Concentration Camps Are Not Death Camps, But They ARE a Crime Against Humanity
It is time to expect the unthinkable. It's time to say the unsayable.
The United States of America is operating concentration camps. Don't be fooled by euphemisms. Don't be fooled by whataboutisms.
#Don'tLookAway
President Donald Trump is ready to crank up his base with another round of immigrant bashing. He’s openly promising to deport millions of people in the coming months, now that a sufficiently cruel leadership has been found for the appropriate government agencies.
His campaign kickoff speech in Orlando, Florida will, if past experience is any guide, consist of self-congratulatory boasts, promises he’s incapable of keeping, and a blistering attack on anybody and anything perceived as not Trumpian enough.
Most of all, we’ll hear a litany of lies aimed at demonizing non-citizens and keeping the faithful angry enough to ignore how badly they’re getting screwed by the “great economy.”
Apologists for his administration’s treatment of migrants are attempting to discredit the notion the so-called detention camps around the country are, in fact, concentration camps.
Locally, talk show host Carl DeMaio has joined Liz Cheney’s pearl-clutching chorus by saying liberals are conflating the mass detention of civilians without trial with the death camps of the Third Reich.
https://twitter.com/gorskon/status/1140995889709740033
Deaths or no deaths, the systematic funneling of large groups of people into facilities designed to separate them from the general populace, IS enough to call what U.S. Taxpayers are funding as concentration camps.
As Jack Holmes points out at Esquire:
Not every concentration camp is a death camp—in fact, their primary purpose is rarely extermination, and never in the beginning. Often, much of the death and suffering is a result of insufficient resources, overcrowding, and deteriorating conditions. So far, 24 people have died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Trump administration, while six children have died in the care of other agencies since September. Systems like these have emerged across the world for well over 100 years, and they've been established by putative liberal democracies—as with Britain's camps in South Africa during the Boer War—as well as authoritarian states like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Camps set up with one aim can be repurposed by new regimes, often with devastating consequences.
Nobody is saying there are death camps. Yet. But when four-month-old infants are ripped from their parents arms and put into foster homes under the administration’s zero-tolerance family separation policy, the concept of future international crimes trials isn’t hard to grasp.
Ninety-nine year old Ben Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor at the Nazi Nuremberg trials, has criticized the Trump administration's family separation crisis resulting from its cruel immigration policies, calling it "a crime against humanity."
Sadly, the United States is one of the few countries in the world that has never ratified the Rome Statute, the treaty making things like genocide and torture crimes.
https://twitter.com/joncoopertweets/status/1140263430911344640
An op ed by Jonathan M.Katz in his newsletter, which ultimately ran in the Los Angeles Times, has played a large role in fostering this necessary self-examination of what is occurring in the ‘land of the free.’
You might balk at my use of “concentration camp.” That’s good, it’s something to balk at. Hannah Arendt knew the concept too well: She was imprisoned by the Gestapo and later interned by the French ahead of the German invasion. She wrote that concentration camps ranged from the extreme Nazi extermination camps to “relatively mild forms, once popular even in non-totalitarian countries, for getting undesirable elements … out of the way.”
All have one thing in common, she wrote:
… the human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead …
Earlier this year, attorney Martin Garbus spent a week inside Dilley helping families apply for asylum. Here’s how he described the process of being admitted to the camp:
The agents take them in their wet clothes, at first, to the “hielera,” the “icebox,” a refrigerated building, a large processing center, where they had to try to sleep on the concrete floor or sit on concrete benches under mylar blankets, prodded by agents all night and day, deliberately kept awake. Bathroom breaks are frequently not granted, or not in time, so both women and children often soil themselves … After the Hielera, they went to the “perrera,” or “doghouse,” a place where families were put in cages, cyclone fencing between them as though they were animals. But at least the chain link cages—dog kennels, really—were warmer, the mothers told me.
“[It] was an attempt to persuade these immigrants to turn back before they even reached a credible-fear interview with an asylum officer,” Garbus observed. “It was also a message to those who were still trying to cross the border.”
“I saw fear in every face I saw.”
It fits Arendt’s definition to a T.
https://twitter.com/AlOtroLado_Org/status/1139936857158909958
The last thing the Trump administration wants is for the people behind barbed wire to become humanized. And that’s exactly why the words “concentration camp” are important to say. Often.
I don’t expect the President and his minions to be shamed; I do expect people with a modicum of empathy left in their consciousness to be motivated enough to make some noise, not allow themselves to be distracted, and to get their friends and neighbors to polling places.
https://twitter.com/ECMcLaughlin/status/1139711084628103169
As Katz notes in the LA Times op ed, these camps are not about illegal immigration.
The goal is putting the country under the control of the right kind of white people. Trump has made it clear that he wants to stifle all non-white immigration, period. And the reasons aren’t hard to figure out. His administration just got caught using a literal question of immigration to suppress opposition votes and boost “Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.” The GOP simply can’t win national elections without doing that sort of thing anymore.
And as history shows, when a leader starts putting people in camps to stay in power, it doesn’t usually end with the first group they detain.
https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1139633661786185728
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