Twenty-Five Things You Can Call a Concentration Camp Other Than “Concentration Camp”

Pity the middling white ego. Noticing nothing but oppression as far as the eye can see. Having its drive back from the Hamptons interrupted by marching Black people, hearing people speak Spanish at the grocery store, encountering homeless people in broad daylight who refuse to decrease the surplus population. Oppression is positively everywhere for this poor, disgruntled soul! 

Now, there’s a new addition to the long list of oppressors of the white ego: the act of definition. The dictionary, the thesaurus, the mutability of the English language that somehow still refuses to let you speak to the manager, even the guy who invented Godwin’s Law. Whose name I can’t seem to remember… 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinks that, just because people of a certain racial and ethnic background are being separated from their families and detained without trial at the border, she can draw some kind of historical parallel to other times when people of a certain racial and ethnic background were separated from their families detained without trial.  

How dare she? Doesn’t she realize that if we want to defeat the right then we need to appease the right? That the fragile ego is best when it is coddled and that it won’t by any means take advantage of our generosity? Maybe it’s just me but I don’t think we are going to get anywhere by riling up the likes of Dick Cheney’s daughter. We all know she’s learned how to waterboard by now…  

And so, in that spirit, in the American spirit of compromise and reaching across the aisle, here are some alternative names for that loaded, ugly phrase “concentration camp.” 

1. Civility Camp 
2. America Was Already Great Camp 
3. Euphemism Camp 
4.Trump International Hotel Rio Grande 
5. Plausible Deniability Camp 
6. Camp Where People Are Concentrated  
7. Liz Cheney’s Wacky Fun Time Camp 
8. Freedom Camp (with fences and bars) 
9. Friendly Neighbor Camp 
10. Concentration Lamp 
11. The American Prison System
12. The Circular Route of History Makes Me Uncomfortable Camp  
13. It’s Not a Concentration Camp Because You Don’t Like to Think You’d Have Been a Nazi In the 30s But It’s Definitely a Concentration Camp and You’d Definitely Have Been a Nazi In the 30s Camp 
14. ICE Bucket 
15. Camp of American Exceptionalism 
16. Mean Puerto Rican Lady Made Me Cry Camp 
17. Gary 
18. The American Public School System 
19. Guantanamo 
20. The American Mental Healthcare System
21. I Can’t Believe It’s Not a Concentration Camp!
22. We’re Still Charging You $1850 a Month In Rent Camp 
23. Actually, They Were Fascists, Not Nazis Camp 
24. Ignore That FDR Also Called the Japanese Internment Camps “Concentration Camps” Camp 
25. Disneyland 

Disclaimer: Lest anyone think I am “making light” of all this, I’ll simply paraphrase Stewart Lee and point out that the aim of this post is to use the rhetoric and implied values of the American moderate (and by extension the American right) to satirize the rhetoric and implied values of the American moderate (and by extension the American right). And even if you’re made squeamish by that, perhaps this explanation will nonetheless save you the trouble of writing an angry and useless email.