Merriam- Webster dictionary:
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.
***
Nearly a week ago
in a tweet,
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) described the places where the Trump regime is warehousing asylum- seeking families as "concentration camps." Since then, there's been a lot of reaction and counter- reaction to the characterization. The perpetually outraged right took great umbrage at the use of the term (as well as the
usual "both sides" jackasses), being the defenders that they are of a morally superior "American exceptionalism." Of course, these are the
absolute last people on earth who have a claim to speak for "American values," something the new generation of Millennial progressives is keenly aware of, a higher proportion of whom are people of color. They and their families have experienced the gap more starkly than most between the moralistic "American exceptionalism" rhetoric and the American reality.
Peter Beinart makes the point that Ocasio-Cortez's comment points to this reframing of "exceptionalism" in light of
the Trump regime's America's treatment of families on the border:
Ocasio-Cortez’s comment about concentration camps is only the latest
example of this broad challenge to American exceptionalism. She didn’t
claim that Trump’s detention centers are the equivalent of Auschwitz.
But she denied that America is a separate moral category, so inherently
different from the world’s worst regimes that it requires a separate
language. On Tuesday night she retweeted the actor George Takei, who wrote,
“I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in
America.” This was another act of linguistic transgression. When
remembering the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II,
Americans have generally employed the term internment camps—largely, the historian Roger Daniels has argued, to create a clear separation between America’s misdeeds and those of its hated foes.
Masha Gessen makes a similar point:
... It is not an argument about language. Ocasio-Cortez and her opponents agree that the term “concentration camp” refers to something so horrible as to be unimaginable. (For this reason, mounting a defense of Ocasio-Cortez’s position by explaining that not all concentration camps were death camps misses the point.) It is the choice between thinking that whatever is happening in reality is, by definition, acceptable, and thinking that some actual events in our current reality are fundamentally incompatible with our concept of ourselves—not just as Americans but as human beings—and therefore unimaginable. The latter position is immeasurably more difficult to hold—not so much because it is contentious and politically risky, as attacks on Ocasio-Cortez continue to demonstrate, but because it is cognitively strenuous. It makes one’s brain implode. It will always be a minority position.
If your image of America today is that we're not creating
concentration camps,
how does this fit that image:
A prematurely born infant and her 17-year-old mother spent seven days being almost entirely neglected in Border Patrol custody, according to lawyers who visited an immigrant processing station in McAllen, Texas, on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The baby, barely a month old, was wrapped in a dirty towel, wore a soiled onesie and looked listless, said one of the lawyers, Hope Frye. The mother was in a wheelchair due to complications from her emergency C-section and had barely slept ― the pain made it too uncomfortable for her to lie down and she was afraid of dropping her baby, the immigration and human rights attorney said.
How about this:
Four toddlers were so severely ill and neglected at a U.S. Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, that lawyers forced the government to hospitalize them last week.
The children, all under age 3 with teenage mothers or guardians, were feverish, coughing, vomiting and had diarrhea, immigration attorneys told HuffPost on Friday. Some of the toddlers and infants were refusing to eat or drink. One 2-year-old’s eyes were rolled back in her head, and she was “completely unresponsive” and limp, according to Toby Gialluca, a Florida-based attorney.
How about this:
A 2-year-old boy locked in detention wants to be held all the time. A few girls, ages 10 to 15, say they’ve been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler who was handed to them by a guard days ago. Lawyers warn that kids are taking care of kids, and there’s inadequate food, water and sanitation for the 250 infants, children and teens at the Border Patrol station.
The bleak portrait emerged Thursday after a legal team interviewed 60 children at the facility near El Paso that has become the latest place where attorneys say young migrants are describing neglect and mistreatment at the hands of the U.S. government.
"... [A]t the hands of the U.S. government." Those are the children, who are the most helpless of all. That's us government- by- the- people citizens. That's the banality of evil. That's America. That's reality, 2019.
If you're as sickened by this as we are, please contact your
Senators and your
Representative and demand that the government immediately provide humanitarian aid -- including medical assistance -- to these victims of our exceptionalism. Because, this is cruelty being used as a deterrent to migration. It's cruelty as policy, and it's being done in your name and ours.
BONUS: But of course.
BONUS II: If only...
