Yes, They Are Concentration Camps
The language matters. “Never again” is well past due.
--
NY-14 Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did this week what so many of her colleagues have long refused to for fear of controversy: boldly and unapologetically used the term “concentration camps” to refer to the detention system currently being run at the US border with Mexico.
Even this time last year, when news of the Trump administration’s inhumane family separation and child detention policy broke to mass outcry, even then this terminology was not yet part of the national conversation. But it is officially part of the conversation now, and any remaining illusions the right wing may have had of a moral high ground is slipping from their fingertips.
This is hardly a new thought pulled from the ether. Ocasio-Cortez merely brought onto the mainstream political stage what experts have already confirmed. In fact her June 18th tweet, which has already earned so much backlash from Republicans in the short time that it has been up, was little more than an addendum to a link, leading to the article that discusses these very findings in detail.
“We have what I would call a concentration camp system, and the definition of that in my book is, mass detention of civilians without trial.” — Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps
Concentration camps are perhaps more broadly-defined than Ocasio-Cortez’s detractors (among them Representative Liz Cheney) realize or would care to admit. They are not necessarily synonymous with the death camps that haunt 20th century history, but their core purpose, to isolate and detain specific “undesirable” populations, stripping them of freedoms, dignities, and standards of living, stems from the same root. Concentration camps are already a part of the US’s own history, having been the culmination of the…
