A Democratic congresswoman has given a scathing review of the Trump administration’s so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, describing it as an “internment camp” that needs to be “shut the hell down.”
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who represents Florida’s 25th congressional district, said that pictures of the facility “don’t do it justice” and that detainees were being “packed into cages.”
On Saturday Florida lawmakers from both parties took a state-arranged tour of the new 3,000-bed detention center that the state rapidly built on an isolated airstrip surrounded by swampland in the Everglades.
Auschwitz was an extermination camp, not a concentration camp. This is more like Dachau. Pretty accurately like Dachau I’d even say.
Yeah let’s weaken our political messaging for the camp where acting forces want to feed the latino population to alligators in the name of pedantry! Fuck the fact that most Americans would probably guess Dachau is a cheese or something, and that Auschwitz is certainly the most recognizable of the camps taught from the holocaust, we want to be 5% more correct!
Look, if you put people in “concentration camps” until they die, wouldn’t that be an extermination camp, even if you aren’t doing anything to accelerate their deaths?
No, because words have meaning. People also died in the original concentration camps - they were still distinct from the extermination camps.
Auschwitz 1 was a concentration camp, Auschwitz 2 (Auschwitz-Birkenau) was an extermination camp
Also please stop using the euphemisms the Nazis used. It’s an extermination camp.
Alligator Auschwitz will be an extermination camp, but the “oopsie, the residents all died of heatstroke and dehydration, maybe they shouldn’t have been illegally entered the country” kind.
Euphemisms are meaningless once the connotation settle in. No person alive in the modern civilization can heart the term “concentration camp” and think “oh, this is not so bad then”.
Anne Frank didn’t die in a gas chamber; she died of typhus. Putting people in a place full of health hazards where they will not get proper medical care is a form of extermination.
But the alliteration…
I nominate “Donalds Dachau”. Would that work for you?
YES👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
I mean. They built it in the middle of a swamp. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next time that area gets a particularly heavy rain it’ll morph into an extermination camp in a matter of hours.
The facility is comprised of tents, in a gator and snake infested swamp in southern Florida, one of the most active hurricane regions on the planet. The first hurricane or tropical storm that comes through there is going to destroy that place, and put those people at mortal risk.
You’re right, BUT -
this is a majorly fucked up timeline when people are complaining that it’s too mean to call a US concentration camp “Auschwitz” when it’s clearly just harmless little “Dachau.” Dachau led to Auschwitz and if the normalization of it is any indication, it WILL happen again here. THAT’S why people are calling it that - we’ve seen this shit before and know how it ends.
I see it another way.
By the time Auschwitz happened it was already way too late to oppse the Nazi Regime. It was too late to save lifes and prevent tragedy. But at Dachau it wasn’t.
It also makes it seem like this (Donalds Dachau) is the endgame. Like this is the worst they will do. When they will in fact do much worse.
By calling it an Auschwitz, I feel we’re kind of throwing a towel and telling ourselves that the MAGA-Regime is already too powerful. It isn’t. They’re only just starting, they can still be stopped. It also makes it seem like this is the height of their tyranny, which it isn’t. Noone should stay at home thinking “well, it isn’t that bad” but instead go to the streets thinking “it mustn’t get worse”
Also we all know that Dachau isn’t “harmless” in any way, and my comment should be pretty clear that it was awful. Comparing it to dachau isn’t normalizing it, it isn’t disrespectful, because it’s what gets closest to it. On the other hands it can be seen as disrespectful to all those who suffered and even perished in Birkenau to be compared to “Donalds Dachau”.
Lastly let me assure you that I am NOT, as implied in your comment, defending the current US-Regime nor normalizing Dachau.