About forty years before the Nazis opened Dachau, the Spanish general Valeriano Weyler set up the first modern concentration camps in Cuba. Used to punish rural civilians accused of offering assistance to Cuban rebels, the strategy was to move “hundreds of thousands of rural inhabitants into Spanish-held cities behind barbed wire” in order to suppress the rebellion, wrote Andrea Pitzer, a scholar of concentration camp history, in a 2017 Smithsonian article. In the following decades, the blueprint for reconcentración laid out in Cuba would later be found in colonial South Africa, in American Japanese internment camps during World War II, and, most infamously, in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Drawing on this history, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez compared immigrant detention facilities to concentration camps in a Monday night Instagram Live video. The following day, she affirmed her remarks in a tweet: “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.” She cited an Esquire article featuring interviews with Pitzer and other historians who made precisely that point.

Predictably, right-wing pundits and Republican politicians have responded by working themselves up into a lather, screaming and whining that by deploying the term “concentration camps,” Ocasio-Cortez is diminishing the memory of the Holocaust.