"The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border — and that is exactly what they are." This historian says the backlash over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling migrant detention centers "concentration camps" ignores their history.
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00:00I think Congresswoman AOC needs to apologize, not only to the nation, but to the world.
00:04She does not understand history.
00:14Does she not owe every Jew on this planet an apology?
00:18When you say concentration camps, you're not necessarily implying Nazi death camps.
00:30A lot of people in the current debate are saying AOC is obviously wrong because she's
00:46saying that these camps are the same as death camps.
00:51And the key point here is that, firstly, concentration camps existed long before the Nazis.
00:58They existed for over 30 years before the Nazis.
01:02It's important because if you're making comparisons, when you say concentration camps, you're not
01:08necessarily implying Nazi death camps.
01:12The term concentration camp was actually invented at a particular point in time by the British
01:17during the World War in South Africa between 1899 and 1902.
01:23And it's to capture the idea that they wanted to round up civilian populations who were
01:29supporting guerrillas.
01:30And what the British decided to do is to take the women and children out of the farms and
01:36also a lot of the African farm laborers off those farms and put them in camps, which they
01:43call concentration camps.
01:54Any time you put large numbers of people in camps with limited resources, there's an immediate
02:03danger of a health catastrophe, you know, that you have lots of people who don't have
02:12adequate sanitation and nutrition, they're liable to get very sick.
02:17There's an interesting comparison to today in the sense that we see a lot about how the
02:25parents are irresponsible for bringing their children on these journeys and so on.
02:32It's a way of deflecting responsibility from the state.
02:38International law, as it's evolved, does not assume that you can only have rights if you're
02:43a citizen.
02:44You have to run rights as a human being.
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