[D66] Concentratiekampen in de VS

[A.OUT]

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/06/21/some-suburb-of-hell-americas-new-concentration-camp-system/


‘Some Suburb of Hell’: America’s New Concentration Camp System
Andrea Pitzer	
Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images
Barbed wire, fences, and security cameras surrounding a tent city
constructed in 2007 to house undocumented immigrants in Raymondville, Texas

On Monday, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to
US border detention facilities as “concentration camps,” spurring a
backlash in which critics accused her of demeaning the memory of those
who died in the Holocaust. Debates raged over a label for what is
happening along the southern border and grew louder as the week rolled
on. But even this back-and-forth over naming the camps has been a
recurrent feature in the mass detention of civilians ever since its
inception, a history that long predates the Holocaust.

At the heart of such policy is a question: What does a country owe
desperate people whom it does not consider to be its citizens? The
twentieth century posed this question to the world just as the shadow of
global conflict threatened for the second time in less than three
decades. The dominant response was silence, and the doctrine of absolute
national sovereignty meant that what a state did to people under its
control, within its borders, was nobody else’s business. After the
harrowing toll of the Holocaust with the murder of millions, the world
revisited its answer, deciding that perhaps something was owed to those
in mortal danger. From the Fourth Geneva Convention protecting civilians
in 1949 to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, the
international community established humanitarian obligations toward the
most vulnerable that apply, at least in theory, to all nations.

The twenty-first century is unraveling that response. Countries are
rejecting existing obligations and meeting asylum seekers with walls and
fences, from detainees fleeing persecution who were sent by Australia to
third-party detention in the brutal offshore camps of Manus and Nauru to
razor-wire barriers blocking Syrian refugees from entering Hungary.
While some nations, such as Germany, wrestle with how to integrate
refugees into their labor force—more and more have become resistant to
letting them in at all. The latest location of this unwinding is along
the southern border of the United States.

So far, American citizens have gotten only glimpses of the conditions in
the border camps that have been opened in their name. In the month of
May, Customs and Border Protection reported a total of 132,887 migrants
who were apprehended or turned themselves in between ports of entry
along the southwest border, an increase of 34 percent from April alone.
Upon apprehension, these migrants are temporarily detained by Border
Patrol, and once their claims are processed, they are either released or
handed over to ICE for longer-term detention. Yet Border Patrol itself
is currently holding about 15,000 people, nearly four times what
government officials consider to be this enforcement arm’s detention
capacity.

[...]


On 24-06-19 01:02, A.OUT wrote:
> https://www.businessinsider.nl/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-tweets-concentration-camps-us-mexico-border-2019-6-2/
> 
> Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ignited a firestorm after she spent 3 days
> calling US migrant detention centers ‘concentration camps’
> Eliza Relman
> 20 Jun 2019
> 
> 
>     Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is aggressively doubling down on her
> argument that the US government’s migrant detention centers are
> “concentration camps,” despite substantial pushback.
>     The freshman congresswoman has tweeted more than a dozen times about
> the issue and re-tweeted nearly two dozen scholars, journalists, and
> descendants of Holocaust survivors who defended her.
>     Ocasio-Cortez said the migrant detention facilities amount to
> concentration camps because they’re detaining people without trial. And
> she argued that those upset with her use of the term should instead
> focus on what she says is the dehumanization of migrants on the border.
>     “I will never apologize for calling these camps what they are. If
> that makes you uncomfortable, fight the camps – not the nomenclature,”
> she tweeted Wednesday.
> 
> On 24-06-19 00:54, A.OUT wrote:
>> (En de NOS zwijgt over de feiten.)
>>
>> https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a27813648/concentration-camps-southern-border-migrant-detention-facilities-trump/
>>
>> An Expert on Concentration Camps Says That's Exactly What the U.S. Is
>> Running at the Border
>> By
>> Jack Holmes
>> esquire.com
>> 18 min
>> View Original
>>
>> Surely, the United States of America could not operate concentration
>> camps. In the American consciousness, the term is synonymous with the
>> Nazi death machines across the European continent that the Allies began
>> the process of dismantling 75 years ago this month. But while the
>> world-historical horrors of the Holocaust are unmatched, they are only
>> the most extreme and inhuman manifestation of a concentration-camp
>> system—which, according to Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A
>> Global History of Concentration Camps, has a more global definition.
>> There have been concentration camps in France, South Africa, Cuba, the
>> Soviet Union, and—with Japanese internment—the United States. In fact,
>> she contends we are operating such a system right now in response to a
>> very real spike in arrivals at our southern border.
>>
>> “We have what I would call a concentration camp system,” Pitzer says,
>> “and the definition of that in my book is, mass detention of civilians
>> without trial.”
>>
>> Historians use a broader definition of concentration camps, as well.
>>
>> "What's required is a little bit of demystification of it," says Waitman
>> Wade Beorn, a Holocaust and genocide studies historian and a lecturer at
>> the University of Virginia. "Things can be concentration camps without
>> being Dachau or Auschwitz. Concentration camps in general have always
>> been designed—at the most basic level—to separate one group of people
>> from another group. Usually, because the majority group, or the creators
>> of the camp, deem the people they're putting in it to be dangerous or
>> undesirable in some way."
>>
>>
>> [...]
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