Leave The Third Reich Out Of It

I know it’s asking a lot. Especially in a country where we value free speech. 

But could we please have a voluntary moratorium on the following words: Hitler, Nazis, concentration camps? When we’re talking about politics, that is.

Because the casual overuse and misuse of these highly charged words dishonors the six million Jews who were slaughtered during the Holocaust and highlights an appalling ignorance of history. 

The latest offender is the constantly babbling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the freshman congresswoman from New York who has been hogging the spotlight and microphones since she won the Democratic primary against the sane-but-complacent Rep. Joseph Crowley a year ago.

This attention-seeking politician full of half-baked ideas and brimming with misinformation - frequently wrong, never in doubt - has overshadowed all of the other first-term members of Congress with her bloviations. It’s impossible to imagine that her colleagues are any more enamored with her than many of the rest of us.

Ocasio-Cortez’s most recent display of breathtaking stupidity was when, in an Instagram Live video,  she criticized the detainment facilities along our Southern border where thousands of illegal aliens are being housed as they await hearings or deportations and compared them to concentration camps. 

"I want to talk to people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that 'never again' means something," Ocasio-Cortez said in the video. "The fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the 'Home of the Free' is extraordinarily disturbing and we need to do something about it.”

What the hell is wrong with this woman?

When she was called out by everyone from Holocaust survivors to Nancy Pelosi for engaging in such odious hyperbole she doubled down, pretending that her critics didn’t understand the difference between “concentration camps” and death camps and that she was referring to something like what the British did in the Boer War when thousands of women and children died of disease and starvation.

Nice try, lady.

But those of us who actually attended history class and paid attention know that “Never Again” is firmly and inextricably linked to the Holocaust.

Writing last summer, when some other “progressive” used the term “never again” to support gun control, Holocaust survivor Dov Marhoffer indignantly penned this:

In the 1940s, the words Never Again! in German were scrawled on the wall of the Muehldorfer Hart Nazi concentration camp in southern Germany, where 2,200 prisoners, mostly Hungarian Jews, were murdered and buried in a mass grave. For 70 years, the slogan Never Again! has been the post-Holocaust rallying cry of Jews everywhere. It is a solemn vow that millions of Jews will never again be disarmed and defenselessly marched into camps for systematic liquidation because we can resist with the same powerful firearms we might face in the hands of totalitarian government.

How dare a member of Congress - or anyone else - compare the detainment of people who entered a country illegally, who are being housed, fed, given medical care, diapers and formula to the obscenity that befell Jews who were rounded up, taken from their homes, shoved into cattle cars and thrown into camps where they were either worked to death or gassed is beyond the pale.

To defend this kind of Instagram garbage because you think the congresswoman is cute, you loathe the president, you love socialism or you, too, believe in open borders is to debase yourself.

Nothing the current president or his administration is doing in any way resembles the atrocity that was Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. 

So leave the Third Reich out of it.