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Josh Marshall
@joshtpm
, 3 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
I will say that I fully recognize that some people have a good faith concern about using this term to describe these facilities. The term "concentration camp" long predates and post-dates the Holocaust. See the Boer War, for instance. And using "never again" language feels off ..
2/ to me too. But this is way beyond that. There's nothing remotely wrong about what Mann says in this tweet and claiming it minimizes the Holocaust is just an inciting lie. It's the standard game, increasingly used by the formal institutions of the GOP to weaponize ...
3/ the horrors and collective memories of Jewish history on behalf of a party the great majority of American Jews do not support. Rather to protect the memory of the Holocaust it is used to defend policies which while clearly not comparable to the Holocaust are simply wrong.
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Josh Marshall
@joshtpm
This is a deeply insane situation. Thank god he called it off, if that’s really what happened. But we have a broken policy making process, no sec def and we’re relying on the caution of Donald Trump to avoid catastrophic decisions.
2/ You have complete nutballs like Bolton vying with slightly less nutty people, a resistant pentagon, an inconstant President. This kind of erratic and often contradictory set of actions makes misunderstandings and descents into war much more likely.
3/ Again, we’re now relying on Donald Trump to prevent crazy things from happening. That’s where we are. But he’s created a volatile, chaotic and unpredictable decision making process that makes wars much more likely, even beyond the bellicosity of particular advisors.
Read 3 tweets
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Josh Marshall
@joshtpm
I don’t think anyone is normalizing anything, at least not any substantial number. I said myself I dont like invoking “never again” over this. I think for many Jews the issue isn’t that Trump is bad or that his anti-immigrant policies are bad, though they both certainly ...
2/ are. There’s something different going on. Many of us are tired of the GOP evangelical political alliance which frequently relegates us as Jews into dragooned mascots for bad faith right wing attacks and false grievance politics. Indeed our history, our collective ...
3/ tragedies and sorrow, our survival as a people becomes a cynical cudgel for political battles we often have nothing to do with and which are advanced by people who don’t share our values. Our story as a people, our history and survival gets prostituted and abused by ...
Read 9 tweets
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Josh Marshall
@joshtpm
Worth adding to this discussion. The origin of the term "concentration camp" goes back to the Boer War, the war the British Empire fought agst Afrikaner settlers from 1899-1902. The camps began as refugee camps for civilians displaced by the war. But they quickly transformed ...
2/ into a tool to break the Boer rebellion by clearing out the civilian population it lived on. They were largely populated by women, children and non-military age men. Men were deported or sent to other facilities. Families of men still in arms were often allotted less food ...
3/ as a matter of policy. These camps didn't start as any effort to kill anyone & as far as I know forced labor wasn't a part of it. But many thousands of women and children ended up dying in these camps due mainly to epidemic disease facilitated by neglect, poor hygiene etc.
Read 4 tweets

Related threads

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Dr. Sunny Moraine PhFUCKINGD
@dynamicsymmetry
I'm seeing a number of people saying - in perfectly good faith - that we shouldn't get bogged down in semantics, that arguing over whether or not to call concentration camps concentration camps distracts from actually doing something about it.

Sorry, no.
We need to call them that. Not "internment camps". Not "detention camps" or "irregular detention". Those are weasel terms that allow us to evade the full terrifying implications of what's happening.

Which is how we always use those terms.
I understand that people of good faith find the notion that calling them concentration camps is counterproductive because it shuts down the conversation a convincing one. I'm sympathetic to that.

It's still wrong.
Read 12 tweets
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Alexandra Erin
@AlexandraErin
So, uh.

If your viewpoint is that we shouldn't use the term "concentration camp" because the right turned it into an argument over terminology.

What's your magic solution that you think they *can't* do that with?
People say "we fall for this every time!" but what we fall for, collectively, is the fallacy that *we* are the problem, that our *terminology* or *tone* is what the right objects to.
There is no tone urgent enough that it can accomplish something, no description of right-wing policies and ideology honest enough to accomplish anything, that they will accept.
Read 14 tweets
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Dr. Rose Stremlau
@RoseStremlau
Hello, historian here. When not Tweeting, I am writing my 2nd book, including a chapter on Indian Removal/aka the Trail of Tears. I use the term "concentration camp" to refer to the places in which Cherokees were held against their will in anticipation of removal in 1838.
I explain my choice in the text to make the case that historians should use this term when they teach/write & not the euphemisms that sanitize the story. Soooo, I've read A LOT about Cherokee removal in orig documents AND about the term concentration camp in Genocide Studies lit.
A LOT more than the folks criticizing @AOC & others, including my fellow historians, using this term to in ref. to the human rights crisis on our southern border. No, there isn't one agreed-upon definition, but there's significant consistency about these characteristics:
Read 14 tweets
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Alexandra Erin
@AlexandraErin
This, this, this. People tell me, "I don't have to worry about it, I can prove I'm a citizen." How do you prove it, if you have no rights? "But citizens have rights."

But how do you prove your'e a citizen, if you have no rights?

Rights must be universal or they don't exist.
They don't even have to take your documents. They don't have to go through any kind of process, legal or otherwise, to take your citizenship away. As soon as we accept that "illegals" aren't entitled to due process, aren't protected by our laws... we are all guests of the state.
If there is a class of people, any class, no matter how it's defined or how narrow the category, that loses the protection of law, loses the presumption of innocence, the right to due process... then from that moment, we're all only allowed to skate by on the grace of the state.
Read 31 tweets
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Black&QueerChanda Prescod-Weinstein 🙅🏽‍♀️ 🇧🇧🌈
@IBJIYONGI
I grew up using “concentration camp” and “extermination camp” interchangeably and seeing them as distinct from “internment camp.” I still have some kind of irrational emotional attachment to my definitions but actually

PUTTING PEOPLE IN CAGES IS BAD AND MURDEROUS

Ok?
And the most important thread I’ve seen on our vocabulary on this issue is from award-winning journo @aurabogado who has been doing ground breaking reporting on this from a Latinx/WOC perspective, even as she battled cancer.
Importantly there is already a long time pre-existing word for the current camps, hieleras — and the word maybe is worth noting because its existence highlights for us that this is a longstanding human rights problem that is only now getting national attention bc it got worse
Read 11 tweets
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Dr. Waitman W. Beorn
@waitmanb
[THREAD] On what a concentration camp IS or why @DineshDSouza doesn't need to lose his historically-disadvantaged mind over nuanced comparisons. 🙄🤦‍♂️

Let's talk about this.
(@AOC @RepAOC, I've got your back here.)

👇👇👇👇
Me checking into Twitter this afternoon...

On it...
First, I've actually written on this a couple times or been interviewed about it. So we'll lead with that.

washingtonpost.com/news/postevery…
Read 48 tweets

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