“Andrea Pitzer, who literally wrote the book on the global history of concentration camps, defended the freshman lawmaker against Republican backlash during an appearance Tuesday on MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes…
...“The death camps ― which were on top of the existing concentration camps system, including Auschwitz and a series of other camps in which you had gas chambers, mass killings ― that is a singular moment in history,” Pitzer said Tuesday. “And for the people that want to respect that, I think that’s fine and that’s important.”
She continued: “If we want to call it ‘irregular detention,’ if we want to call it ‘extrajudicial detention,’ I don’t think we have to get stuck on that term. I wrote a history of the term ... and what I would really like people to know is that the same thing is happening here now.”…
Pitzer on Tuesday said a government’s reasoning for operating concentration camps is often to use a certain group of people as a “scapegoat” for a problem.
“You push it on a vulnerable group of people that you can label as somehow infecting a society, a national security threat to a society,” she said. “This is not a national security crisis. This is a humanitarian crisis. But we’re using the language of war to detain civilians.”
And AOC fought back on her own yesterday:
Some folks are of the opinion that this dust up should be allowed to pass into the ‘long night’ but anyone who has been paying attention to Republican tactics for the last five decades knows it will not.
The GOP will continue to try to define AOC’s statement in their own terms, which is to say, to the detriment of the Democratic Party.
We must continue to educate the general public that this massive detainment of civilians, with out due process they are entitled to by International Law, under conditions that violate every norm of civilized societies, deserves condemnation in the strongest terms whether the GOP and squeamish journalists like it or not.
You can see Pitzer’s remarks below, beginning at the 1:35 mark.
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[cross-posted to PolitiZoom]