San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘Concentration camps’? What history instructs
One surefire way to spark a chorus of condemnation is to use the term “concentration camp” outside the historic context of the Nazi forcedlabor and death camps during the Holocaust. Many Jewish leaders and organizations argue the term has that exclusive meaning; using it to describe other mass detention facilities, they claim, is insensitive at best and possibly an effort to place the Holocaust on the same level as less extreme instances of forced confinement of people considered dangerous or disloyal.
Rep. Alexandria OcasioCortez, DN.Y., ignited the latest semantic scuffle when she recently charged that the Trump administration “has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying.” Her use of this term to describe the mass detention facilities in which thousands of asylumseeking migrants, many of them children forcibly separated from parents and family members, are being held in deplorable conditions, provoked an immediate and fierce backlash. Fox News, ever eager to bash OcasioCortez for her criticisms of the Trump administration, ran an interview with Sami Steigmann, a Holocaust survivor who voiced his indignation: “What you are doing is insulting every victim of the Holocaust. Shame on you!” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, charged that OcasioCortez “is insulting victims of genocide” with her comments.
The blowback, quite predictably, took on partisan terms, as Republican House members bristled at being accused of complicity in what has rapidly become a major embarrassment for the Trump administration, with reports of children forced to sleep on cold, concrete floors, denied access to showers, clean clothing, even toothbrushes. Rep. Liz Cheney, RWyo., called on her colleague to “spend just a few minutes learning some actual history,” adding that “6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”
Let me relate some “actual history” of this contentious and freighted term, which first gained widespread use during the BoerAnglo War of 18991902 in South Africa, in which insurgent Boer fighters — mostly farmers — failed to throw off British rule. Waging a “scorched earth” campaign, burning Boer farms and killing livestock, British officials established what they called “refuge camps” to hold Boer families hostage. Conditions were so deplorable that some 28,000 women
and children — almost a quarter of those confined — “died in the concentration camps, the majority from epidemics of measles and typhoid,” wrote the war’s leading historian.
Few Americans know anything about the Boer War concentration camps, and the origin of that term. Lamentably, few also know the term was used by the political and military leaders who ordered and executed the roundup and mass detention of some 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry — twothirds of them nativeborn citizens — in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Suspected of disloyalty but never charged with a crime, the entire West Coast population of Japanese Americans — including women, children, and the elderly and disabled — were held for up to three years in hastily erected pineboard and tarpaper barracks, enclosed by barbedwire fencing and guarded by armed troops. Mostly located in remote desert or mountainous areas, the 10 camps — including one that confined 14,000 Japanese Americans in Cheney’s home state of Wyoming — left their involuntary residents with little protection from blazing summer heat and dust, and freezing winter cold and snow.
Shielding the public from viewing the harsh conditions in what officials euphemistically called “relocation centers,” the government produced propaganda newsreels portraying happy boys playing baseball and girls playing with dolls. No mention was made that guards shot and killed at least three elderly Japanese men who strayed too close to the fences; a work strike by inmates of the Tule Lake “segregation camp” in Northern California was broken by tear gas and brutal beatings of strike leaders.
The political leaders who launched the greatest mass imprisonment in American history freely used the term now hotly debated and decried to characterize these detention facilities. The month after Pearl Harbor, Rep. Leland Ford, RCalif., urged Navy Secretary Frank Knox and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that “all Japanese, whether citizen or not, be placed in inland concentration camps.”
Other officials used the term as well in pushing for the detention of Japanese Americans, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized in February 1942 over the objection of War Secretary Henry Stimson that incarcerating American citizens without criminal charges “will make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system.”
This thumbnail history shows that even before Americans learned of the Holocaust, the term “concentration camps” was often applied to mass detention facilities in which “undesirable” groups of people were confined, the literal meaning of the term.
Today’s migrants, largely from Central America, who cross our borders to seek work or asylum, are being held in what can fairly be called concentration camps. Reserving the term for exclusive reference to Nazi death camps or the Holocaust may be understandable, but it’s not historically accurate. Calling something by its proper name, as OcasioCortez has done, strikes me as perfectly appropriate. She cited the kind of “actual history” I’ve recounted here, saying on June 27: “When we talk about concentration camps, if we do not also talk about Japanese internment, if we don’t talk about the Boer War, if we don’t talk about the many times this has happened in the history of humanity, we also erase the suffering of those people.”
Those who condemn OcasioCortez for using the term she did might well look at the “actual history” recounted here before accusing her, directly or by insinuation, of slighting the Holocaust or even of veiled antiSemitism. Regardless of time or place, or the race, nationality, or religion of its victims, or euphemistic labels, a concentration camp is a concentration camp.
Peter Irons is professor emeritus of political science at UC San Diego, a member of the U.S. Supreme Court Bar, and author of “Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases.”