‘I Don’t, I Don’t Know, I, Like, We Can Have, OK, Whatever’: AOC Claims Trump Running ‘Concentration Camps’

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She read a magazine article, so now she’s an expert.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 29-year-old former bartender turned member of Congress, on Monday said President Trump “has established concentration camps on the southern border.”

“This administration has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying. This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis,” she wrote on Twitter, citing a magazine article.

Ocasio-Cortez also took to Instagram to make the same allegations in her rambling, Valley-girl speak.

“The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border and that is exactly what they are,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “They are concentration camps. And, um, if that doesn’t bother you, I don’t, I don’t know, I, like, we can have, OK, whatever,” she said, waving her hands and shrugging her shoulders.

“I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that we should not — that ‘Never Again’ means something, and that the fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing, um, and we need to do something about it,” she said. “This week, children, uh, immigrant children were moved to the same internment camps where the Japanese were held in, in the early, in the earlier 20th century. And this is, um, this is not even about a crisis for, this is not just about the immigrant communities being held in concentration camps being a crisis.”

“This is a crisis for ourselves. This is a crisis on if America will remain America on its actual principles and values or if we are losing to an authoritarian and fascist presidency,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And so I think that that is, um, you know, I don’t use those words lightly. I don’t use those words to just throw bombs. I used that word because that is what an administration that creates concentration camps is.”

Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democratic socialist, on Friday retweeted a post on Twitter. ” ‘We have what I would call a concentration camp system… a mass detention of civilians without trial.’ 24 people *that we know of* have died under ICE under Trump so far, plus 6 children in other agencies since September,” wrote Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who said in her Twitter profile that she has “Bylines NYT, WaPo, Time, The Atlantic etc.”

The tweet cited a piece in Esquire headlined, “An Expert on Concentration Camps Says That’s Exactly What the U.S. Is Running at the Border,” written by Jack Holmes. The sub-headline says, “Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz.”

Holmes then cited Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, who says, “We have what I would call a concentration camp system… and the definition of that in my book is, mass detention of civilians without trial.”

Then the piece cited Waitman Wade Beorn, a Holocaust and genocide studies historian and a lecturer at the University of Virginia. “Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz. Concentration camps in general have always been designed—at the most basic level—to separate one group of people from another group. Usually, because the majority group, or the creators of the camp, deem the people they’re putting in it to be dangerous or undesirable in some way.”

And then the piece said “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.”

Twenty-four dead is, of course, tragic, but that’s a far cry from the concentration camps during the Holocaust. Dachau, the first of the Nazi concentration camps opened in 1933, held political prisoners. Later, it was enlarged to include forced labor, and eventually, the imprisonment of Jews, German and Austrians. Still later, prisoners of war were brought to the camp. All were treated brutally, some held in “standing” cells, others subjected to the so-called tree or pole hanging. More than 32,000 died there — thousands more were never accounted for.

At Auschwitz, “at least 1.1 million died, around 90 percent of them Jews,” says its Wikipedia page. “Approximately one in six Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp. Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 non-Jewish Poles, 23,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 400 Jehovah’s Witnesses, tens of thousands of others of diverse nationalities, and an unknown number of gay men. Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died because of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments.”

That’s nothing like the U.S.-Mexican border, where foreigners are flocking in order to sneak into the United States or claim asylum.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) schooled the newcomer who has read a magazine article.

Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this,” she wrote on Twitter.

 

 

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Joseph Curl

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