[Aaron Novick]

Mark, I'm glad you're thinking about this, and I post this without expectation of a response.

I think that the Holocaust Museum should see, as one of its central missions, to keep people informed in ways that lower the likelihood of Holocaust-type atrocities occurring again (keeping in mind that, while the death camps were the worst of these atrocities, they were not the extent of them). I think this is impossible if they take the view that analogizing contemporary situations to the Holocaust is verboten across the board—they have willingly eliminated the central resource at their disposal. That, I think, is, in a deep sense, spineless. It's certainly an abandonment of their mission.

Your point that people likely equivocate between "concentration camp" and "death camp" is a fair one. But I have a perhaps different view of the practical implications of this equivocation than you do. In my view, the thing to do is to make the (correct) point that the ICE camps are concentration camps. Then, if people object that they aren't death camps, the appropriate response is twofold: (a) to note that concentration camps and death camps are distinct, and (b) to point out that the Nazis did concentration camps first and death camps second.

Again, the whole point of "never again", as I understand it, is to recognize that the Nazi atrocities unfolded in a series of stages, so that we can recognize when a country is in the early stages and cut it off before it gets to the worst of them. And here is my fundamental contention: the US is several stages deep already. And, honestly, the Nazi comparisons don't really depend on whether we take the remaining steps into utter moral depravity. What we're doing now is already beyond the pale.