12/28/2023 0 Comments Nytimes chinese concentration camps![]() ![]() My son’s size had been documented, and this made him possible.ĭonald Trump has played this trick on Americans many times, beginning with his very election: first, he was impossible, and then he was President. But a sort of cognitive trick had been performed. He was still the smallest child of his age. His little red dot was still below the lowest, fifth-percentile curve. (This was in the early aughts, and there weren’t any available to me at home.) She had just put him in the system. ![]() ![]() Then I realized that the pediatrician was working with an interactive chart. I felt my body finally relax my child was no longer impossible! He was on the chart. She entered his measurements into her computer, and a red dot appeared on the chart. When he was four, I took him to see a pediatrician in Boston. was concerned, my son, at his age, height, and weight, was unimaginable. No matter how many times I looked, I couldn’t place him-he was literally off the chart. I spent useless hours upon hours in my study in Moscow, where we then lived, poring over C.D.C. My oldest son, who spent his early childhood in a Russian hospital, was for many years extremely small for his age. Or, to use a phrase only slightly out of context, something that can’t happen here.Īnything that happens here and now is normalized, not solely through the moral failure of contemporaries but simply by virtue of actually existing. In crafting the story of something that should never have been allowed to happen, we forge the story of something that couldn’t possibly have happened. This has the effect of making them, essentially, unimaginable. The Holocaust, or the Gulag, are such monstrous events that the very idea of rendering them in any sort of gray scale seems monstrous, too. Hitler, or Stalin, comes to look like a two-dimensional villain-someone whom contemporaries could not have seen as a human being. Despite our best intentions, the myth becomes a caricature of sorts. As for history, the greater the event, the more mythologized it becomes. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison. We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Read: Isaac Chotiner’s interview with Warren Binford, a lawyer disturbed by what she saw while interviewing immigrant children held in American detention facilities.īut the argument is really about how we perceive history, ourselves, and ourselves in history. One side always argues that nothing can be as bad as the Holocaust, therefore nothing can be compared to it the other argues that the cautionary lesson of history can be learned only by acknowledging the similarities between now and then. These almost never go well, and they always devolve into a virtual shouting match if the Holocaust, the Nazis, or Adolf Hitler is invoked. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.” A high-pitched battle of tweets and op-eds took off down the much travelled dead-end road of arguments about historical analogies. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. It is the conclusion of expert analysis.” Hackles were immediately raised, tweets fired, and, less than an hour and a half later, Representative Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, tweeted, “Please do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. The full text of Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet was “This administration has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying. In a Monday-evening live stream, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, called the U.S.’s detention facilities for migrants “concentration camps.” On Tuesday, she tweeted a link to an article in Esquire in which Andrea Pitzer, a historian of concentration camps, was quoted making the same assertion: that the United States has created a “concentration camp system.” Pitzer argued that “mass detention of civilians without a trial” was what made the camps concentration camps. This argument is about imagination, and it may be a deeper, more important conversation than it seems. Almost refreshingly, it is not an argument about facts. ![]() Like many arguments, the fight over the term “ concentration camp” is mostly an argument about something entirely different. ![]()
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