FEMA Camps

[NikZeta302]

I always hear Alex Jones talking about FEMA making concentration camps. When ever I look it up on youtube all the CTers seem to be showing is some old railroad stations with barbwire fences, and surveillance cameras, so should we be freaking that someone is protecting there property.

[Totovader]

I always hear Alex Jones talking about FEMA making concentration camps. When ever I look it up on youtube all the CTers seem to be showing is some old railroad stations with barbwire fences, and surveillance cameras, so should we be freaking that someone is protecting there property.

If a bunch of freakazoids thinking I was a part of a big government plot to exterminate certain sectors of the population started snooping around my train station/warehouse/whatever I would certainly put up some fencing and install security cameras.

[dudalb]

All I can say if if FEMA runs it's concentration camps with same competence with which it handled Hurrican Katrina,escaping from one would be extremely easy.

[DGM]

What I would like to know is, of all the branches of government how did FEMA get assigned to death camps?

[dudalb]

This dates back to the 1990's. I remember a lot of the Conspiracy loons back in the 90's yelling about how Bill Clinton was going to have FEMA round up all gun owners and put them in concentration camps.
It's totally insane..but then the world of the CT is not a rational one.

[ElMondoHummus]

Yes. I cracked up on one of the big YouTube concentration camp videos; it's a train repair facility in Beech Grove, Indiana. An active repair facility. Part of a previous CT Forum thread here (http://forums.randi.org/archive/index.php/t-87662.html) burst that balloon.

[NYCEMT86]

I just found that youtube video you guys were talking about... "Electronic Turnstyles and prison bars" If these are signs of a Concentration Camp, does that mean my subway stop is a covert FEMA camp and do I still have pay to enter? :boggled:

[Arkan_Wolfshade]

The bestest part evar about the FEMA death camps is how they (the CTists) think that we (the shills) will be the ones to end up in the death camps. No, ya maroons, we'll be running the danged things.

[ElMondoHummus]

I just found that youtube video you guys were talking about... "Electronic Turnstyles and prison bars" If these are signs of a Concentration Camp, does that mean my subway stop is a covert FEMA camp and do I still have pay to enter? :boggled:

Naw. It means the penalty for jumpin' the turnsile is harsh. Real, real harsh.

:D

[NikZeta302]

What I would like to know is, of all the branches of government how did FEMA get assigned to death camps?

Yeah one wonders. I remember reading a Jack T Chick Tract where the UN/Vatican had a death camp for Born Agains and one of the UN troops had a moped with a guillotine slapped on the back of it. UN,FEMA and the Vatican can barely do there real jobs, one wonders at how they can run death camps.

[T.A.M.]

when the NWO takes control, I want my own FEMA camp, but I won't have anyone killed, I am just going to segregate the truthers from the rest, and laugh at them.

TAM;)

[damien pastaume]

This dates back to the 1990's.

The '80s would be closer - Rex 84 and all that.

"Rex 84, short for Readiness Exercise 1984, was a plan by the United States federal government to test their ability to detain large numbers of American citizens in case of massive civil unrest or national emergency. Exercises similar to Rex 84 happen periodically.[1] Plans for roundups of persons in the United States in times of crisis are constructed during periods of increased political repression such as the Palmer Raids and the McCarthy Era. For example, from 1967 to 1971 the FBI kept a list of persons to be rounded up as subversive, dubbed the "ADEX" list."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_84

North's (non) testimony here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug0IL7k3elQ

It's hardly unreasonable to suggest the Cheney/Bush regime having paranoid visions of massive civil unrest. Just look at their policies.

[dudalb]

And nothing happened during the Reagan Admnistration,right?
And I am no supporter of Bush and Cheney,but I would be careful tossing around the word "Paranoid". People who live in glass houses,etc.

[damien pastaume]

And nothing happened during the Reagan Admnistration,right?
And I am no supporter of Bush and Cheney,but I would be careful tossing around the word "Paranoid". People who live in glass houses,etc.

Mine's made of victorian brick, with a touch of 1990's pebbledash to the rear (must fix that soon).

I'm guessing your Reagan era statement meant something along the lines of 'whatever they did/didn't scheme, no one ended up being rounded up'?

The point is, regardless of CTs, secretive governments do have a history of being just as paranoid as the people who make paranoid claims about them.

[SDC]

The '80s would be closer - Rex 84 and all that.

"Rex 84, short for Readiness Exercise 1984, was a plan by the United States federal government to test their ability to detain large numbers of American citizens in case of massive civil unrest or national emergency. Exercises similar to Rex 84 happen periodically.[1] Plans for roundups of persons in the United States in times of crisis are constructed during periods of increased political repression such as the Palmer Raids and the McCarthy Era. For example, from 1967 to 1971 the FBI kept a list of persons to be rounded up as subversive, dubbed the "ADEX" list."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_84

North's (non) testimony here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug0IL7k3elQ

It's hardly unreasonable to suggest the Cheney/Bush regime having paranoid visions of massive civil unrest. Just look at their policies.

I'll add that not only were there no mass roundups in the McCarthy days, nor did the FBI do this in the late 1960s-early 70s. As for the Palmer raids at the end of WWI... I'll need to do a little research. While a number of people were deported, and some sent to jail, I don't know if "roundups" sensibly applies.

I'd say this comes under the heading of government agencies make all sorts of plans, including who foots the bill for the office Xmas party. Aren't militaries always producing plans and projects to invade one another's countries, most of which end up forgotten?

ETA: OK, your basic Wikipedia; about 10 thousand people were rounded up; they don't specify the numbers jailed or deported. Refers to it as the largest roundup in US history (and they should have added, before World War II). Well, again, whatever may have been discussed or whatever information gathered, nothing of the kind has happened since WW2, despite any red scares, Islamophobia, or any other fears. Which doesn't mean one shouldn't be vigilant against the likes of Palmer. On the other hand, these hints that the US was repeatedly on the brink of such roundups do not in fact encourage vigilance, instead leading to "boy who cried wolf" situations. The author of the quoted Wikipedia piece probably would disagree with me. So no doubt do others.

I'll add as well that some of the jailed leaders were released by the appeals process; and there were actual anarchist bombings in this period, including a bombing of Wall Street, I think in 1920, which was never solved; 38 killed and approx 400 wounded. No doubt someone will claim it was a false flag.

[Hokulele]

There are reasons I personally do not find this type of CT very funny, and I wish the CTer's making the "FEMA death camp" claim would grow up and learn a little history.

http://www.asianamericanmedia.org/jainternment/

[damien pastaume]

There are reasons I personally do not find this type of CT very funny, and I wish the CTer's making the "FEMA death camp" claim would grow up and learn a little history.

http://www.asianamericanmedia.org/jainternment/

I hadn't noticed anyone finding it 'funny'.

[DrewD]

Yeah one wonders. I remember reading a Jack T Chick Tract where the UN/Vatican had a death camp for Born Agains and one of the UN troops had a moped with a guillotine slapped on the back of it. UN,FEMA and the Vatican can barely do there real jobs, one wonders at how they can run death camps.

The reason that they can't do thier real jobs is because they have all of thier resources tied up in the death camps.

Or one could consider the more unlikely idea that they are not running a death camp, that they are an inefficient goverment agency. But what are the possiblies of that being true? :)

[ktesibios]

The roots of the "FEMA death camps" meme might go back to the Reagan adminsitration and some of the loonies who worked in gummint at that time, but the elaborate tales, of 107,000 white boxcars with built-in shackles, boxcars with guillotines smuggled in from China disguised as cargo containers and long lists of "death camp" locations- which are still circulating among the patrons of the Alcoa Haberdashery Shoppe- seem, AFAIK, to date to the early to mid '90s.

Many of these tales first circulated on USENET; when I did some looking into this stuff a few years ago I found posts dated 1995 on "patriot" (read militia) newsgroups trashing the "white boxcars" claims, which indicates that these tales were in circulation earlier than that.* Unfortunately, the ephemeral nature of 'net dialogue being what it is, the earliest posts pertaining to any of these tales that I can now find via Google Groups are from 1996.

The copyright date on that Chick tract would be interesting. The mo-ped with a guillotine (and we think some SUVs are top-heavy ;)) is probably lifted from the Chinese-made boxcar with guillotines claim.** The date of the tract would at least set a lower bound on the age of that story.

*Some sources trace the "107,000 white boxcars with built-in shackles" story to Phil Schneider, a well-known UFO loony who committed suicide in 1996.

**Unless Chick is familiar with the career of Victor Hugues (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Hugues), who trundled a portable guillotine brought from France around the island of Guadeloupe, chopping off the heads of suspected counterrevolutionaries.

[lordofwaffles]

I'm always curious as to the how and why certain beliefs become ingrained within our collective (and selective) consciousness.

Death camps are something I'm curious about, in terms of conspiracies. They strike me as terribly inconvenient, and too logistics heavy to be a practical means of population control. The Nazis seemed to use them more as a place to liquidate the unconvertible (those incompatible with their aims) and a threat to intimidate those of weaker spines into compliance. This would require more or less an established mainstream knowledge of said camps.

Then again that's just conjecture. The other use of a camp would be to control a dangerous collection of people, such as the wrongly accused and detained Japanese-American internees of the Second World War, and some of the raids and arrests associated with the Socialist opposition to the First World War. These only happened with the knowledge, and consent (right or wrong) of the populace. No secret hole that thousands of people suddenly poofed into.

My theory is that death camps are something undeniably bad and evil, and "obvious," thus making them appealing to fringe groups for inclusion into their theories. It's a threat they can see coming, with tangible dangers and even an established geographic position. This must be comforting in a "world" in which most other things (NWO hover mind control pods with cloaking devices, behind the door wheelings and dealings etc) are less than clear or harder to track.

But as always that's just what I think.

[Plantfoam]

I got a kick out of watching the video of the "death camp" in Indiana. The narrator (Sophia?) talks about all of the features as if they are obviously designed for something else.

Yeah, because I'm sure that those big side mounted HVAC units are ideal for incinerating people.

Actually, there's a big place near me that looks like a death camp....turnstyles, barbed wire, and cameras everywhere. It's a place called General Motors. Those poor people trapped inside subsist only on a $35 an hour wage.

[buka001]

FEMA are so slow in responding to anything, they are probably concentration camps intended for Japanese and German P.O.W's from WW2.

[Disbelief]

The point is, regardless of CTs, secretive governments do have a history of being just as paranoid as the people who make paranoid claims about them.

You can't be talking about the Bush administration then. They are so bad at keeping secrets that people make up other "supposed" secrets of theirs. For people who hold Dubya and his people in such low regard, truthers give them an awful lot of credit.

By the way, I remember when Clinton was just about finished with his second term. I started hearing people talking about how he was going to cause some kind of crisis so he could declare martial law and stay president. Can't remember if camps were involved or not.

[SpaceMonkeyZero]

They never seem to have any updated pictures of these "FEMA Death Camps". It's always video from the early 90s, or even late 80s. Even though they "know" where they are, they have yet to take new updated pictures of these so-called camps...

Then there's the whole fact that they're not camps to begin with.

Maybe the fact that there was only 100 Truthers out and about on 9/11 means they're teeming and overflowing with 84% of the country's population.

Truthers are pathetic with their paranoid ramblings.

[G-K-4]

A lot of the still-current round of "FEMA concentration camp" lore does in fact begin in 1984. (How appropriate.)

There actually was a military "readiness exercise" that year, which included a component of simulated civil unrest. But it was all a drill, not the beginning of any real internment drive. According to Chip Berlet, a lefty researcher of the right, the truth of the matter was exaggerated by a far-right, anti-Jewish, conspiracist newspaper called The Spotlight.
"The April 23, 1984 Spotlight article ran with a banner headline "Reagan Orders Concentration Camps." The article, true to form, took a problematic swipe at the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith along with reporting the facts of the story. The Harrer article was based primarily on two unnamed government sources, and follow-up confirmations. Mainstream reporters pursued the allegations through interviews and Freedom of Information Act requests, and ultimately the Harrer Spotlight article proved to be a substantially accurate account of the readiness exercise, although Spotlight did underplay the fact that this was a scenario and drill, not an actual order to round up dissidents."
http://www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/rwooz9-14.html
And by the way, if any of you who know about these kinds of exercises from that era, I have a question. Were they just simulations on computer screens and phonecalls and such? Or were there any "real" activities like running around or moving real equipment? (If the former, that gives the conspiracists even less to crow about.) I picture more tabletop RPG than LARP here.

In a 1990 issue of the Covert Action Information Bulletin, Diana Reynolds writes more details about the facts, the exaggeration, and the historical background of REX-84. (And since it comes from a Left source, I expect a lot of you won't like this article. It does give some of the background of Federal government preparation for mass arrests and detention of political opponents. But the article also makes it clear that REX-84 was not the implementation of any actual internment.)
http://www.publiceye.org/liberty/fema/Fema_0.html

More recently, the concentration camp meme got more traction, but only because people have (willfully?) misunderstood the report. In early 2006, we learned that Kellogg Brown and Root had received a contingency contract for the construction of new ICE detention facilities should the government want them. Note that this was a contingency contract.
http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7B62C8724D%2DAE8A%2D4B5C%2D94C7%2 D70171315C0A0%7D&dist=SignInArchive&param=archive&siteid=mktw&dateid=38741%2E5136277662%2D858254656

But, of course lots of folks concluded that this meant they were already being built. That's not to say this isn't a problem, and that there is no threat to citizens who "look like illegal immigrants" or to political dissidents in the U.S. But in this particular case, a lot of people who should know better are jumping to unwarranted conclusions.

[Plantfoam]

This is almost as disturbing as the government attempt to punch holes in the atmosphere with fake moon rockets and the HAARP cannon.