Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

“Concentration Camp: A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group which the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable.”

—American Heritage Dictionary

“I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States. All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must, accordingly, be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment, and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.”

–Supreme Court Judge Frank Murphy on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II

“We have two enemies. We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries. If you have a smart president, he can handle them … but the thing that’s harder to handle is the lunatics we have inside…”

—Donald J. Trump

If Adolf Hitler had been a reality television star, he might have gotten away with everything.

One tires of comparing Trump to Hitler, but, to paraphrase the late Johnnie Cochran: if the jackboot fits you can’t acquit. This isn’t to suggest that their atrocities are of comparable scale. However, there is a subtle legerdemain that insists Hitler and the Nazis must remain the ultimate benchman of human depravity, thus comfortably minimizing other acts of heinous cruelty by comparison, whether it be the Armenian, Namibian and Rwandan genocides, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the mass detentions and deportations that preceded them, or, in MAGA America, the systematic internment of individuals the government has collectively identified as “dangerous and undesirable.”

This is particularly true as many Americans remain entrenched in atrocity-denying mode. Even when we reluctantly face up to our own atrocities, we feel compelled to go back to Nazi Germany rather than our own ignoble past to underscore their gravity. “Alligator Alcatraz” morphs into “Alligator Auschwitz” – not “Alligator Manzanar.” That would hit too close to home, if we even remembered them. Then again, maybe it’s the lack of alliteration. How about “Mosquito Manzanar”?

No wonder diabetes is on the rise in the U.S; the language we use to discuss our past – and present – cruelties is cloyingly sugar-coated. The ugly truth such language conceals becomes........

© CounterPunch