The new ICE confinement facility in Florida, semi-officially called “Alligator Alcatraz,” is by all accounts brutal, unsanitary, and degrading. It’s a showpiece of the Trump administration, whose followers admire it for its sheer viciousness. Some people, including plenty on Bluesky, have taken to calling it “Alligator Auschwitz.” The term trivializes the Nazi extermination camp. Bad as the Florida facility is, it isn’t designed to kill people systematically. Equating the two implies that Jews in the Nazi camps merely had a very rough time of it.

Alligator Alcatraz is a concentration camp, a place where many civilians are involuntarily moved to and confined in without charges or due process. The Japanese-American internment camps of World War II were concentration camps in the same sense, and I’ve used the term repeatedly for them. But it isn’t a death camp. Trump is evil, but he hasn’t reached that level of evil yet.

Referring to ICE as a Gestapo is also fine. The term is a contraction of “Geheime Staatspolizei,” or “secret state (i.e., national) police.” That’s what ICE is, and its methods are similar to the German Gestapo’s, though the latter didn’t hide their faces.

Scott Maxwell, writing for the Tampa Bay Times, reports that he’s gotten emails berating him for not making that false comparison. He responds:

Gov. Ron DeSantis‘ “Alcatraz” moniker may be gaslighting political schtick, but Auschwitz is a place where more than 1 million people were systemically murdered. And before anyone casually tosses around a term like that, they might consider listening to the people who know the history of Auschwitz — those at the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida.
 
The center minced no words in saying that comparing a detention center in Florida to the site of a global genocide “trivializes the horrors of Auschwitz.”

Stuart Rojstaczer, a former professor of geology at Duke University, wrote:

Don’t call it Alligator Auschwitz. Don’t trivialize the Holocaust. I lost too many family members for me not to feel a sting whenever I hear the Holocaust being trivialized.

A certain segment of the left thinks that Nazism consists of any form of disagreement with them. Like just about everyone who’s expressed a non-left view on the Internet, I’ve been called a Nazi a few times. I’m acquainted with someone who falsely called a tech conference a “Nazi conference” because it included some speakers he disapproved of. Curiously, the people who massacred Jews on October 7, 2023 usually get a pass when they don’t get outright applause.

There are darkly humorous uses of “Nazi,” such as Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi.” There’s obvious hyperbole, like “My Nazi boss made me work overtime again.” That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the drawing of full moral or practical equivalence. The people who do that accomplish several things: They dilute the term, trivializing what the Nazis did. They hand their opponents a straw man that’s easy to knock down. And they get a reputation as liars.