If you don’t want Auschwitz, don’t stand by while they build Dachau
Many people have reacted to Liz Cheney’s “internment camps for migrants are not the Holocaust, learn some history” tweet.
https://twitter.com/KatzOnEarth/status/1141028078468128770
Enuf w/ “ICE camps are concentration camps but they’re not gassing people” or “we should take action before things get worse.”
Concentration camps aren’t good enough?? Even if Auschwitz was never built the Warsaw Ghetto wasn’t reason enough to tear down the Third Reich??
— Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (@TheRaDR) June 18, 2019
GOP seems to be embracing the "it's not as bad as Auschwitz" defense for their concentration camps on the border. That's a bad defense.
— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) June 18, 2019
https://twitter.com/AdamSerwer/status/1141010617257668608
And in the “massively missing the point” category, step up Dinesh D’Souza.
Nazi concentrarion camps were forced labor camps. They were not for illegal immigrants but rather for war captives, internal dissidents and Jews. Some like Auschwitz had extermination facilities so they also functioned as death camps. So where is the valid analogy here? https://t.co/vrjFNavyWy
— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) June 18, 2019
Nazi concentration camps weren’t for “illegal immigrants” because oddly enough Germany wasn’t a hugely popular destination for immigrants during the Third Reich. They were for despised people the Nazi regime wanted to control and, with any luck, destroy. Putting migrants and asylum seekers in camps is not radically different from putting dissidents and Jews…and gays and gypsies and the disabled in camps. The whole idea fits in the category Putting Despised People in Camps. It’s not a good look. We did it with the Japanese internments, we’re pretty much doing it now with mass incarceration, and putting migrants and asylum seekers in camps will be the same bad look and the same horrendous disgraceful brutal way of carrying on. Don’t bother trying to defend it.
D’Souza seems to be saying that if X and Y are not identical, you can’t say that X is like Y.
Which is dumb.
Dinesh is both an idiot, and a convicted felon.
None of Trump’s pardons truly count.
What else would one call a camp which takes a population of people with a common denominator – be it nationality, race, religion – against their will and without convicting them of a crime, and concentrates them in one enclosed area? That is, after all, why they are called concentration camps.
Exactly.
I think a lot of people assume the term is specific to the Nazis…I know I used to until I learned otherwise. But, of course, the Nazis were simply using an existing technology of genocide-adjacent control. Churchill was in on it decades before Hitler was. (Not really fair, Churchill didn’t have that kind of power during the Boer War, but he was at least familiar with them as a tool of British colonial power.)