AOC's Big Lie

AOC and Her “Big Lie”
The View from the Middle

During WWII, Adolph Hitler appointed a man named Joseph Goebbels to the position of Minister of Propaganda. His job was to convince German citizens and then the world that the actions of the Nazi party were noble and the real enemy was the Jews. Goebbels invented a new and very effective strategy called “the big lie”. According to Goebbels, “if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually believe it.” This despicable technique was and is so effective that some unscrupulous people still use it today.

I think the best example of a “big lie” today is when Alexandria Ocasio Cortez equates the detention centers on our southern border to concentration camps in (ironically) Nazi Germany. Ted Koppel, hardly a right-wing journalist, recently wrote a column politely criticizing AOC’s equation. He called her comparison of the US detention facilities on our southern border to concentration camps in Nazi Germany a “facile (shallow) analogy” and added that he believed they were rash and overheated. I’ll go a step further. I’ll call her comparisons an intentional lie. I will suggest that even she, a pampered 29-year-old, knows the real difference and if she doesn’t she just needs to read a book or look at a few pictures of emaciated prisoners from the second world war to understand.

Most of us have seen the pictures of the actual living conditions in the detainment facilities in Texas, Arizona and California and we’ve seen pictures and even some videos of the deplorable conditions in Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka, the most infamous of the Nazi death camps. I’m going to go a step farther than Ted Koppel and call her comparisons ridiculous, irresponsible and even dangerous.

I’ve searched the archives of the Nazi concentration camps and didn’t find a single reference of these facilities having big screen TV’s for their prisoners to watch. Yet, I have seen repeated reports of the detainees on our southern border watching the latest soccer matches and playing video games on bigger and nicer TV’s than the average American can afford.

I’ve seen the examples of the good hygiene welcome packages that internees on our southern border receive. They contain toothpaste, a toothbrush, soap and shampoo. I’ve even seen videos of these detainees being checked by dentists and doctors. I’m pretty sure the inhabitants of Treblinka didn’t receive such welcome packets. In fact I cringe at the absurdity of that remark. If there were doctors at Dachau they weren’t there with the well-being of the prisoners in mind. Doctors like Josef Mengele performed experiments on the Jews, Catholics, Gypsies and homosexual occupants of Auschwitz.

And, of course, we must remember that the people who were eventually imprisoned at Treblinka, Auschwitz and Dachau were not trying to get into Germany or Poland or other Nazi occupied territories. If anything, they were trying to get out!! The people on our southern border are trying to sneak in to this country and flee the poverty, violence and oppression of their home countries. For most, if not all of these people who are illegally crossing our borders, these facilities with three meals a day, exercise yards and protection from the elements must look like an oasis compared to the conditions they left or the dangers of the treacherous journey they had to make to get here.

Finally, to compare the guards and other workers at the US detention facilities to the guards at Treblinka, Auschwitz and Dachau is also absurd. The watchmen in these camps were famous for their cruel, inhumane and even sadistic treatment of their prisoners. The stories are so horrific, I won’t even give examples here to save my reading audience from the revulsion they would experience. The US guards are doing the very best they can with the limited funds they have, and working in facilities that were not designed to handle the number of people who are now flooding over our border.

Tragically, there have been some deaths on our southern border. A young girl drowned as she and her father tried to cross the Rio Grande. Since 2003 there have been 188 deaths and each one is tragic. However, in the Nazi concentration camps there were 11 million people systematically exterminated in just the seven years between 1938 and 1945. These people didn’t die from “poor treatment” or “spotty oversight”. Any comparison of these two realities is just preposterous.

These facilities are not like staying at The Ritz, but to compare them to concentration camps is ludicrous. There are two things we should do to AOC and the like. First, the mainstream media should send a strong message to these people that comments to this effect are inaccurate, reprehensible and even dangerous. Second, we all need to demand that these people do their jobs and change the laws that are encouraging the deluge of illegal entries at our southern border and to properly fund the facilities and workforce that must deal with this humanitarian crisis. If we do not call out the “big lie”, as Joseph Goebbels said, “people will eventually come to believe it.”