Surviving Autocracy

by Masha Gessen

twenty-eight-year-old Ocasio-Cortez had won a Democratic primary against a longtime incumbent. At the time of making this comment, she had been in office for less than a week. A year and a half later, she would similarly step forward to call things as they are, this time speaking about detention facilities for migrants. After reporters at The New York Times and the El Paso Times broke the story of deplorable conditions at a detention center near the border and more information on similar centers followed, Ocasio-Cortez secured a visit to such a facility. In a livestream, she used the term “concentration camps.” The following day, she tweeted, “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. This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis.” She linked 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.