Camps

This week Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that our federal administration is putting people into concentration camps on our southern border, “where they are being brutalized with inhuman conditions and dying.”

House GOP Conference Chair Liz Cheney and other Republican lawmakers objected to her use of the term “concentration camps”, arguing that this term should be reserved for the Nazi death camps of WWII.

So I looked it all up, to find out what the real history was.

It turns out that the Nazis created about 20,000 concentration camps, as well as six death camps. In the concentration camps, prisoners were used as slave labor.

This sort of reminded me of the American internment camps for our own citizens in WWII. Many thousands of Americans, mostly United States citizens who had been born in the U.S. and had never lived anywhere else, were forcibly taken from their homes and thrown into camps. In some of those camps the prisoners were used as slave labor.

Basically, you were thrown into one of those American camps if you were an American citizen who was ethnically German or Italian. Your accomplishments or credentials as an individual didn’t matter. If your family roots happened to be German or Italian, you were out of luck.

Even if you had spent your entire life in the U.S., everyone knew that someone from a German or Italian American family could not possibly be a real American. Your house and property were conficated and and your entire family — men, women and children — were thrown into a prison camp for the duration of the war. To add to the fun, after the war ended you didn’t ever get your house or property back (in case you were wondering).

In his internal government communications, president Roosevelt referred to these American camps as “concentration camps”, and they did indeed exactly fit the current dictionary definition of “concentration camps” — as opposed to “death camps”, a term generally reserved for Auschwitz, Dauchau, and the four other places where the Nazis shipped large numbers of people specifically to be murdered.

And it turns out that the Americans who suffered through our own version of that experience much prefer the term “concentration camp” to describe what they and their families went through. Our government, understandably, prefers the gentler sounding term “internment camps”.

Speaking of terminology, in Liz Cheney’s objection to AOC’s use of the term “concentration camps”, she said that the people in the Nazi camps were “exterminated”.

As it happens, quite a few of my relatives in my grandparents’ generation were murdered in those Nazi camps, and I feel uncomfortable with Cheney calling what was done to them “extermination”. We are not cockroaches.

So yes, we Americans are once again keeping lots and lots of people — men, women and children, entire families — in concentration camps. It’s just something we do.

Oh sorry — one correction. Turns out that the American citizens thrown into the WWII American concentration camps were not ethnically German or Italian. My mistake.