Well said, sir.
They’re based entirely on scoring political points and avoiding a serious debate about terrible policies — which have led to gross abuses of human rights — that the Republicans making those arguments actually continue to support.
Yep… to the GOP everything the Democrats say must be twisted to hang around their necks.
I guess when we have a President Biden, this will magically stop </snark>
Thank you for a lucid and genuinely compelling piece.
Good article. I don’t care what these horrible places are called, but the stronger language gets peoples attention. These places should not exist, they are completely inhumane and everyone in charge of them including higher ups that have never been inside should have to be a resident to know what it’s like. We have learned nothing from history and must always have “lesser” human beings to be scapegoats.
And, I don’t buy the argument for people that work there are just trying to do their job and feed their families. No conscience, no moral society.
I just saw a CBS Morning News segment about conditions in the camps.
Would we have seen this segment, and the increased media attention in the last few days, without AOC’s tweet and the use of the words ‘concentration camps’?
One slam after another since tRump has been in office and events are at the top of the page for a couple days at most until the next outrageous event goes to the top. We can’t keep up and all of these would be immigrants to the US fell off the main page for a lot of us. I’m glad AOC brought it up and now it’s back at the top.
Something for all of us to think about. If AOC hadn’t used the term “concentration camp” in reference to Trump’s detention facilities, would we be talking about them?
Words have the power to focus our attention on a problem. They also have power to deflect our attention. “Detention facilities” deflects our attention. "Concentration camps " or even “camps” draws our attention.
AOC has done the men, women and children who are being brutally held at the border a favor by drawing our attention back to their suffering.
It may be beside the point, but it is on the path that leads to the point. If we cannot accept this characterization, which has clear parallels even if there are also differences (at least for now), we cannot move further down the path to reach the point.
Every year, I watch students grapple with a passage in David Shipler’s 1986 book “Arab and Jew” in which a Palestinian prisoner at the Ansar prison camp, built by Israelis in Southern Lebanon, tells a Holocaust survivor that “Ansar is Auschwitz.”
That is a good teacher.
Kudos.
Good article.
These are, by definition, concentration camps. The U.S. is currently operating concentration camps, and they’re growing. And it’s now known that conditions within them are inhumane, with an increasing amount of the general public becoming aware of it. We need to keep this in the larger public conscience because the only difference between what’s going on at our border and Auschwitz is the scale of it and at one point in their timeline we’re in. Nazi concentration camps didn’t just start out as murder factories from the get-go. I’m not saying that the U.S. concentration camps will eventually evolve into full-blown extermination camps, but we should treat them as if they could. I haven’t seen anything yet out of Trump, his administration, or the people who currently support them to think that they wouldn’t be ok with it if they did. That probably sounds hyperbolic, but this is some scary shit we’re seeing.
Nailed it!
…keep saying to myself about this Confederate Nazi American bad faith in this- and many others in our current moment “Hitler was Hitler before he became Hitler.
And keep repeating Masha Gessen who commented on this time of Trump; ‘Don’t have a failure of imagination’
Sorry kids, but even Chief Justice Roberts called Manzanar a “concentration camp”
https://mises.org/power-market/us-supreme-court-condemns-fdrs-concentration-camps.
AOC did not call them “death camps” or “extermination centers”. There were plenty of Nazi CCs where prisoners were not gassed. Are we going to get all semantic about those? If Jews want exclusive access to the term they should trademark it, but conditions where children are separated from parents and not allowed to bathe for weeks at a time-- DOJ is arguing that soap, toothbrushes and the fundamental toiletries needn’t e provided!-- and 24 [last count] people have already died are close enough for me.
“I’m a Jewish historian. Yes, we should call border detention centers “concentration camps.”
It isn’t just accurate. It’s necessary.”
By Anna Lind-Guzik Jun 20, 2019
“This week, conservatives weaponized Jewish suffering to divert discussion from the massive human rights abuses occurring at our border.”
This, exactly.
Not calling them concentration camps will mean we’ve learned nothing from what victims and survivors of the holocaust went through. It’s telling them we’d allow it to happen again.
In other words, genocide is not the defining characteristic of a concentration camp. Detaining large groups of people for political reasons or based on ethnicity is. It just happens that Nazi Germany’s camps are the ones generally taught in school, so that becomes the baseline for most people.
In response to Chris Hayes’ tweet that he understood “.…why many people are, in good faith, uncomfortable with its application for Godwin’s Law purposes among others…”, Mike Godwin himself responded:
Chris, I think they're concentration camps. Keep in mind that one of their functions *by design* is to punish those individuals and families who are detained. So even the "charged" term is appropriate.
— Mike Godwin (@sfmnemonic) June 18, 2019
Yes, I’m glad he brought up the “punishment” aspect and while I know Twitter is full of ransoms from who knows where, you see an almost glee there and from Fox News types that the immigrants are being punished. Lots of horrible comments about what terrible parents they are to justify torturing children or how it’s a deterrent.
“Concentration camps” weren’t invented by the Nazis, and was first used as a term during the Boer War in the early 1900s, when the British interned 100k+ Boer women and children. They weren’t “death camps”, and the fact that 30% of the interned civilians died was just incidental to (or perhaps an added bonus of) their purpose of punishing and demoralizing the Boer population.