“Andrea Pitzer, who literally wrote the book on the global history of concentration camps, defended the freshman lawmaker against Republican backlash during an appearance Tuesday on MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes…
…“The death camps ― which were on top of the existing concentration camps system, including Auschwitz and a series of other camps in which you had gas chambers, mass killings ― that is a singular moment in history,” Pitzer said Tuesday. “And for the people that want to respect that, I think that’s fine and that’s important.”
She continued: “If we want to call it ‘irregular detention,’ if we want to call it ‘extrajudicial detention,’ I don’t think we have to get stuck on that term. I wrote a history of the term … and what I would really like people to know is that the same thing is happening here now.”…
Pitzer on Tuesday said a government’s reasoning for operating concentration camps is often to use a certain group of people as a “scapegoat” for a problem.
“You push it on a vulnerable group of people that you can label as somehow infecting a society, a national security threat to a society,” she said. “This is not a national security crisis. This is a humanitarian crisis. But we’re using the language of war to detain civilians.”
And AOC fought back on her own yesterday:
DHS ripped 1000s of children from their parents & put them in cages w inhumane conditions.
They call their cells “dog pounds” & “freezers.”
I will never apologize for calling these camps what they are.
If that makes you uncomfortable, fight the camps – not the nomenclature. https://t.co/eJpJWeYiot
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 19, 2019
Some folks are of the opinion that this dust up should be allowed to pass into the ‘long night’ but anyone who has been paying attention to Republican tactics for the last five decades knows it will not.
The GOP will continue to try to define AOC’s statement in their own terms, which is to say, to the detriment of the Democratic Party.
We must continue to educate the general public that this massive detainment of civilians, with out due process they are entitled to by International Law, under conditions that violate every norm of civilized societies, deserves condemnation in the strongest terms whether the GOP and squeamish journalists like it or not.
You can see Pitzer’s remarks below, beginning at the 1:35 mark.
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Republiscum get morning wood in the late afternoon when they think of brown people in cages.
All Dems should join AOC in calling them what they are…..concentration camps.
So as I wrote yesterday, I found the use of the term “concentration camp” unfortunate because I thought people would conflate that with the holocaust. I still don’t think it’s the best term to use…but I’m not particularly offended by the term itself.
But this is how stupid our politics have become. On the one side, we have Rep Ocasio-Cortez arguing that she intended some Byzantine reference to one aspect of the concentration camp system but not others…oh please. She used the term because it’s harsh and she wanted to be harsh. The whole “I meant the sub-system of camps…” reply is just silly. Nobody makes a comparison to Nazi concentration camps and intends it to be a nuanced comment about early twentieth century infrastructure or the lunch menu. It was a slightly harsh comment said from an emotional place.
Which in normal times would just get dropped…because language is nuanced, and sometimes people speak in a clunky manner. But no…because we are living in this stupid era, the G.D. Republican leadership has to call for an international apology. What would that even look like? Would she go to the U.N. to formally state her sorrow over her off-handed (and I would still argue clunky) comment?
Maybe that’s what she should do…march down to the U.N. and stand up on the dais and say she’s sorry. And then add “while I have you here, let me also add a few things about climate change…”
I’m not saying anything negative about AOC, and I have plenty of negative things to say about McCarthy, who is an utter embarrassment to my state…but my overall point is that this little dance we do through social media and propaganda news outlets is tiresome and asinine.