The internet was aflame this week with people denouncing the inhumanity of conditions in which asylum-seeking families and unaccompanied minors are being held near the U.S. southern border.
Of all the injustices to arouse concern and denunciations of the Trump administration, this is a good choice if people will only do the short work of asking what the alternatives are, and what Congress can do to alleviate it and get there. House Democrats have some ideas, embodied in a bill they passed Tuesday. Senate Republicans passed a dueling version Wednesday.
It was also the week that social media was aflame with a discussion of whether Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist from Queens, New York, was making Holocaust analogies in connection with the border mess. She denounced the detention centers as “concentration camps” and vowed “never again” – hardly a dog whistle. When she was rebuked, she refused to apologize, even after the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum weighed in, saying it “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary.”
This in no way dissuaded Ocasio-Cortez’s defenders, who have countered with lengthy and even scholarly opinions about the provenance of concentration camps, touching on the Boer War, and the views of Spanish Gen. Valeriano Weyler, who was thought to have pioneered the tactic in Cuba before the Spanish-American War, although Weyler got it from studying Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s campaigns in the Civil War while Weyler was a military attaché in the Spanish embassy in Washington.
Even if this learning is all in service now to asserting that Ocasio-Cortez is right when she is wrong, that is a lesser aggravation. Learning is always a good thing in itself.
