Recently, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) ignited a firestorm when she described detention centers for illegal immigrants as “concentration camps.” This caused outrage from across the political spectrum, as well as from Jewish organizations. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) called the comments “ludicrous.” The implication was that the term “concentration camp” be retired because of the Holocaust. Even given a more charitable and limited reading of Rep. Cheney’s comments, the comments more recently from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) were way more clear on the outright rejection of the term. Cuomo said that “there is no comparison to the Holocaust, period”. This is absurd on its face. You can disagree with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s characterization of the detention centers, as I do, but to demand that the term “concentration camp” be reserved for one very specific moment in history and put it off limits for everything else, is ridiculous, an affront to freedom of speech, and, possibly most importantly, ignorant of history. The great irony of this, however, is that, by the time I’m done with this article, many members of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s own party, who are hellbent on canonizing Margaret Sanger as the patron saint of third-wave feminism, are going to wish that the term had been retired. The key is in an article Sanger wrote in The Birth Control Review, which used to be Planned Parenthood’s propaganda arm, in 1932. This article was called “A Plan For Peace”. In this article, Sanger wrote about her plan to improve the world in the aftermath of World War I and huge changes. In the article, one of Sanger’s plans was to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.” By “dysgenic”, she meant people with disabilities, which were all thought to be transmissible at the time In the next item on her list of ideas, Sanger expanded on what she meant by “segregation”. Sanger’s idea for this was “to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.” Farm lands and homesteads? Work for their entire lives? Specifically apportioning these lands to forcibly send people en masse? I don’t know if anybody else has a better word for it, but that sounds a lot like a concentration camp to me. Margaret Sanger, the person who abortion zealots hold up as their greatest paragon, the person who Hillary Clinton once said that she “admire[s]… enormously” advocated putting people with disabilities in concentration camps where they would be forced to work for the rest of their lives. Of course, it is ridiculous that some people seem to want to retire the word, because, without it, there is so much history, so much ugly history that needs to be brought to light, and we need the proper descriptive words in order to bring that history to light.
Sources:
https://www.issues4life.org/pdfs/1932_peaceplan_margaretsanger.pdf
About The Contributor
