Last week Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the Trump-Camps on the border, where migrant children and others seeking refugee status are held without toothpaste, soap, (and in many cases) clean blankets, clean clothing and adequate food, in conditions that range from hot to frigid, Concentration Camps, the right-wing echo chamber had a field day. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez was lectured on her lack of knowledge about history, and everyone from Liz Cheney (seen above in Fox News’ side by side shot of the two Reps), to Polish legislators piled on AOC.
Liz Cheney had this to say:
"It's a total disregard to the facts, in particular about the Holocaust, but also you see the extent to which her colleagues and the people who are supposed to be leading the Democrats in the House - Speaker Pelosi, Steny Hoyer - won't stand up and criticize what she's saying and condemn those comments," the House Republican Caucus chairwoman said.
"I'm waiting for her fellow freshmen, I'm waiting for the leaders of her party to stand up and say they disagree because certainly, they ought to disagree. It was a shameful set of remarks."
Meanwhile U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN, said, among other things:
I think this is probably a young lady who should finish her education on what concentration camps were.
while speaking in a Fox News Radio interview. A Polish legislator even invited Rep. Ocasio-Cortez to tour camps in Poland. I won’t get into the Yad Vashem or the Jewish Community Relations Council’s condemnations, both to be respectful to those who have the deepest and most personal investment in the Holocaust and its memorial, and also to side-step the complex politics and cultural history informing their condemnations. I will just say other Jewish groups, and the last-living Nuremberg Prosecutor, have backed AOC’s comments.
To the surprise of few here, however, it is Liz Cheney and Marsha Blackburn who are wrong and whose comments show an amateurish level of understanding of the history and study of the Holocaust. While the two Republican Congresswomen are correct that in popular, vernacular English, the term concentration camp has become synonymous with Auschwitz and the Holocaust, both academically and in the original German there are key and important differences between Auschwitz and Concentration Camps. In German, Concentration camps were called Konzentrationslager , where as the Eastern camps, in Poland, such as Auschwitz II Birkenau, Belzec (where only 7 Sonderkammando Jews escape during the war, and only 1 came forward to testify about the camp’s existence, out of between 400,000-500,000 murdered there), Sobibor, and the infamous Treblinka, were called Vernichtungslager or Todeslager . Other than barebones crews of Jewish prisoners used to help keep things moving, Jewish arrivals to a Vernichtungslager were usually murdered within just a few hours. A Death Camp, or Extermination Camp, as the eastern camps are termed in academia, was designed by Germans for one thing, and that’s the fast and efficient slaughter of what the German state designated Lebensunwertes Leben, “lives of those unworthy of life.” The Nazi government distinguished between the extermination camps, and those camps, primarily in Germany, that were purely Concentration Camps (the infamous Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Thersienstadt where the poet Paul Celan was interned).
Concentration Camps were not designed for mass murder, though murder and death abounded in the camps, where as many as hundreds of thousands of people starved to death or died of diseases like typhus, cholera, typhoid fever and other sicknesses abundant in crowded, unsanitary conditions. However, murder was not the name of the game for concentration camps, the bulk of whom predated the Nazi’s Final Solution and where initially built to hold union organizers, socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and communist party members. Konzentrationslagers were primarily work camps, designed to work in much the same way as most of the United States prisons do, albeit it with vastly more inhumane conditions (prisoners were exposed to the elements, had little in the way of heating or clothing, little access to clean water, lacked food, and were often used in medical experimentation), though of course prisoners unfit for labor were frequently left to die or outright shipped to extermination camps to be killed.
This makes Sen. Blackburn’s comments especially ignorant, as, in their condescension to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, they are completely mistaken about the issue, both from a historians perspective, and from the primary sources of Nazi designations. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary also shines some light on the definition of concentration camp:
a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard—used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners.
The widespread internment of migrant children and asylum seeking refugees on our borders, in squalid, over-crowded positions and under armed guard, has met condemnation from numerous international organizations (including UN watchdogs) and human rights groups, as well as various activist groups within America. If such a spectacle were happening in Venezuela, with the government seizing people fleeing the country and holding them under such conditions, the U.S. and of course, Liz Cheney and Marsha Blackburn, would not hesitate to call them Concentration Camps. The Atlantic hit the nail on the head when it explained that the difference here is the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and my generation of leftists do not presume America’s innocence or use whitewashing language when addressing our countries questionable practices.
Every single one of us needs to stand up. Both to loudly proclaim we will not stand for the mistreatment, abuse and violation of any human being’s dignity and human rights, and that whether or not someone’s asylum application ends up being accepted, the applicant should be treated fairly and decently while in U.S. custody. Tell the grifter-filled, white nationalists populating the Trump Administration that we are listening, and we are watching, and we will fight them and their callousness and crassness.