Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has come under fire after she tweeted on Tuesday that the detention camps where the Trump Administration keeps undocumented immigrants are actually “concentration camps”.
But first of all, concentration camps where not invented by Nazis. They have, in fact, been used by liberal democracies for decades. Even if they had been, why should comparisons to the Holocaust be taboo? When survivors and the Jewish community talk about the Shoah, they say “never again”, by which everyone around the world should be alert to anything that seems remotely like Nazi policies, not shun these comparisons. In fact, many experts, survivors and other people who have experienced detentions based on racial profiles have come out in support of AOC. Some people have demanded she apologize. Guess which people.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, was first to responded to AOC demanding that she learn from history, but coming from the daughter of such a controversial character, her comments don’t mean much. Let me level with you: most of the backlash against AOC doesn’t come from a genuine concern about a misuse of Holocaust memory. They are Republican crocodile tears attempting to diminish the credibility of a progressive political sensation. In other words, critics of AOC’s comparison, are either mindblowingly uneducated, world class hypocrites, or so deep in denial you almost feel sorry for exposing these camps for what they are: racist policies that dehumanize immigrants. You know it’s bad if Republicans’ main argument is “we may be racist but we’re not Auschwitz-racist”.
Rather than running away from controversy and confrontation by apologizing, Ocasio-Cortez has doubled down on her claims. Good. She has experts and scholars to back her up. Oh, and facts, too. AOC wasn’t initially making the claims herself, she was quoting and agreeing with this Esquire article, which in turn was quoting Andre Pitz, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. Pitz argues the United States is currently operating a system of said camps, even if it’s still far from matching the Nazi version of it, which she describes as the most extreme manifestation of the concentration camp system. In short, as Pitz explains, a concentration camp system is a “mass detention of civilians without trial.”
@cuillean5Pritz explains concentration camps don’t necessarily have to operate as death camps to call them as such, and that their purpose is to separate one group from another. And guess what? This isn’t the first time the US does this. During WWII, the US instituted internment camps for Japanese immigrants and Japanese-American citizens. What’s more outrageous is Trump plans to use these same camps for immigrant detainees. George Takei tweeted “I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in America. And yes, we are operating such camps again.”
ICE is currently detaining 52,000 undocumented migrants while 24 people have already died under federal custody. Families are being separated, children are being taken from their parents and put into cages.
The similarities are so evident even insult comic Jeff Ross, the quote un-quote Roastmaster, points them out. Recalling Anne Frank’s story in a mock roast with didactic purposes he did for Netflix, Ross says Anne was “dragged” to a “processing center across the border at Auschwitz”, separated from her parents and thrown in a cage. “Sound familiar?”, Ross poignantly asks.
Many of Shoah survivors’ descendants and even young people today either wonder what they would have done had they lived in the 1930’s and 40s’ or like to think they would have done anything and everything to stand up to the Nazis and stop the Holocaust from ever happening. Well, there’s no need to wonder. It’s happening right now, it’s happening in the United States, and it’s happening in large numbers. So, ask not what we would have done but what to do about this here and now?
If you can’t think of anything, being by becoming acquainted with this bill proposing to shut down all of these camps. It’s not impeaching Trump, but it’s a start.
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