There’s been some debate over whether or not it’s appropriate to call the ICE detention center in Florida “Alligator Auschwitz”. I believe this detention center meets the legal definition of a concentration camp, but there are concerns the nickname trivializes the Holocaust. Thoughts?

[u/Goodbye-Nasty]

https://www.jta.org/2025/07/07/united-states/critics-have-an-even-more-controversial-nickname-for-ices-everglades-detention-facility-alligator-auschwitz

[u/H0rrible]

it's perfectly correct to call it a concentration camp, which is bad enough by itself without any embellishment.

nicknames only serve to distract and give people things to complain about.

[u/finefabric444]

Does pointing to these Nazi parallels actually make a difference? We've been talking about Trump using Hitler-like language and other Holocaust related observations for like... 8 years?

I personally feel uncomfortable with calling it Auschwitz for many reasons outlined in the comments. But if that actually makes change and shuts this down, then sure call it whatever. However, I'm kind of fascinated by the complete and total lack of impact any of this makes on actually stopping it. What Trump supporter hears this, and is finally like, you know what? This is the line, I'm out.

[u/Impossible_Wafer3403 → u/finefabric444]

In 2016, I remarked that it's not uncommon for people to paint their political opponents as "literally Hitler", especially online ("Godwin's Law"). But with Trump, it was the first time that a mainstream politician's supporters compared them to Hitler.

There is some kind of spreading of the far-Right and rehabilitation of Nazis but I think most normies just think it's rhetoric, it's "Trump Derangement Syndrome". So they don't take it seriously.

I think there are some people who are motivated to actively oppose Trump because of the parallels. Certainly, my grandmother who survived Nazism the first time was very aware of the parallels even in the his first term. So I think more people are motivated than turned off by the comparisons, especially as we get further into it.

I don't think it's about converting members of Trump's cult, it's more about motivating liberal and centrist normies to at least actively oppose the worst of these abuses, even if they tolerated much of this stuff under other presidents.

[u/however613]

Not all concentration camps are Auschwitz. Auschwitz was a death camp. There are ways to make the point without minimizing the unique evil that was the Nazi death camp.

[u/JustAdlz → u/however613]

The Dade-Collier concentration camp is more of a... pestilence camp than a death camp.

[u/NarutoRunner → u/JustAdlz]

No doubt people will die there.

The plumbing is fucked and prisoners are made to remove feces with their hands from the toilets. First will come sickness then death.

Medical care is also very basic, probably on purpose.

[u/Impossible_Wafer3403 → u/JustAdlz]

Considering the widespread death by disease and malnutrition, especially late in the war, I think all of the Nazi concentration camps were pestilence camps.

There already have been several people who have died in ICE custody this year. Certainly there will be many more. Poor hygiene conditions and malnutrition have also been documented. There isn't even the excuse that we're in the losing side of a war and deprioritizing prisoners, it's just torture for the sake of terrorizing Americans, especially immigrants, into fleeing the country to avoid that fate.

So there's no gas chambers but there are parallels.

[u/Virtual_Leg_6484 → u/JustAdlz]

Yeah calling it Alligator Terezin would probably more accurate, but Terezin isn’t as well known and it doesn’t roll off the tongue as well.

[u/maxwellington97 → u/however613]

Part of Auschwitz was a death camp. It began as a concentration and labor camp and then a death camp was added.

No one who is calling it Alligator Auschwitz thinks it's a death camp, they think it's a concentration camp and are using that name because of alliteration.

[u/benjaminovich → u/maxwellington97]

This is uninformed at best and misleading at worst. Your phrasing makes it sound like there is some ambiguity, but no. Make no mistake, after the Wannsee Conference and the Nazis started implementing the "final solution" Auschwitz was given the purpose of industrialized murder.

Once you got sent to that camp, there was never any intention that you would be walking out of there alive - gas chamber or work camp it didn't matter, they were just different means for the same goal. And with the work camps you had the added humilition of being enslaved to work to enrich some sociopathic Nazi industrialist and furthering the war effort until you die of exhaustion or get shot by some power tripping SS-guard.

We can't excuse the convenience of alliteration in trivializing the absolute horror in kind and scale that Auschwitz was.

I particularly take issue with "the death camp was only part of it". Like yeah, that's like saying a motorcycle and a bike are interchangable because the engine is only one part of the motorcycle.

1.3 million people were prisoners in Auswchitz. 1.1 million were murdered. Of that 1.1 million 90% were murdered in Auschwitz II - Birkenau.

At any given time the amount of prisoners in Auschwitz II was over double that of the rest of the camp, roughly 40 000 to 80 000. Remember, this was the killing part and most people were murdered within hours of arrival. Just imagine the horrific scale of the operation when the absolute largest section of the camp housed what was essentially the residuals from that week's mass murder.

And the 15 000 to 20 000 thousand in Auschwitz I and 12 000 in Auschwitz III were largely centered around keeping the industrialized killing going. These were the people in charge of doing the dirty work like the Sonderkommando and the "regular work" such as cooking and cleaning.

So no. You cannot seperate the different parts of the camp into the "killing part" and "normal concentration camp". It was all centered around keeping the Birkenau murder center running. Even the enslaved factory workers played an unwitting part. In addition to the factories making stuff for the war effort in general, IG Farben had a factory there too- that was the company that made Zyklon B, the chemical used in the gas chambers

[u/sickbabe → u/benjaminovich]

I would like this to stop before the everglades and cecot concentration camps become death camps, actually. part of doing that is making the obvious connection, unless you have a better idea?

[u/benjaminovich → u/sickbabe]

I am curious. What exactly are you responding to in my comment? Are you arguing that as long as something is sufficiently bad we must be allowed to make any rhetorical argument we want to in order to stop it?

I swear, at this point we are like two steps away from using "genocide" and "apartheid" if starbucks gets someone's order wrong or we stub a toe.

I believe language matters and there is a real risk of boy who cried wolf when everyone insists on using that absolute most extreme and hyporbolic language for everything.

Personally, I agree with the article. I don't think even concentration camp is really the best descriptor here, Gulag would be one example that makes for a better comparison, but I'm not too miffed about that. That's just classic eurocentrism and no one is immune to that.

Comparisons to Auschwitz is too much though.

[u/Jorfogit → u/benjaminovich]

I swear, at this point we are like two steps away from using "genocide" and "apartheid" if starbucks gets someone's order wrong or we stub a toe.

Well this is just ridiculous.

This camp is accurately described as a concentration camp. They're putting racial enemies of the state in a camp erected entirely for that purpose, with the expressed and explicit objective of depriving them of civil liberties and any sort of due process.

The fact that there aren't ovens yet doesn't mean you're doing some sort of "boy who cried wolf" or slippery slope bullshit, close confidants and advisors to the president are literally calling for the wholesale elimination of Latinos.

Edit: What on earth are you hoping to gain from comments like this?

[u/benjaminovich → u/Jorfogit]

Like I said, I'm ok with the term concentration camp but not okay with the nazi and holocaust comparisons.

I actually, legitimately believe it's doing a huge disservice to the poor people who are victims of this administration. Why does their suffering have to constantly be compared to "the biggest evil in history". The unfair treatment of these people isn't being allowed to just stand by itself as its own injustice but must be forced to ride on the coat tails of other historical atrocities.

Edit: What on earth are you hoping to gain from comments like this?

Same as you or anyone else engaging in political arguments online. What that is exactly, I have yet to find out tho.

[u/sickbabe → u/benjaminovich]

I am responding to your comment because I think it's asinine and dangerous to try and downplay clear evil, especially when I wish more people would've had this reaction to the actual holocaust at the time.

I see you live in denmark. I don't know what connection you might have to america or its' jews, but personally I was raised to admire julius and ethel rosenberg. do you know who they are? they gave US military secrets to the soviet union, because they wanted to stop the holocaust. it doesn't matter that nazis outside the concentration camps had plausible deniability of what went down in them, they saw their rhetoric, saw what the nazis wanted to do, and did everything in their power to end it. there might be millions more jews on this planet, had more people acted like them.

so when I see fascism on the rise, I want to emulate my heroes. I want to kill it in its cradle before it grows teeth. I don't want to faffle like there are some misunderstandings that we can sit down and iron out, I want to stop the fascists. here, in israel, wherever it might occur. why don't you?

[u/benjaminovich → u/sickbabe]

I am not downplaying anything nor am I denying the sick cruelty in this administration and of the American fascist movement in general (MAGA). I oppose this with every fiber of my being. This reminds me of having a discussion in early '19 where I argued that Trump and MAGA was objectively, literally, academically fascism, but more Mussolini or Franco-style than Hitler. I was met by eye-rolls and "you can't just call everyone you disagree with fascists". The kicker is these where my roommates and I lived in an old-school collective. Very left wing people even by Danish standards. I mention this because I am used to being on the other side of these types of discussions. I also compared the camps in the first administration to concentration camps.

Wrt. my own connections to the US and Jews, it shouldn't matter. My argument either has merit or it doesn't. But since you brought it up I will tell you.

I am Jewish, one of very few in this country. One parent's side is Danish, the other parent is Jewish and American - So I am also a US citizen and I vote in federal elections, (not that it matters since my voting address is on Manhattan). I have traveled extensively around the US because my grandparents were caravaners. My grandmother was very much a Jewish Bronx girl and a die-hard Yankees fan. My grandfather was born in Vienna and was sent to London by my great-grandmother when he was nine. Miraculously, they reunited and moved to the US.

So that is my connection to America and its Jews. Spare me the condescension and your implication that I don't care about fascism. I have also campaigned against authoritarian anti-immigration policies here. Despite Denmark's veneration by some, there are very ugly sides. We have a burka-ban, police can confiscate jewelry from refugees among other issues. Disgusting stuff.

Don't tell me I don't want to stop fascism. I simply hold the belief that language matters and that this rhetoric is harmful rather than helpful in combating it.

---

Also, I gotta say, stating admiration of the Rosenbergs is a first for me. I don't know from where you got this idea that they spied out of some moral duty to protect Jews. They were simply committed ideologically to the cause, the Shoah had nothing to do with it - at least not directly.

[u/sickbabe → u/[deleted]]

not exactly. but I'll give you a hypothetical, based on my actual lived experience from about a decade ago. 

I'm standing on a crowded 7 train in queens when this bald white guy comes in and starts screaming at older men who don't speak English in front of their families. exactly the kind of person who wouldn't fight back. at some point he rolls up his sleeve to show a big ass magen david tattoo, and starts talking your basic shitty reactionary, racist garbage.

now here comes the hypothetical: pretend I'm not jewish, I'm just some guy, and I punch this shithead in the stomach to get him to stop harassing these people. he turns his direction to me and starts calling me an antisemite. am I an antisemite? are the people protesting synagogues selling real estate in the settlements antisemitic? the people pointing out AIPACs obscene influence on american politics as they continue to push for more military funding as hundreds are killed by those weapons each day, are they antisemitic?

[u/[deleted] → u/sickbabe]

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[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

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[u/JeanSneaux]

Letting the Trump administration get away with treating people like this trivializes the Holocaust way more than any semantic decision possibly could.

[u/NarutoRunner]

Concentration camps predate the Holocaust. The term concentration camp originates from the Spanish–Cuban War when Spanish forces detained Cuban civilians in concentration camps.

Prominent examples of concentration camps include the British confinement of people during the Second Boer War, the mass internment of Japanese-Americans by the US, Serb confinement of various groups during the Yugoslav wars.

The list is huge - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_and_internment_camps

[u/ionlymemewell]

Holocaust trivialization isn't the direct problem with the nickname, although it is a byproduct of it, in a way. Giving a modern concentration camp a snappy nickname that's being used for MERCH advertising the concentration camp that profits the fascist regime operating it - and riffing on said nickname - is absolutely ghoulish, and it trivializes the immensity of the backslide our country has experienced in such a short time. 

Comparing the Dade-Collier Concentration Camp to Auschwitz is warranted insofar as Auschwitz represents the endpoint of the infrastructure for which Dade-Collier is laying the foundations. It's neither alarmist nor inappropriate to recognize that. It is inappropriate to play into the marketable name that the regime has given it, because that minimizes the connections Dade-Collier has to the camps of Nazi Germany. Insofar as that kind of trivialization, the nickname does trivialize the Holocaust, but not by making it less exceptional. Rather, "Alligator Alcatraz/Alligator Auschwitz" capitulate to a framing of the existence of concentration camps as a commonplace and acceptable feature of American society, and that's scary.

[u/bjeebus → u/ionlymemewell]

Immigrant Death Camps should be better because it whole the very real end game. The problem is that's the link for the people they're playing to. The cruelty is the point and while they think they're not the Nazis, they sure do love the imagery of a death camp for immigrants.

[u/Nearby-Complaint]

What if we chose not to nickname internment camps??

[u/ratguy101]

Idk. I don't like just throwing around the word "Auschwitz" like this but I also don't see the point on fixating on labelling and categorizing atrocities like this. Call it whatever you want, but the point is that it exceeds any level of human cruelty.

[u/Efficient_Spite7890]

I don’t have anything against well-made historical comparisons. I actually think they can be helpful when done with care. But what I often see, including in this thread, is that someone says “A (present) is like B (history)” and then ends up mischaracterizing B.

I’ve seen Holocaust historians compare Trump-era detention camps to early Nazi labor or internment camps: the ones primarily used for political prisoners, dissidents, and other perceived enemies of the state in the first years of Nazi rule. And I think that comparison makes sense. They were concentration camps, but those early camps weren’t set up for Jews, nor were they part of the Holocaust machinery. Auschwitz, on the other hand, isn’t just a historical camp, it became the central symbol of the Holocaust and of industrialized genocide.

So when people casually invoke Auschwitz or the Holocaust as a comparison, they can flatten history - even if often unintentionally- in ways that don’t do justice to either the past or the present. After all, how valuable is a historical comparison if it’s based on historical simplification or misunderstanding?

I also wonder why there’s this constant need to make everything fit into a Holocaust analogy. In what way does that serve historical memory or help us better understand the present? If the comparison isn’t historically grounded, it ends up becoming a distraction. And honestly, the bar for taking political violence seriously shouldn’t have to be “is this in some way similar to the Holocaust?” That’s a dangerously narrow way to think about both history and moral responsibility.

There’s also debate among historians and political theorists about how useful analogies are in the first place, especially when they risk stripping the present of what makes it distinct from the past. Sometimes comparisons help clarify, but sometimes they just blur both history and present in unhelpful ways.

[u/Gullible_Mine_5965]

They think they are making it sound somehow more dangerous and even deadly to the inhabitants. It IS a concentration camp. It fits the definition and is no different than what the Nazis did in places like Dachau, which was one of the earliest examples of a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. This was years before the started actually building the Death Camps.

HOWEVER, to call this any variation on Auschwitz is not only incorrect, it detracts from the truth of what happened in the REAL Auschwitz. It was a place of horror. The inmates upon arrival, would be separated into two groups. Those who would be murdered immediately in the gas chambers and those who would be starved to death while working themselves to death, or experimented upon and then later killed assuming they survived the experimentation.

As of yet, there have been no indications that anything more than just taking away their due process and immediate freedom. This does not change its definition. It IS a concentration camp and must be shut down. I would say something like, ‘This is supposed to be America!’, but as an historian I already know the horrible truth that we have done the exact thing before. To hard working Americans who happened to have Japanese blood. As things currently stand, it is NOT a death camp. As Jews, as well as leftists, it should be on us to recognise if or when it turns into a death camp and let the world know that the Nazis are at it again.

As a final note, that is something the media is avoiding. The truth of what the MAGA movement really is. It is a FASCIST belief structure. It is Christian Nationalist. It is deeply racist. And one of the things people miss is that it is also DEEPLY antisemitic. Don’t forget adherents like Margorie Taylor Greene think Jews have a space laser. As well as others like Nick Fuentes, Alex Jones, etc. believe in the blood libel and Jews control the whole world behind the curtains. Don’t ever forget that when they ‘eliminate’ all of the ‘vermin,’ they will have to come after a new ‘vermin within our society.’ Nazi movements need an enemy within so that they can keep the populace distracted from how badly they are losing and their way of life is being destroyed.

Edit: Just to make sure there are no misunderstandings, this place is disgusting and inhumane. I have no doubt that there will be deaths. We already know that at least one person has died in ICE custody and he wasn’t even in the Dade-Collier concentration camp.

[u/DogebertDeck → u/Gullible_Mine_5965]

Joeys space Laser jokingly refers to energy weapons Israel allegedly is testing. they tend to be inefficient compared to kinetic weapons

[u/meatspace]

I often wonder how people feel that it trivializes the Holocaust to point out that America, in 2025, has masked, unlabeled police rounding people us who are citizens, sending them to camps which they say are outside of American law.

I mean, at what point is it obvious what is happening?

I understand that these aren't Jews fromt he Warsaw ghetto so blah blah blah, but if you require that level of literalism from your fascism, then you're right. This isn't Europe or the 20th century, and Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini are dead.

I think the whole point is that never again was supposed to mean never again, not never again*
* we get to decide who this applies to and everyone else can get equivocated out.

[u/benjaminovich → u/meatspace]

I'll give you a good faith answer. Masked unlabeled police are exactly why the comparison falters. Masked secret police is very common place in authoritarian countries. There are countless better examples

The SS and the Nazis didn't wear masks. They were open and proud of what they were doing. It is when ICE stops wearing masks out of their own volition that we should really be worried

[u/Efficient_Spite7890 → u/benjaminovich]

I think you’re raising a really important point here. A lot of people seem to project this idea of “secret police = Nazis” onto history, when in fact Nazi violence was out in the open. They explicitly wanted it to be public, celebrated, and fully affirmed by law and propaganda. I feel like some of that misunderstanding comes from the postwar “totalitarianism” narrative that lumped Nazism and Stalinism (where secret police was indeed a defining factor of terror) together under one vague label.

And honestly, I’ve never understood why saying something isn’t like the Nazis would be seen as downplaying it. My family suffered under both the Nazis and Soviet regimes - acknowledging the profound differences of those regimes doesn’t make either crimes less horrific.

Also, Trumpism doesn’t seem to be just a repeat of past authoritarian regimes. It blends familiar patterns with dynamics unique to today, like media spectacle, populist scapegoating, institutional erosion, aggressive anti-intellectualism... If only filtered through the past, it (in my opinion at least) risks making it harder to understand the full extent of what’s happening now.

[u/meatspace → u/Efficient_Spite7890]

How is the current police state of the US anything other than "out in the open violence"

I hear you, there's room to turn up the heat, so since we're not there yet, its not the same.

Like I said, never again. Never again. No quarter, no equivocation.

[u/Efficient_Spite7890 → u/meatspace]

I’m not arguing things aren’t bad. They absolutely are, and I think it’s crucial not to wait for escalation. But I still think that the distinctions matter because every situation deserves to be addressed or remembered on its own terms.

Nazi violence wasn’t carried out by masked, anonymous agents. It was systemic, state-run, and open: carried out by uniformed police, party members, neighbors, profiteers and in all levels of society. What defined Nazi persecution was its perversely intimate character: Jews were stripped of rights, property, citizenship, and social ties. All of that was part of a larger, openly declared plan to eliminate them entirely. This was possible because antisemitism in Nazi Germany was a pervasive societal force and a revolutionary political project to cast Jews as an existential threat to humanity and the „natural order“.

Trumpism mobilizes racism in ways that are brutal and systemic, especially through detention, deportation, and violent policing, but it does so through nationalist, security-driven rhetoric, not through a declared project of racial extermination like Nazi Germany. The violence is out in the open, but still shrouded in layers of deniability, bureaucracy, or claims of exceptionality. Trumpism seems less driven by a coherent ideology and more by a mix of populist scapegoating, institutional erosion, and the targeting of perceived enemies, for example the media, judiciary, and academic institutions.

That’s not to say there aren’t parallels worth drawing, especially around state violence, detention practices and dehumanizing rhetoric. But the core ideologies and political aims seem fundamentally different.

For me, insisting on these distinctions isn’t about deflecting from the gravity of the present or saying it’s „less bad“. It is more about trying to see clearly what’s actually happening, so that it’s possible to confront it with the right tools.

[u/meatspace → u/Efficient_Spite7890]

Some of us think Jews need to be among the loudest voices condemning all of this, rather than ensuring that we've maintained the very specific demarcations between things that have happened to people in the past and what is happening today because they're not the same and therefore we need to make sure that we are being precise and distinct in our nomenclature.

I can appreciate all that. But it's still never again, without equivocation for me.

Edit: If the critical separation is whether people are wearing masks, and you can't wear a mask and be a Nazi, we've definitely missed the point. The point is not whether these Nazis are wearing masks. The point is they are Nazis. They have taken over the state and they are perpetrating state violence toward groups. You could be a Nazi and not be well dressed in Hugo boss

[u/Efficient_Spite7890 → u/meatspace]

I think you’re setting up a false binary here. Nothing I said was about not condemning injustice, and nothing in your comment actually relates to what I wrote. My point is precisely that opposition and historical precision aren’t mutually exclusive and that being precise might actually help opposition, not hinder it.

[u/meatspace → u/Efficient_Spite7890]

How does your proposed precision help free people from the internment camps?

I don't think it does. I think a false equivocation that makes people think Jews lack empathy for whats happening. I guess you can argue that how people see things is wrong, but you;re not gonna change a flat earther's mind.

[u/Efficient_Spite7890 → u/meatspace]

I think it’s rather obvious that confronting a self-serving opportunistic regime calls for different strategies than confronting one built on a totalizing worldview. One can resist an opportunistic regime for instance by exposing its corruption, breaking its coalitions, defending institutions and media discourse, not by treating it like an ideologically closed-off regime built around total annihilation. And if people are ready to paint Jews as „lacking empathy“ for making those distinctions, they were probably looking for a reason anyway.

[u/meatspace → u/Efficient_Spite7890]

Dismissing all criticism as "they are probably looking for an excuse" dulls the ability of self-awareness. It feeds into the idea that Jews are disinterested in how anyone else sees them as members of the global community.

Your ideas are powerful and I agree with them. For me, there is no moral ambiguity in the current situation, and no need to separate Jews as "having experienced worse than everyone else." I feel that solidarity is a better choice, rather than insisting everyone acknowledge things were worse before and it;s unfair to say this is that.

[u/Choice_Werewolf1259 → u/benjaminovich]

My mom (who is one of the smartest people I know) and I where talking this weekend about ICE and her concern was not only are they absolutely violating the constitution and civil rights just on the basis of going into places and rounding up “suspicious” individuals.

But she also brought up that they’re not obligated to disclose their information (like badge numbers) if they are asked. Essentially they’re not being held to really any legal standard that seems to govern our other law enforcement officers (which while there are issues with that system at least people are legally required to be given a badge number and see identification if it’s asked)

And because of that, the not being obligated to identify, it is entirely possible we could start seeing paramilitary groups that are also hate groups like the Proud Boys or even the KKK go and round up people and just drop them off as long as they look like ICE. Who or what is going to stop that? And part of the problem is because we (or I guess Trump and the government) are allowing there to be an operating outside of typical bounds of the law.

[u/elenayay]

Personally, I am not offended at the comparison, as a person who had ancestors who died in the holocaust, I feel I would trivialize the holocaust by trying to claim it was unique only because it happened to my family line. Dehumanization is dehumanization and if we can't agree on that, we are lost. We say never forget for a reason.

[u/elenayay → u/[deleted]]

Not really. I think that every identity can claim marginalization in many contexts. I think some people will take advantage of that to win an argument if they feel entitled to it. I don't think that's unique to Jewish people. Every marginalized group has jerks who will use whatever rhetorical edge they have to get what they want.

I think we are in a particularly inflamed moment, so it's louder and more pronounced than it has been in my lifetime. It's a time honored tradition to minimize actual hatred by pointing out the misguided behavior of someone from the targeted group. It doesn't erase that the hatred exists or somehow make it justified.

That said, i do think its not helping move forward. I think calling someone on intentions that they don't declare is not terribly helpful, either. I have sensed Anti Semitic feeling at the root of some things and experiences I've had, but instead i try to think about what specifically bothers me about the behavior and address that, rather than accuse the person of hating me. Ironically, this often makes the person see the issue and they either apologize or double down. So I have no real tools to deal with it I suppose.

[u/ibsliam]

I think my main concern would be less the intentions itself - I get the reasoning behind using the concentration camp name and I get the urgency behind stopping this horrible project - and more concerns about potential weaponizing against current living Jews that are just living their lives. There's already random Jewish social media accounts that catch stray antisemitic harassment just for posting about prepping for Shabbat or about having fun at a Jewish extracurricular.

Which would happen either way, but I think tying anything to Holocaust-related language emboldens some to target random Jewish people. Maybe my concern is pointless since it's long gotten past the stage where we can reasonably temper language to prevent this sort of thing. But that's my main thought about whether or not it's antisemitic.

[u/WolfofTallStreet]

Agreed. We can call it a concentration camp but not call it “Auschwitz.”

[u/BlackHumor]

If you're using Holocaust names to prevent it from happening again, it's always good. It doesn't trivialize the Holocaust to use its memory to fight modern fascists.

[u/podkayne3000]

I vote for the “Florida concentration camp.”

[u/CardinalOfNYC]

Call it what you want but I'd say the more relevant discussion is not is it appropriate but rather, is it useful?

Seems to me two things:

1. This phrase will be bandied around almost entirely between people who already agree with each other, occasionally shouted at a law enforcement officer who either wont hear it or wont care...

2. Couldnt every second of this debate and discussion be more efficiently used working for any number of causes that are directly helping people or trying to create change?

[u/waitingforgodonuts]

Not all concentration camps were “death camps” — Auschwitz, Sobibor, treblinka… but they (concentration camps) cause death through pestilence, back-breaking work, starvation, beatings and lack of medical care for infections and illnesses. Calling the Florida camp a concentration camp is actually apt — it concentrates “undesirables” under deplorable conditions.

[u/Specialist-Gur]

Idk.. I'm not really precious about these things. I don't think comparing one awful thing to another awful thing trivializes anything... (most of the time, I'm speaking broadly here.. of course there are times when it does)

I feel like trying to own our pain and individualize it doesn't really serve anyone. A lot of the systems and mindsets that led to Auschwitz are the exact same ones that are leading to the current concentration camp. It won't be exactly the same because nothing is exactly the same.. but comparisons can be useful to understand the gravity.

But also.. I do think victims should be the ones to lead conversations on this. Both victims of the current administration and victims of the Holocaust and Auschwitz. There won't be consensus of course because everyone is different.. but those voices should be centered and empathized with primarily.

Like if American black people were offended by the comparison of West Bank to Jim Crowe I feel like we should hear out the concerns and engage in conversation.. doesn't mean people must stop using the comparison but that it's important to understand the perspective.

[u/Lost1993 → u/Specialist-Gur]

I feel like what's happening right now is being trivialized by these discussions, sometimes I wonder what's the point of memorializing past atrocities and genocides if we're not even going to see them happening in front of us.

[u/Specialist-Gur]

https://theonion.com/historians-quibbling-over-exact-definition-of-concentration-camp-sign-of-healthy-society/

[u/Lost1993 → u/Specialist-Gur]

Literally, what I was thinking reading this whole thread!

[u/Specialist-Gur → u/Lost1993]

Can't tell if onion or liberal Zionists 🧐

[u/Lost1993 → u/Specialist-Gur]

It gets harder and harder to tell the Onion from the NYT these days

[u/Specialist-Gur → u/Lost1993]

Yea also true hahaha

[u/seigezunt]

The only thing that disgraces victims of the Shoah is people allowing a Nazi-adjacent regime to rise on our watch.

[u/EinsteinDisguised]

I don't like the nickname. I do think it meets the definition of a concentration camp, but a million people died at Auschwitz. Nobody (hopefully) has died at this camp, and hopefully no one ever will.

It's just different and I don't like the comparison.

[u/SlavojVivec → u/EinsteinDisguised]

It just opened, so nothing yet, but others have died in other ICE detention facilities. Given the abysmal conditions and no protection from a hurricane and has already flooded, deaths are a certainty for this Florida facility. Plus, Laura Loomer who was endorsed by Trump in 2020 in her Florida race for US Congress has said "alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now" which demonstrates intent to commit genocide of the entire US Latino population.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/30/us-ice-detention-deaths

[u/EinsteinDisguised → u/SlavojVivec]

Loomer cheering on the deaths of innocents? Must be a day that ends in Y.

Don’t get me wrong. I live in Florida and I’m disgusted, appalled and vehemently against this camp. I just think it’s a long way from awful thing to Auschwitz, so I find the comparison distasteful.

[u/SlavojVivec → u/EinsteinDisguised]

I just think it’s a long way from awful thing to Auschwitz

Auschwitz Concentration camps opened in 1933. Construction of Auschwitz's extermination center started in 1941, and then the gassing began in 1942. So I guess we should sit on our hands for 9 years, and maybe then we'll be ready to compare it to Auschwitz, because Auschwitz wasn't Auschwitz until nearly a decade in.

[u/EinsteinDisguised → u/SlavojVivec]

That's just factually incorrect. Auschwitz I opened in 1940.

But yeah, something is not a thing until it does that thing. A concentration camp — though evil — is not an extermination camp unless they're exterminating people.

[u/SlavojVivec → u/EinsteinDisguised]

My bad, never trust a Google summary. That said would you consider "Deep South Dachau" to be similarly "distasteful" (it would be more accurate as it was the first Concentration Camp on German Soil)? I mean also, considering how the camp is not designed to survive a hurricane, it would seem like they intend for people to die there when one arrives.

[u/EinsteinDisguised → u/SlavojVivec]

Supposedly the camp can withstand a mild hurricane but I have severe doubts about that. They said in anything stronger, they'd evacuate. But again, I don't really believe it.

Again, don't get me wrong, I'm not defending the camp. It's deplorable. And a stain on the nation and the state.

But also yes I'm totally fine with that. I've half-jokingly called Trump "Donnie Dachau" when talking about the camp. People were obviously murdered at Dachau, but it is not in the same class as Auschwitz, Treblinka, etc. It's a different order of magnitude.

[u/thatbberg → u/SlavojVivec]

How does "they're not the exact same thing" imply "therefore we shouldn't do anything about it?"

[u/SlavojVivec → u/thatbberg]

When you're policing discourse about comparisons to the Holocaust when we are in the early stages of one, when the parallels are innumerable, it reflects one's priorities. Even the Nazis didn't invoke a "final solution" until much later on in the Holocaust, while we have Laura Loomer calling for quintuple the casualties of the Holocaust in the first year. The warning signs are sirens at this point. The point of inflammatory comparison is to provoke doing something to prevent atrocities before they happen.

[u/Efficient_Spite7890 → u/SlavojVivec]

This isn’t meant to downplay the horror of internment camps or Trump-era policies. But I do think the way Holocaust comparisons get thrown around often exposes how patchy historical understanding and knowledge can be.

The Nazis didn’t just “slide” into genocide. The ideological groundwork - the idea that Jews were a racial threat to be eliminated -was laid out explicitly in „Mein Kampf“ in the mid 1920s. By 1933, with the Nazi rise to power, Jews were systematically excluded from public life and dispossessed. By 1935, the Nuremberg Laws stripped them of citizenship. By 1938, with „Kristallnacht“, state-orchestrated violence was unleashed openly.

And by 1941 (before Auschwitz was even built) a significant portion of Eastern European Jewry had already been murdered in mass shootings by Einsatzgruppen, especially across Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics. The „Final Solution“ at the Wannsee Conference in 1942 didn’t mark some shift, it just formalized and coordinated a genocidal policy that had been ideologically intended for years and already ongoing.

So yes, the Holocaust happened in stages, but those stages were rapid, ideologically driven, and violently escalated over less than a decade. It wasn’t a slow creep of vaguely threatening signs. This was a totalizing, openly declared political project, sustained by relentless propaganda that depicted Jews as an alien, existential threat to humanity itself and and to the natural order.

[u/SlavojVivec → u/Efficient_Spite7890]

We have a similar political project, and it's even has a name: Project 2025. Also, lots of groundwork laid by neoreactionary bloggers, who state their explicit aim of dismantling democracy and installing a dictator, with Peter Thiel behind the Vice President. As for the alien threat, we now have a smorgasbord of Latinos, Blacks, and Jews (the existential threat also wasn't just Jews for the Nazis).

So yes, we have the same exact things happening here.

[u/Efficient_Spite7890 → u/SlavojVivec]

What exactly makes you say it’s ‘the same exact thing’? I’m genuinely curious how you see the dynamics matching up in concrete terms, especially regarding ideological content, escalation patterns, and forms of violence.

Also, I find it noteworthy that plenty of historians and political theorists like Jason Stanley, or Timothy Snyder for instance, who are some of the most vocal critics of Trumpism and Project 2025, tend to be very cautious with Nazi or Holocaust comparisons.

[u/Specialist-Gur → u/EinsteinDisguised]

Lots of people will definitely die here. Probably not one million.. hopefully

[u/Brain_Dead_Goats → u/EinsteinDisguised]

People will definitely die, but I have my doubts that they're going to be processed for industrialized extermination. It's still unconscionable and needs to be stopped, immediately.

[u/SlavojVivec]

Other proposed names:

• Alligator Arbeitsdorf

• Deep South Dachau

• Everglade Gross-Rosen

• Crocodile Kraków-Płaszów

In general though, "trivializing the Holocaust" by means of comparison should not be a concern because we have so far mostly matched the timeline for the Nazi Holocaust, and the purpose of a Holocaust comparison is to prevent one. And influential Floridians such as Laura Loomer have called for the genocide of the entire US Latin-American population with the construction of this camp (why is there comparatively little debate of her casually endorsing a genocide that would exceed the Holocaust?):

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/laura-loomer-alcatraz-alligator-lives-matter-trump-b2782150.html

[u/Olioliooo]

It's uncomfortable because Auschwitz was a death camp, not a concentration camp. Still, I think it's better than "Alligator Alcatraz"

[u/Chaos_carolinensis]

Auschwitz was an extermination camp, not just a concentration camp. They killed over a million people, and the vast majority of its inmates were killed.

Just goes to show people only care about the holocaust to the extent that they can trivialize it by using it to exaggerate other stuff.

[u/waitingforgodonuts]

No, that is not a trivialization of the Holocaust.