Did anyone really compare the ICE camps to Nazi concentration camps though? I mean it was the Brits who originally invented concentration camps in South Africa and I always assumed that the contemporary comparisons with the Trump camps refered to those?
It I have made the comparison, as have
many others.
The technical point - which Republicans are desperate to the point of Lovecraftian madness to try and confuse - is that concentration camps and death camps are not the same thing.
A
concentration camp is,
A camp where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners, prisoners of war, refugees etc., are detained for the purpose of confining them in one place, typically with inadequate or inhumane facilities.
A
death camp is,
A prison camp in which a large number of prisoners die for various reasons, such as starvation, disease, brutality and neglect.
Sometimes it is used specifically to refer to
extermination camps set up by the government of Nazi Germany.
All these camps are horrible, whatever their exact definition or classification. They're all, I think, crimes against humanity. I'm confident that most people would agree death camps are worse than concentration camps, but that's ultimately just arguing about how horribly evil something is - and all of them are so evil no decent human being wants anything to do with enabling any of them.
Which brings us right back around to the GOP's desperate attempts to twist semantics in order to avoid being judged for their own actions.
First, Republicans confuse 'concentration camps' with 'death camps'.
Second, Republicans get very indignant at supposedly being accused of mass murder and genocide, charges of which they are innocent so far. (If you don't count Yemen, started by Obama, continued by Trump and his Republicans.)
Third, Republicans claim that since they aren't running death camps (which, again, they are not) they can't be running concentration camps either (yes, Republicans are running concentration camps) because they're the same thing (which they are not) which must mean they're doing nothing wrong at all on immigration (which wouldn't be true even if they weren't running concentration camps).
I know it gets confusing - modern Republicans have weaponized stupidity. This is far from the only issue where Republicans lie about definitions in order to try and get away with abusive and criminal behavior. From Trump's many impeachable actions to stacking the deck for internet service providers, lying and spreading confusion are key Republican tactics.
I suppose it's possible that the errors are made in good faith and Republicans are reliably ignorant and stupid to the level of criminality. But if that's the case, they
still shouldn't be running a burger joint, much less the United States of America.
In the end, I think Never Again has
the best reaction to any Republican attempt obfuscate their atrocities:
“ the semantics. Children are dying. That should be enough,” she said. “My goal is not to convince you to use those semantics. It’s to get you to stop these atrocities.”
Sophie Ellman-Golan, Never Again Action spokesperson, said the group isn’t waiting for conditions to match those of the Holocaust to take action.
“We look at what is happening and what our government is doing immigrant communities,” Ellman-Golan told The Daily Beast. “We see nothing less than a mass atrocity. While conditions might not exactly mirror the Holocaust, we shouldn’t wait for them to mirror the Holocaust to take action. That’s why we say ‘never again’ means never again for everyone, and never again means now.”
