Letters We Wish We'd Written Dept. -- Concentration Camps

From today's Washington Post:

Call them concentration camps. The detention centers at the border are, by dictionary definition, concentration camps. Calling them so isn’t inflammatory; it is accurate.

I used to wonder, how on earth did the Holocaust happen? How did people stand by? How did people participate? I see now how easy it is. We all know about the concentration camps at the border, and yet we minimize and justify them at best, defend and praise them at worst.

The Nazis didn’t start with Auschwitz. They started with dehumanizing. Jews weren’t people. We were illegal. We stole jobs and businesses. We were dirty. We were rapists. We were immigrants who didn’t belong. Sound familiar?

We aren’t shooting, gassing, starving or overworking immigrants at the border. But we don’t give them soap or water, or a place to sleep that isn’t an overcrowded concrete room with the lights on all night. They don’t have adequate access to doctors or medicine. (Many people in Nazi concentration camps died from disease and overcrowding. Anne Frank and her sister died from typhus.)

And now justify sitting idly by, as we advance our concentration camps. We all like to think we would have spoken up; we would have attempted to stop the Nazis. But by sitting here, we prove we wouldn’t have. We would minimize and justify them at best, defend and praise them at worst.

Call them concentration camps. And end them. Or “never again” will mean nothing.

J.M. Van Pelt, Burke

We're living in that historical moment where horrors are being minimized and justified by some, and we need to realize that we're all involved in those horrors whether it suits us or not.