When Donald Trump was called out in his first presidential debate for using language offensive to some, he replied that “there is too much political correctness” in this country. Well Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s description of the facilities along our border as “concentration camps” was certainly not politically correct.
That does not mean it was not without merit.
Yes, we could quibble about the fact that the term “concentration camp” had been used many times before its infamous use in the second world war, originally in the Boer War. We could point out, as some historians have done, that the generic term “concentration camp”, as a large collection of detainees held without conviction by a judicial proceeding together and away from the general population is by historical definition a concentration camp, and, strictly speaking, our detention facilities are therefore accurately called concentration camps.
But that would be semantics, and, like patriotism as been called, a refuge for scoundrels. Let us assume and allow that AOC called the facilities “concentration camps” intending to invoke the image, and the moral opprobrium of the Nazi “konzentrationslager”, the concentration camps.
It is conceivable that this choice of words could mean that she was unable intellectually or morally to discriminate between that which is happening on our border and that which finally came to pass in Nazi held territory, Auschwitz and Treblinka, vast systematic factories of death and torture. But anyone who has listened to AOC knows she is often brilliant, direct and courageous, and always purposeful, so perhaps she is making another point. Perhaps she is intentionally “calling us out” for being on a trajectory which leads no where good.
Origins and codification of antisemitism in Germany.
Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany and assumed power in January of 1933. The Nazis established the first concentration camps, starting with Dachau, later that year. However they were initially used for political prisoners, communists, social Democrat’s, critics of the regime. It was not until after 1938, Kristallnacht, that Dachau and other concentration camps started to be used for Jews.
The first official steps toward the systematic deprivation of basic rights to Jews had first codified as the Nuremberg Laws, which took effect in September of 1935. We are not as far into the Trump administration yet as was Germany into the administration of the Nazis when anti Jewish laws were first passed.
The idea of “extermination”, while it appears sporadically in Hitlers thoughts, does not become policy until 1941/1942. Prior to that, and as late as 1940, Hitler was still considering mass deportation of Europe’s Jews. There are some in our country not so shy, or politically correct, not to call for the same.
The first Extermination camps were started in 1941/1942, after the war was well under way, and after Hitler’s decision to kill Europe’s Jews. That decision, its planning and putting into practice was finalized at the end of 1942, and is well expressed in the film The Wannsee Conference”. In other words, those camps whose horrors we have rightfully come to consider the apogee of human evil, and with who nothing since can compare, did not begin until 9 years after Hitler came to power, more than the equivalence of two presidential terms.
When Hitler had been in power the same amount of time that Trump has, Jews were still legal citizens of Germany, and concentration camps were political prisons, not instruments, yet, of extermination.
The growing and increasingly inhumane collections of men, women and children we are constructing within our country now are also not intended as extermination facilities, and therefore cannot be compared to the final endpoint of the Nazi terror, the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka and the like. However, already upwards of 20 people are reported to have died in our overcrowded custody. (I can’t verify those figures personally, but I have not heard them denied.) If you just compare the time line, we have gone some distance toward competing with the third Reich regarding the systematic deprivation of human rights compared per unit time. We view that period, the Nazi period, now through the scope of its ultimate outcome. Perhaps we should apply that scope, where the trends could lead, when we look at our present.
Perhaps, when AOC says that we have built ‘concentration camps’, she is not saying that borders camps equal Auschwitz. Not saying that the trajectory has gone all the way to the level of an Auschwitz, which was built about 9 years after the Nazi administration began.
Perhaps she is observing that we seem to be starting on such a trajectory. It is, I think, a very fair question to raise. The current occupant of the oval office dehumanizes immigrants, calls them animals, he uses the vermin analogy of infestation. People are held in at best questionable conditions without trials, some of them die, and he still talks of the deportation of millions.
Vast numbers of people who are not criminals, many of whom are perfectly within their legal rights to seek asylum, are being forcibly detained in very questionable conditions. Their families are being separated, children taken from their mothers arms. They are not criminals. Those who are convicted criminals are kept in prisons, when they are convicted. These people are, in large measure, asylum seekers. The people our statue of liberty told us we were to welcome.
Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez is calling out the non-judicial collection (concentration) of large numbers of ethnically similar non – criminal families in conditions which no real American could possibly avoid being ashamed of. She is calling it by a name which is, although this is semantics, factual accurate. But she is using an image as a warning that we have started down a path which is disturbing. She finds it very disturbing. Disturbing enough to use rhetoric more inflammatory than some of us might prefer, but still, the facts are very disturbing.
Perhaps we should be applauding her courage, not denigrating her choice of words.
I also find what has happened in this country, what is happening in the name of our country, both rhetorically and actually, quite disturbing.
Don’t you?