It's hard to know these days whether Republicans are all actually ignorant (some simply are) or whether they're simply pandering to a fact-deprived base. But now House GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who traffics regularly in baseless conspiracy theories, is calling on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to apologize to “the world” for making a historically accurate comment about the Trump administration operating "concentration camps" at the U.S. southern border.
Even though Americans most closely associate the charged term with the WWII-era death camps Nazis used to murder millions of Jews and other people, “concentration camp” is actually a more generalized term referring to areas where prisoners or persecuted minorities are detained or imprisoned for the purposes of punishment, exploitation, or security concerns.
“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,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.
Republicans immediately employed outrage to discredit her assertion, with Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, chair of the House Republican caucus, chiding Ocasio-Cortez to learn "some actual history." “6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this," Cheney tweeted Tuesday afternoon. By Wednesday morning, McCarthy seized on Cheney's tweet to amplify the outrage.
"I think Congresswoman AOC needs to apologize—not only to the nation but to the world," McCarthy charged. "To take somewhere in history where millions of Jews died...and equate that to somewhere that's happening on the border...she owes this nation an apology.”
Certainly millions of Jews did perish during the Holocaust after being held in what most people refer to as concentration camps. But the Nazis didn’t invent concentration camps, nor is the term synonymous with “death camp” or “extermination camp.” Actually, the places in which the U.S. interned tens of thousands of Japanese Americans during WWII qualified as concentration camps.
As MSNBC's Chris Hayes observed in response to Cheney’s tweet, "If you spend a few minutes learning some actual history, you will find out that concentration camps are different from death camps and have a history that both predates and extends far past the Nazis."
The term “concentration camp” is understandably charged, but apologizing to the world for employing it accurately in a present-day context is ridiculous.