For the last couple of days I’ve been engaged in a discussion about what to call Alligator Alcatraz. A lot of you want to call it alligator Auschwitz… I say no. You (my debaters) say yes.
My first reason for saying no is that Auschwitz has a history, it has a past and it does not belong to the US.
My second reason emerged from the debates themselves, the more I argued I had no right to use that term, the more people answered it was appropriate, so I went to research Auschwitz details, to bolster my argument, and that’s when it hit me. The weight of History.
When in some years or decades down the road people are researching the horrors perpetuated by our own, I don’t want the spectacle of Alligator Alcatraz to be hidden behind the name of Auschwitz and be absorbed into their history by default. No, if Alligator Alcatraz turns out to be a comparable stain on the US, it should stand on its own and not be hidden behind the horrors of another.
We should not banalize historical events, by attributing a particular name, to everything that bears a resemblance to that event. Some names, dates, words are too heavy with their own horrors, misery or shame to become everyday words.
This is not about comparing things to things mind you, but let’s not confuse comparing Alligator Alcatraz to Auschwitz to actually calling it Auschwitz, it is our own camp of future horrors and I said future, because while we are calling that site Auschwitz, a site mind you that is not even operational yet, there are migrants being held in actual operational detention centers, who are being abused and who are dying but we are not talking about naming those anything.
And while one could argue the same for the name Alcatraz, my reply would be that Alcatraz is US history, so our own.
As exhibit, I will use D-Day… we applied D-Day to so many things, it has become an cliché, an expression, so much so, that a lot of US Citizens do not know that D-Day is an actual day, a historical event, do not know the Date of D-Day (June 6th, 1944), do not know it is not “The Day that will live in Infamy” (dec 7th, 1941), both have so common that a lot of US citizens do not even know they are actual days/dates/history.
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Muriel Vieux – July 6th, 2025 – ©All rights reserved
