This is classic American politics. Getting all hung up on semantics instead of actually debating the issue.

Totally agree, and it's getting irritatingly worse. It's getting hard to engage in good faith. People seem more concerned with the "gotcha" moment; the issue itself it irrelevant.

It's not unrelated though. Trump has used immigrants as a scapegoat to ignite his base and is now housing them in concentration camps. A full swath of his supporters consider them subhuman and wish them to be jailed, mistreated, and even killed. How is what she is saying hyperbolic in this context? It's describing the facts of what is happening.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive member of the U.S. Congress, has likened the U.S. government’s immigrant detention facilities on the Mexican border to concentration camps and is unapologetic about it even in the face of a reprimand from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust research center. Her remarks were clearly meant to provoke; but were they entirely wrong? AOC, as Ocasio-Cortez is called, provides a reminder that concentration camps have been more common in history than many think.

In the modern consciousness, the term “concentration camp” is firmly linked to the Nazis. Their practice, of course, was geared toward hard labor, torture and extermination. These were often explicit goals. Comparing U.S. immigration detention to the Nazi camps would be an impossible and unconscionable stretch, as anyone who’s ever been to Nazi concentration camp sites will attest.

But as British historian Dan Stone wrote in his 2017 book, “Concentration Camps: A Short History,” “The term ‘concentration camp’, like any other concept, means different things over time.” Though the U.S. facilities have nothing in common with the Nazi camps, they share important features with other concentration camps throughout history, including – perhaps uncomfortably for socialist Ocasio-Cortez – the ones established by Lenin in post-revolutionary Russia.

The term itself is of Spanish origin, born of the effort by the Spanish colonial authorities in Cuba in 1896 and 1897 to “reconcentrate” rural workers from areas controlled by Maximo Gomez’s rebels to those under Spanish control. Some 10,000 people died in “concentration centers.” The basic idea of the early concentration camps – the Cuban ones, those set up by the U.S. in the Philippines and the ones formed by the British army in South Africa, which came to be known as “concentration camps” after 1901 – was to deprive the opposite side in a war of supplies and local support. These camps were part of scorched-earth tactics in which the suffering of local civilians – to which colonial authorities were largely indifferent – was collateral damage.

The only element of that early practice that’s similar to U.S. immigration detention is the racial aspect. The early concentration camp inmates overwhelmingly had skin of a different color than that of their tormentors. That’s not enough to justify AOC’s simile.

But then, there have been plenty of other types of concentration camps throughout history. “Concentration camps can very aptly be divided into three types corresponding to three basic Western conceptions of a life after death: Hades, Purgatory, and Hell,” Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher, wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism”:

To Hades correspond those relatively mild forms, once popular even in non-totalitarian countries, for getting undesirable elements of all sorts – refugees, stateless persons, the asocial, and the unemployed – out of the way; as DP camps, which are nothing other than camps for persons who have become superfluous and bothersome, they have survived the war. Purgatory is represented by the Soviet Union's labor camps, where neglect is combined with chaotic forced labor. Hell in the most literal sense was embodied by those types of camp perfected by the Nazis, in which the whole of life was thoroughly and systematically organized with a view to the greatest possible torment.

The U.S. immigration detention facilities are the Hades type of concentration camp. They are expressly designed to keep “superfluous and bothersome people,” as Arendt called them, out of the way. The conditions in them can be intensely uncomfortable, but tormenting inmates isn’t the primary goal, and there’s certainly no hard labor.

In many important ways, the U.S. practice is similar to the displaced persons camps that emerged in Europe after World War I (and then again after World War II). In his book, Stone quotes German sociologist Klaus Muehlhahn as saying these displaced persons (DP) camps, with their suspension of the proper legal process, contributed to the conditions that “facilitated the emergence of concentration camps on the European continent.”

Like many of the DP camps, the U.S. facilities hold foreigners rather than domestic enemies. The undocumented immigrants have no right to due process, and though they are allowed to retain lawyers, many of them don’t have the money and other resources necessary to obtain help.

One can argue whether DP camps were concentration camps in the full sense of the word. Arendt, at any rate, clearly thought so. But there’s an element of the U.S. migrant detention practice that put it in the “Purgatory” category rather than the “Hades” one. It was the separation of families, which the Trump administration introduced and then had to end under intense political pressure last year. Its idea was to deter undocumented immigration, so it was essentially a hostage-taking practice: The children were held to put pressure on the adults.

Some of the first Communist concentration camps, set up under Vladimir Lenin in Russia, were created with similar ideas in mind. Lenin was one of the first politicians to use the term “concentration camp” for an ad-hoc internment facility in Europe rather than the colonies. He (and Leon Trotsky) ordered the camps set up as part of the traditional scorched-earth tactic during the Russian civil war which followed the 1917 revolution. But there was a peculiarly Bolshevik twist to the practice. Some 10% of the inmates were hostages, including the family members of active adversaries – and even of officers and professionals who had gone over to the Bolshevik side, to prevent them from engaging in sabotage.

While the U.S. family separation policy was scrapped, it's still unclear how many families it affected and whether they’ve all been reunited. That remaining uncertainty takes the U.S. practice under Donald Trump beyond Hades territory and into Purgatory. The use of family separation as an immigration deterrent is what makes AOC’s concentration camp remarks largely justified rather than merely speculative.

Whether or not AOC is familiar with this history, she certainly knew exactly the power her words held; if it were not for the Nazis, the very term “concentration camp” would not fill us with quite the same horror. But there’s no need to be as evil as the Nazis to go down in concentration camp history. Several U.S. administrations have gone down this inglorious road, but Trump’s may have crossed an important line, and AOC was right to call it out.

No, Mr. Wizard. She thinks that that explosion was made possible by our determined adherence to fossil fuels.

Man engages in bad faith obfuscation of smart woman's argument to make her look bad. More at 11.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-21/aoc-wasn-t-wrong-about-concentration-camps

So we'll be back to do this again and again, because grievance politics is a beast that's never going to be satiated. AOC will say or do something next week, and Fox News/MSNBC/et al will do the same thing all over again.