By David Harsanyi
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
“The United States is running concentration camps on
our southern border. That is what they are.”
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In April 1944, two Slovakian Jews named Alfred Weczler
and Rudolf Vrba escaped from Auschwitz, and provided one of the first
eyewitness accounts of the horrors of the European concentration camps. Both
men had been rounded up with a group of their countrymen and sent to the
Birkenau section of the camp in the spring of 1941, where they were immediately
put to work as slave labor.
This was before the German regime had properly
streamlined and industrialized efforts to destroy European Jewry. In the early
days of the camp, any man incapable of labor was immediately executed. Those
who survived were sent to do the grueling work of construction.
The men began their work at sunrise, and except for a
half-hour break at noon, when the prisoners were fed cabbage and turnip soup,
they worked until 6 p.m. For dinner, the men were given an ounce of moldy bread
made from “ersatz flour and sawdust.” Lice and fleas tortured their emaciated
bodies as they slept on wooden boards. “Rats were so bold they gnawed at the
toes and fingers of sleepers and stole the crumbs they had left in their
pockets,” wrote Robert Conot in his book “Justice at Nuremberg.”
A third of the prisoners died every week. If a worker was
hurt, he was allotted three days of recovery time. If they failed to heal, the
infirmary—where Dr. Mengele had already begun his nefarious work on women and
children—would inject a fatal dose of phenol directly into their hearts.
Of the 2,722 Slovakian Jews who had been rounded up with
Weczler and Vrba, only 159 survived to the summer of 1942. Those who died had
been dumped, with another approximately 105,000 bodies, into shallow trenches
around Birkenau. “As they decomposed” Conot noted, “the earth rose like a
yeasty mixture of dough and bubbled up nauseating gases, which spread for
miles.”
I think of that last sentence whenever some modern-day
know-nothing begins comparing the United States to a proto-Nazi state. Maybe
it’s because their analogies are embarrassingly ignorant and intellectually
lazy, or maybe it’s because people like Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps unknowingly,
diminish the suffering of millions of dead. Or maybe it’s because my own
grandfather was taken as slave labor in Austria.
Then again, maybe it’s because the comparison itself is a
despicable smear of the American people. It’s true that we’re not prepared for
the crush of refugees on the southern border (although it should be noted that
many Democrats contend any border is immoral). While there is a border,
however, we ask migrants who show up to follow existing laws; ones that are
subject to the democratic process and the court system.
Sometimes we reacted ham-fistedly, even temporarily
breaking up families who are transporting children without any oversight. Some
migrants have been abused and some have died in our care. There is no excuse
for it. Neither is sanctioned by the state.
If you believe any of this morally equivalent to carting
away millions of people to crematoriums for execution because their faith, your
moral compass is irreparably broken.
It should also be noted that the United States has more
immigrants than
any other country in the world. There are 40 million people living in the
United States who were born in another country—accounting for about one-fifth
of the world’s migrants in 2017. We could build a giant steel fence around the
entire country, and the United States would still reign as the most welcoming
place for foreigners that has ever existed.
This doesn’t mean that people of good faith can never be
critical of U.S. policy or contrast any policy with Nazi Germany.
“Concentration camps” have a long history that predates the Holocaust, after
all. But the contemporary usage is clear, notwithstanding Ocasio-Cortez’s
unconvincing attempts to walk back her initial statements. She, in fact, stresses, “I don’t use those
words lightly. I don’t use those words to just throw bombs.”
This dumb Nazi equivalence certainly isn’t
new. We see a spike whenever a Republican is elected—be it Barry Goldwater,
Ronald Reagan, or George Bush. Of course, with Donald Trump, they are in full
bloom. We see it all across social media. We see it not only from random
accounts but from celebrities,
well-known pundits, and major
newspapers peddling fourth-grade-level historical analysis. What they’re
doing is cheapening their own arguments, on top of all else.
Ocasio-Cortez, whose historical obliviousness leads her
to believe we’re living in an economic and racial dystopia, says she is
speaking to those who “are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘Never Again’
means something and…that concentration camps are now an institutionalized
practice in the Home of the Free.” It’s indeed strange to hear a leftist who
champions anti-Israel causes and anti-Semitic politicians using this phrase,
since the Jewish state is the most successful and enduring manifestation of
Never Again.
The appearance of “Never Again” also undermines her later
contention that she wasn’t talking about the Nazi camps.
We’re forced to take someone seriously who believes
vegetables are a tool of colonial oppression because Ocasio-Cortez is both a
charismatic elected official with many impressionable fans, and a person
bestowed with a huge media platform. Only last weekend, she appeared on “Meet
the Press” praising socialism—the other scourge of the 20th century. Yet when
we need our media to ask her to explain her profoundly childish and destructive
statements, they are nowhere to be found.
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