I have a serious question.

[Stonepounder]

I'm no longer a spring chicken, even in my own mind. I'm leaning hard on 70 so, I've lived through a lot of history that is only something in books for the vast majority of you. I've lived through the Civil Rights Movement, the Days of Rage, Vietnam, Kent State, George Wallace, Martin Luther King, the JFK and Bobby Kennedy assassinations and so on.

Is it just for us oldsters that Trump Jr.'s reference to 'warming up the gas chamber' immediately takes me back to Nazi Germany, WWII, and the Holocaust? My father was a medic in WWII although he never saw action, so I am much closer to it than those who remember their grand parents being involved. Or is 'warming up the gas chamber' so instilled in the national psyche that we all see the crematoriums belching smoke, the sonderkommandos picking through the bodies for fillings in their teeth, and the sign saying in steel letters "Arbeit macht frei" over Auschwitz?

I ask this question in all seriousness and not meaning it as any form of snark. Has the image faded from our collective memory, so that a casual reference to 'the gas chamber' no longer causes an instinctive recoil? Is it the same as something like saying 'they would be firing up old sparky' or 'they would be getting the needle ready'? I just don't know.

Thanks for any and all responses.

[emulatorloo]

1. Yes holocaust is exactly what it evokes.

Add that to the anti-semistism thats been a thread throughout the campaign and in my mind it is extremely appalling

[emulatorloo]

3. Anti-Defamation League calls on Donald Trump Jr. to retract his “gas chamber” joke

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12512419651

So you are not alone in your thinking at all.

[Raine1967]

2. I am 49 and the the comment was exactly what you thought. It's reprehensible.

It's disgusting.

[misterhighwasted]

4. Here's Hillary's campaign response to that deplorable statement:

Hillary HQ Retweeted
Alana Abramson
2h
Alana Abramson? @aabramson
And....Hillary Clinton campaign weighs in on gas chamber comments

[PJMcK]

5. It's not just "us oldsters," Stonepounder

You know that Donald Trump's white supremacist supporters heard the same message you and I heard.

[Ms. Yertle]

6. I didn't think of that at all

I thought about capital punishment.

[jehop61]

7. This young man is another deplorable

I too remember much of what is merely history to many here. I can't imagine ANY politician making a joke about the tragedy in Germany during WWII. An immediate retraction is demanded. A spoiled man, given everything, working for nothing cannot be allowed to "joke" in this manner. And to think, his Dad is planning to keep his children close by and serve as "advisors" in his administration! Hateful

[Fast Walker 52]

8. Millions of people are rightly offended by it

Donald Jr is just a sick sick puppy.

[jberryhill]

9. My father participated in liberating a concentration camp, and I find the statement ambiguous

In context, normally one would say "they'd crucify us" or something to that effect. Of course that would also have odd connotations in this context.

The phrase "gas chamber", IMHO, most directly refers to small cubicles which were commonly used in the past in the US to conduct executions.

The large capacity facilities used at death camps, disguised as shower facilities, were large rooms. Yes, they are also accurately called "gas chambers", but it's not as if that phrase originated with them.

The "warming up" part is kind of odd, which, in combination with "gas chamber" might also call to mind the associated crematorium.

But I can't say with certainty that a Holocaust reference, as opposed to a generalized execution reference, was intended.