On Wednesday’s edition of “Cuomo Prime Time,” CNN contributor Angela Rye offered inadvertent irony matched to historical illiteracy.
It came during Rye’s debate with Steve Cortes, a supporter of President Trump, over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s, D-N.Y., description of U.S. border facilities as “concentration camps.” Cortes’ condemnation of Ocasio-Cortez led Rye to respond, “I hope that at some point you wrestle with your conscience. Because sir, you are on the wrong side of history. In 1933 there were concentration camps, in 1941 there were death camps. And that’s where we are going if our consciences are not quickly pierced.”
First, Rye’s inadvertent irony is that in comparing Cortes to Nazis, she adopts Nazi propaganda style. Adolf Hitler’s propaganda master, Joseph Goebbels, built the Nazi ideology by relentlessly presenting Nazism’s detractors as enemies of an absolute moral truth and as agents responsible for the post-World War I suffering of the German people. Suggesting that Cortes is a collaborator for the extermination of immigrants and thus American identity, Rye’s extraordinary rhetoric sits well with the ideology she claims to so hate.
But as with the congresswoman she is defending, Rye clearly also doesn’t understand history.
The emergence of Nazi extermination camps in 1941 was not a progressive outcome of the Nazi concentration camps introduced in 1933. Instead, the two camps always represented two different manifestations of Nazi ideology. Concentration camps, though brutal and responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, were different to extermination camps in that their overriding purpose was not death. But for the Jews, Roma people, disabled, and other “subhumans” despised by Hitler, extermination camps offered the apex of Nazism’s mission.
We make a grievous error of history where we blur the Third Reich’s fascistic fetish for individual control with Nazism’s stratified hatred for certain ethnic groups.
Of course, Rye’s silliness is unsurprising. With a shtick of hateful outrage, Rye revels in making wildly exaggerated claims about conservatives. But that doesn’t make her latest absurdity any less sad.
