On Monday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said, “The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border.” She then went on to say that President Trump is a “fascist” and that when she says that, she does not “use those words lightly.”
Ocasio-Cortez later tried to claim that she was not, in fact, invoking the Holocaust by talking about concentration camps, but rather, she was simply talking about the general “mass detention of civilians without trial.” This, however, is a cheap defense as in the video, she used the phrase “never again,” a phrase directly associated with Holocaust remembrance.
When people invoke abhorrent events in world history, such as the Holocaust, in order to make a political point, the only thing it does is downplay an event in pursuit of political points. There is no world in which the murder of 6 million Jews could ever be compared to what is going on right now on the southern border. There are no death camps, nobody is being systematically starved, and the reason they are being held is that they voluntarily chose to commit a crime — namely crossing the border illegally.
None of this is to say that conditions in the detention centers are ideal. Of course they’re not, but it is to say that while Ocasio-Cortez is trying to play up the dire nature of the current situation on the southern border, she is doing it at the expense of one of the darkest periods in world history.
To invoke the Holocaust in the discussion around the detention of illegal immigrants is a grave insult on those who actually had to live through the Holocaust and those who were affected by it. Further, if we take the analogy Ocasio-Cortez is promulgating and extend it just a little, she would be implying that the Trump administration is comparable to the Nazis, and ICE agents are the modern day SS officers.
Although most people can see right through the disingenuous comparison Ocasio-Cortez makes, that kind of comparison does do harm. When politicians call all policies they disagree with “fascist,” or constantly invoke the Holocaust in order to attack the other side of the aisle, all that it does is normalize the terms to those who do not fully understand the implications of them. The reason for the increasing amount of people who have been invoking horrid historical events in order to make a political point can most likely be traced back to the fact that young people today know nearly nothing about events like the Holocaust.
Two-thirds of young people don’t know what Auschwitz is, and 22% have never heard of the Holocaust. For those who do understand the implications of calling somebody a fascist or a Nazi, it creates an environment where they dismiss what is being said, thus rendering the term meaningless.
The increasingly alarmist nature of politics creates a culture where words begin to mean nothing. The U.S. is actually doing pretty well right now, and sounding the bells of chaos by invoking the Holocaust has the sole purpose of attempting to create a feeling of instability while the opposition party is in power.
While Ocasio-Cortez is busy trying to make people feel like the sky is falling, voters will understand that it is just talk in an age where talk no longer has meaning.
Jack Elbaum is a high school student at Highland Park High School in Illinois.
