Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (known to the general public as AOC now; she's achieved her own brand, remarkably) isn't one to back off. Neither does she mask her attitudes.
AOC has said that the holding zones meant for alien peoples waiting to immigrate to this country are living in "concentration camps." Her admonishment was stated in two words: "Never again."
This has raised hackles on the backs of some necks. Those phrases have been directly connected with the Holocaust during World War II. "Concentration camps" has been stretched to mean that the inhabitants won't remain there very long, but will eventually be executed, as the Jews were by the Nazis, in systematic, barbaric fashion: the phrase "death camps" has been adapted as synonymous. "Never again" is the vow of the Zionists to make sure that no weakness be shown in the perpetual effort to keep anyone or any country from doing the same thing to Jews, ever again.
To some who think of the Holocaust as the ultimate evil, AOC's wording makes what's happening at our border to be equivalent. It isn't, of course. Though a few have died there--bad enough that that is--there are no plans for systematic slaughter. But Holocaust prevention advocates also believe that that terrible process has been diminished by AOC's wording.
The delicateness is borne out by a letter written by the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, asking people not to overuse Holocaust analogies, especially at this point, when the camps housing immigrants and their children are bursting at the seams, a tribute to the cold-shouldered abuse that 45's policies have caused. (It is printed in the June 17 online edition of the New York Review of Books.)
The advantage that the Holocaust has through the sweep of history is that it is packaged through time and place and connected with the major catastrophe of human history, the Second World War. It has a name that you can't look away from. Its numbers are so incredible that a few have devoted much time and research into questioning whether it happened at all.
But it has also been fused into a religious group's cultural and political positioning in contemporary world affairs. Jews have been given a place to call their own now: Israel, the existence of which has been challenged militarily several times during the last seven decades or so--indeed, attacks upon it have spanned nearly the entire post-WWII era--but as a direct result of the Holocaust. American foreign policy has always danced along the edge of support for Israel and the Palestinians whose national legitimacy was displaced by its establishment (Until now, when 45 and his hyper-religious Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, have made no secret of connecting deeper support for Israel to the right-wing's reliance on religiosity for backing nearly everything he does, so Old Testament references to The Promised Land never go wanting, Palestinians notwithstanding.).
So the skittishness of those who would feature the Holocaust as the world's ultimate evil is partly understandable. Minimize it in any way, and the existence and legitimacy of Israel itself falls into question. Hey, a whole bunch of people died in The Big One, ya know?
Thing is, the Holocaust isn't the ultimate slaughter. It's just the most systematic one, the one with the most pre-planning ahead of it, the one religiously connected. It wasn't driven by barbaric lust of conquering, as the butchery of the Chinese by Japanese troops was (for more on that, read The Rape of Nanking, except you probably won't get past page 100 in your non-stop disgust, nor would you need to). It was the "banality of evil," as Hannah Arendt put it. It became hum-drum, de rigeour, as all assembly lines are. And many people had to cooperate, some out of fear of their own lives, for the monstrous process to continue. It went far beyond merely looking and not seeing.
That's the stultifying, numbing aspect of it that too often avoids analysis: barbarism can be cold as well as hot. Hitler's Willing Executioners came out more than two decades ago, with fierce opposition. Until then, nobody could get their arms around how the machinery of local governments had to fall into line with the Nazi regime to create that kind of cooperative killing machine: people generally thought the Gestapo ran the whole thing. But the local authorities did, and some non-uniformed people did it quite willingly. The leading, high-profile Nazis (Hess, Krupp, Goering, et al) found accountability in an international war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, but hundreds of others not nearly as well-known did not.
But that is why AOC calls upon it as a comparison. The truly distressing border camps need a standard upon which to place the potential for inhumane treatment, now quite documented, to descend even farther. It's the thread of experience, the dot-connecting of uncaring which assembly lines evoke, that leads us down the funny stairs to the disgusting scenario with which we are now presented.
To wit: They don't care about the kids. Older children are told to take care of the younger ones, except they are advised not to hug them. That's right: Don't hug them. It isn't solitary confinement, but in some ways, it's worse.
Some three-year-olds have slept on the concrete floors. On concrete. Upon learning of that in prisoner of war camps, we would be appalled. Amnesty International would have organized letter-writing campaigns to tell the unfortunate, You are not forgotten. We've thought that kind of stuff happens in far-off jungles and deserts.
Instead, it's here. In the USA. And here, in the USA, two or three days' drive away from anywhere else in the lower 48, some enforcement officers are horrified and truly upset about having to oversee this ongoing tragedy--read the New York Times today--and some are not. Some have made terrible comments on social media, racist and dismissive in seen-one-seen-'em-all fashion. Banality: It's coming to a theater near you.
The 45 administration's common response--as he himself has put it--is that all of this would stop if the immigrants stopped being immigrants and turned around and went back home. But they don't like their homes. They want new homes. And what the hell is wrong with that?
Besides, ignoring another interesting statistic from the previous administration, there was a point at which the numbers of people who really did go back home to Mexico were greater than those who stayed. But they weren't cooped up in these overcrowded camps, either. They were allowed to discover that on their own. They weren't put on upsetting display.
The Holocaust happened in a society like this one, known for its cultural advancement: in music, art, writing, science, philosophy. But like this one might still do, it turned upon itself in nihilistic fervor which, once locked in, couldn't possibly be reversed except by invasion and devastation.
Fascism, the governmentally-blessed vengeance of renewable racism, does that to people. It is infectious and indelible. Once people think that someone officially supports the idea that they're naturally better than others, that they can get away with abuse to others, all kinds of scary things begin to happen. Totalitarianism is a simple step from there.
For an indication of the step-by-step process by which Jews were first stripped of their rights and then rounded up for extermination, please read Elie Wiesel's thin but important book Night. You might finish it in one evening. Either way, you aren't likely to forget it.
There are more devastating examples of mass slaughter during the last century; Soviet starvation and executions to force especially the Ukrainians to accept the poorly-planned collectivized farms, and Mao Zedong's killings of Chinese citizens who didn't accept the Great Leap Forward, a misnomer if there ever was one. The death toll of each, as estimated, topped twenty million. Even if you add the non-Jews who died in the Holocaust--another issue worth pointing out--both double the death toll.
But those people's records weren't painstakingly kept, like those in the Nazi death camps, so the utter emptiness of those murders are perpetual. It is to the Holocaust's advantage that we know very well the names of those butchered, maimed, perpetually damaged. It gives it a oft-repeated status of exactness that, except for right-wing fantasy makers, is rarely challenged.
Any conversation dealing with the border mess is going to evoke emotional responses and severe comparisons. That the Holocaust represents one edge of them doesn't make it the ultimate evil because we now know that, amazingly, it's been superseded by other barbarians. It is, instead, an ultimate evil and as such, something that will never become mainstream, even with inappropriate or exaggerated attempts to make connections.
It can't remain in the same box that the U.S. Holocaust Museum pretends that it is, though. The existence of the museum gives anyone (admission is still free) the opportunity to observe incarceration, deprivation and mass murder as an accumulation of crimes against humanity--an accumulation that began with lesser but egregious violations of human rights.
It is also the end product of a process toward which the U.S. border's situation is advancing. That AOC is starting to blow the whistle now, warning us of an end product that looms ahead, is neither an act of excess alarmism nor flippant insult. It's a reminder of the slippery slope that can continue if we let it--if the present administration is allowed to do so.
The Washington Post has just published the results of the latest survey: 47% approval rating for 45. If people care primarily about their pocketbooks, or the possibility, however contrived, that they will improve, and not fellow humans trying to get that same result themselves except they need to get out of the cages first, we will permit this to continue. Nothing will then stop the collapse of what we used to stand for--liberty under law, the rule of law, and what Lincoln once called us--"the last, best hope of mankind."
Every day those cages exist is a day closer to disaster. Holding pens don't keep attitudes at bay. They go in one direction or the other. Wherever you may find them, messes that aren't cleaned up are always more tolerated and always get worse. Always.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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