Opinion | Nazi Germany comparisons with family separation in U.S. are fair comment

(Yes, I’m aware some of these facilities are rumoured to have ping-pong tables. No, I don’t care. They could have bottomless vats of candy and a trunk of life-sized stuffed animals for every kid detained and the thing would still be evil.)

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Trump and his administration chose to do this most likely because tearing families apart and exhibiting zero tolerance — which is to say showing no mercy — is a powerful deterrent to asylum seekers contemplating trying their luck at a peaceful future in the United States.

Think about that for a second. Those in charge did not have to traumatize kids but they chose to because it was convenient. Later on Wednesday, Trump did sign an executive order that puts an end to the practice of separating families.

But make no mistake. Neither he nor his administration is sorry about what they did. They’re sorry they got caught. They’re sorry that modern technology — a 24-hour news cycle and millions of eyeballs on social media — make it far more difficult to get away with violating migrants’ rights than it was in the good old days. This doesn’t mean, however, that just because their racist agenda is difficult to fulfil, they won’t keep at it. Trump told reporters today that absent toughness at the border, the United States will be “overrun” with immigrants.

Deflecting blame, Trump tweeted the following statement on Tuesday: “Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country.” Overrun. Pour in. Infest. Remind you of anything?

I’m going to say it. It sounds like something a Nazi would say.

To evoke the Holocaust or not to evoke the Holocaust? This seems to be the big question on social media this week (after, remarkably, “Is it OK to keep kids in cages?”). The answer to this question according to many conservatives, Jews among them, is a strong “no.” Don’t go there. Not only is it farfetched to go there. It’s insulting. Citing the Holocaust when you’re talking about anything besides the Holocaust cheapens its memory. Sure those “tender age” shelters are bad, but Auschwitz was worse. Let’s get a hold of ourselves.

Here’s a Trump supporter on Twitter: “Disgusting how you leftists evoke the horror of the holocaust and Hitler for political reasons.”

Maybe it’s because I belong to a generation of Jewish kids who had the “never again” message hammered into their brains at Hebrew school but honestly, to borrow another apt cliché: if not now, when? How bad do things have to get before it’s appropriate to point to a past atrocity and say “hey, let’s avoid going down that road.”

Do I think Trump is planning to murder kids at the border and roll out an ethnic cleansing campaign in the United States? Probably not. But when he uses words such as “infest” to describe asylum seekers, is it really such a stretch to at least allude to another world power in the not so distant past that described minorities like they were cockroaches scurrying across a bathroom floor?

Andrea Pitzer doesn’t seem to think so. Pitzer is the author of the book, One Long Night: a Global History of Concentration Camps. Here’s what she had to say on Twitter about the warehouses used to detain migrant kids in the United States this month.

“Yes, of course they’re concentration camps. They aren’t the unique subset of death camps that were invented by the Nazis for genocide, or even Arctic Gulag camps built for hard labor. But they’re camps created to punish a whole class of civilians via mass detention without trial.”

I understand the concern that when we compare the Holocaust to modern-day events we cheapen its memory. But let’s get real. Its memory is already in peril. Young Americans are overwhelmingly ignorant about Nazi Germany. According a recent survey, two-thirds of millennials don’t know what Auschwitz was and the vast majority of Americans have never visited a Holocaust museum.

There’s no better time than the present to get an education. I say, evoke the past away. And if (I sincerely hope) history proves that we are alarmists for doing so — if every detained toddler is returned to his family tomorrow — so what? We’ll go down as a bunch of yahoos who cried wolf. Better that than the alternative: that we’re remembered as the people who did nothing because “This is bad but that was worse.”