The term “concentration camp” arose during the Boer War in South Africa, at the turn of the 20th Century. The camps were deployed by the British in order to subjugate the Boer (Afrikaner-Dutch) insurgency there.
“Concentration camp” has since come to be synonymous with coordinated governmental effort to suppress an out-group. The most famous camps were the Nazi ones. But “gulags” were concentration camps. The internment camps in which the US government interned its citizens of Japanese heritage during the Second World War were also concentration camps.
The camps on the southern border holding men, women and children in disgusting, inhuman conditions are also concentration camps, whether you like the term or not. Persons of Latino heritage are being confined for the crime of trying to escape rampant criminality and sexual enslavement in their home countries. The United States is the first country where they have a chance to be free, as the same gangs which dominate the Central American nations have free rein across most of Mexico as well. Strangely, persons arriving at airports seeking asylum aren’t being held in conditions like those at the southern border, nor have I heard of them being transferred to those “facilities.” This policy is racially motivated against Latin Americans. It is racist.
In any event, if the US cared to hold, detain or otherwise manage asylum applicants — it could do so in any number of ways. The Administration chooses this method because in order to forcibly deter others from coming. It punishes children trying to escape sex slavery or servitude to criminal gangs by imposing a Kafka-esque regime upon them.
From Sady Doyle:
“A 2018 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees report on female asylum-seekers found that 64% of the women cited “direct threats and attacks by members of criminal armed groups” as their reason for leaving and that those “attacks” very frequently included rape. They also found that the asylum-seekers had often experienced “repeated physical and sexual violence at home,” including “repeated rapes, sexual assaults, and violent physical abuse, such as beatings with baseball bats and other weapons.” To get out, they have to face even more sexual violence: Statistics indicate that between 60% and 80% of women and girls are raped or sexually assaulted during the migration journey.”
The fact that you try to elide the disgusting behavior of members of this administration, to hide behind the corpses of dead Jews and Gypsies at the hands of the historical Nazis does nothing but show a sympathy for people that would likely adopt the actual techniques of the Third Reich, if only they thought they could get away with it.
