so happens that the court absolutely shit the bed in a 6-3 ruling about their constitutionality

          On the other hand, internment camps were effectively ended by the the supreme Court the next year.

          Contrast that with “enemy combatants” who had NO ACCESS TO THE CIVILIAN COURT SYSTEM.

          • FreeLikeGNU@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I don’t see how “slightly different” could support the argument that things were effectively better at the time citizens were put into camps. The legal system supported a racist policy by “6-3 ruling about their constitutionality”. Furthermore:

            internment camps were effectively ended by the the supreme Court the next year.

            No. It was over two years before the order was suspended and the last of the camps shut down. The order was not officially terminated until 1976!

            Over the spring of 1942, General John L. DeWitt issued Western Defense Command orders for Japanese Americans to present themselves for removal. In December 1944, President Roosevelt suspended Executive Order 9066, forced to do so by the Supreme Court decision Ex parte Endo. Detainees were released, often to resettlement facilities and temporary housing, and the camps were shut down by 1946.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066