Meet the Rebuke

Every now and then one of those stooges of mainstream media provides such a glistening example of toolery that it causes jaws to involuntarily drop and brainwaves to momentarily pause as a means of staving off combustion from sudden overheating.  Chuck Todd of NBC is such a stooge and the video above is such toolery.

Meet the Press, which Todd hosts and from which the above is taken, is one of those institutions of mainstream media that has always inspired platitudinous reverence from the bought-in and the easily cowed.  Todd's forebear on the show Tim Russert epitomized the fictional premise in his day - newsmakers' feet were to be held to the fire by the probing grillings of the elite press. But with a radically centrist viewpoint that has always been as pleasing to its corporate owners and sponsors as the messages of the newsmakers themselves, many of them similarly purchased on their way to the polls, the "grilling" has always been for centrist politicians and those to the right of them a bit more like a warm oil foot massage than a pig's foot barbecue.  The flame is usually reserved for the feet of progressives, and Chuck Todd's "one reporter's view" performance above is a classic example of it.

The inspiration for the outburst was an Instagram post and tweet by Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in which her subject is US treatment of refugees along the Mexican border.

In a rapidly spurted editorial that aired a day after Todd "grilled" Trump in part on this very topic, Todd begins his commentary by saying, "Tonight I'm obsessed with what's happening at our Southern Border."  He soon makes clear his obsession is not with the inhumanity with which US Agents are treating people whose desire to make supplication for entry to the US breaks no laws, a cause pursued as a means of escaping violence and desperate conditions in their home countries (often as the result of policies of our government and consequences of our corporate devastation of the planet).  Rather it's a semantic quibble with language Ocasio-Cortez is using to describe the situation.

According to language arbiter Todd, you can call the detention of immigrants, epitomized by the separation of children as young as infants form their parents and confinement in caged cells a "stain on our nation" or you can call it a "necessary evil [to] deal with an untenable situation "

"But you know what you can't call it?" Todd snidely asks, and lets a clip from Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's instagram chat for constituent answer:

The forbidden phrase: "The United States is running concentration camps on our Southern border."  

The full text of Todd's editorial is worth study for its perfect disingenuous sanctimony  [Bracketed insertions are mine]:

After being criticized, Ocasio-Cortez tried to make a distinction between concentration camps and Nazi death camps, where the industrialized mass slaughter of the Holocaust occurred. Fair enough, but congresswoman tens of thousands were also brutalized, tortured, starved and ultimately died in . . . concentration camps.  Camps like Dachau. [Huh?]  If you want to criticize the shameful treatment of people at our southern border, fine. You'll have plenty of company.  But be careful comparing them to Nazi concentration camps, because they are not at all comparable. In the slightest. 

Here's where it's upsetting as her comments [sic].  Some Democrats have been reluctant to condemn her remarks. They don't want to get criticized on Twitter. Congressman Jerry Nadler tweeted in response, "One of the lessons from the Holocaust is 'Never Again'... We fail to learn that lesson when we don't callout such inhumanity right in front of us."  Jerry Nadler surely knows detention camps are not the same as concentration camps.  In the interim the crux of what's really at stake is lost.  [Again, what?]

We see Todd's odd maneuver of inserting Nazi Death camps into the conversation after acknowledging that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez herself made the distinction in response to the by now expected knee-jerk attacks on her from the right and center.  But have you heard a rationale yet for Todd's assertion that the permissibly arguable "stain on our nation" along the border with Mexico is not a concentration of one group of people, in this case Central American refugees, by a militarized dominant group that is through separation, deprivation and abuse actively containing and dehumanizing them?  Todd has not bothered to define what it is he disallows Rep. Ocasio-Cortez from calling it, let alone dealt with the conditions the congresswoman is effectively describing.  "Surely knows" is not an argument. 

The climax of Todd's editorial is a truly repulsive exposure of his true motive -- obfuscation about the gravity of the Trump administration's atrocious policy toward refugees from Latin America and its execution in the detention centers at the border:

What is this country going to do about what's happening at the border and this humanitarian crisis?  We'll get to that at some point I guess, after we have this debate [about words].  No doubt AOC cares deeply about what's happening at the border.  But she just did the people there a tremendous disservice by distracting from their plight.  She said she didn't use those words lightly.  Well neither did I.

In a nutshell, Todd is saying, "Maybe we'll someday get to condemnation of the travesty after you tone it down, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.  Your truth telling is forcing my single focus spotlight on your word choice alone to the exclusion of what's actually wrong with US policy at the border, apparently.  Shame on you."

Since he apparently doesn't have time to be explicit in his rebuke, what exactly is Todd insinuating about the use of the words Concentration Camp to describe the situation at the border, especially considering his pronouncement that "concentration camp" is not permissible while "necessary evil" is?  The subtext of Todd's condemnatory blitz of words is if the United States does it-- and Trump, as president is after all still a duly elected executive of American laws and policy-- it can't be evil.   If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, but is the American ruling class, it can't be a duck.  But can't it?  Listen (at the link) to this eyewitness account from an observer at a detention center for children in Texas for a taste of conditions there.

In a recent Esquire article, Andrea Pitzer, who has written a history of concentration camps weighs in on the question of whether the American camps qualify.

There have been concentration camps in France, South Africa, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and—with Japanese internment—the United States. In fact, she contends we are operating such a system right now in response to a very real spike in arrivals at our southern border.

“We have what I would call a concentration camp system,” Pitzer says, “and the definition of that in my book is, mass detention of civilians without trial.”

Waitman Wade Beorn, an historian of the Holocaust and genocide at the University of Virginia offers this:

"What's required is a little bit of demystification of it ... Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz. Concentration camps in general have always been designed—at the most basic level—to separate one group of people from another group. Usually, because the majority group, or the creators of the camp, deem the people they're putting in it to be dangerous or undesirable in some way."

The article proceeds to say:

Not every concentration camp is a death camp—in fact, their primary purpose is rarely extermination, and never in the beginning. Often, much of the death and suffering is a result of insufficient resources, overcrowding, and deteriorating conditions. So far, 24 people have died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Trump administration, while six children have died in the care of other agencies since September. 

In her book, Pitzer describes camps as “a deliberate choice to inject the framework of war into society itself." These kinds of detention camps are a military endeavor: they are defensible in wartime, when enemy combatants must be detained, often for long periods without trial. They were a hallmark of World War I Europe. But inserting them into civil society, and using them to house civilians, is a materially different proposition. You are revoking the human and civil rights of non-combatants without legal justification.

On multiple viewings of Todd's hissy fit, I don't think I'm imagining the hesitation and lack of commitment in his manner as he delivers what could only be called a perfunctory and reflexive centrist scolding.  The chiding of Representative Jerry Nadler for his "reluctance to criticize" Ocasio-Cortez is undermined by Nadler's own words which do more in one tweet to enlighten on the issue than Todd could dream of doing in an entire career, again from the top and in full this time:

One of the lessons from the Holocaust is ‘Never Again’ - not only to mass murder, but also to the dehumanization of people, violations of basic rights, and assaults on our common morality. We fail to learn that lesson when we don’t callout such inhumanity right in front of us.

It's useful to remember that the ranks of the mainstream media are graduates of our finest educational institutions, where they undoubtedly once pursued their careers with some sense of idealism and awareness of the world around them.  So why is so much of media today so clueless about issues that matter.   When they are not obsessed with the concerns of their class on horrifying distractions such as when and with what force and if we can manage to frame a case for it, why, to pre-emptively rain retribution on Iran, they are studiously obtuse on issues that affect real people's lives.   I used to think mainstream media's centrist posturing was for the rubes.  I still think it's done largely for their benefit, but the impetus is twice removed.  The authors of this posturing are not the journalists themselves but the class that owns them.