AOC’s Generation Doesn’t Presume America’s Innocence
On Monday night, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared in an Instagram video that “the United States is running concentration camps on our southern border.” The following morning, Liz Cheney tweeted, “Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.” After that, the fight was on.
On its face, the fight was about using outside the context of the Holocaust. In a , Ocasio-Cortez linked to an noting that the term pre-dates World War II. It quoted the historian Andrea Pitzer, who defines as the “mass detention of civilians without trial.” To Ocasio-Cortez’s critics, this was too cute by half. Whatever the term’s historical origins or technical meaning, in American popular discourse evokes the Holocaust. By using the term, they argued, the representative from New York
