Rachel Maddow fronts the below linked piece on bluesky that digs into ICE dention warehousing conditions that could have paraell’s to other times in history of the same thing being called Consentration Camps , which had abuses, and even deaths…..
For the past month or so, I’ve been writing about the abysmal conditions in ICE detention centers. Last week, I argued that you could use the term “concentration camp” to describe the system the Trump administration is using to seize and detain immigrants, legal or otherwise.
Both to expand on that point and to bring in a broader perspective, I spoke to Andrea Pitzer, author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.” Pitzer also tackled this question of identification in a recent piece for her newsletter, “Degenerate Art.” As we spoke about her argument, we tried to place the White House’s relentless drive to expand immigration detention in a larger context.
Our conversation covers quite a bit of ground. If, in particular, you want to learn more about the United States’ 19th and 20th century imperial expansion, let me recommend two books, both by journalists. The first, by Spencer Ackerman, is “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.” And the second, by Jonathan Katz, is “Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire.”
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hi, Andrea. First, could you introduce yourself?
My name is Andrea Pitzer, and I am a journalist as well as the author of a few books. I think probably the most important one in this moment is “One Long Night, A Global History of Concentration Camps.”
You recently wrote an essay for your newsletter called “What Counts as a ‘Concentration Camp’?,” in relation to the use of the term to describe the ICE detention facilities. What prompted you to write this particular piece?
I think there is a lot of concern that I see from different communities, certainly from the Jewish community in the U.S. and abroad, that when people start trying to compare the Holocaust to anything, they’re doing so out of antisemitism. It is a natural response to say, “Wait, wait, wait” — are you diminishing this historical event in some way? And my point is always: absolutely not.
If there is a plain of concentration camps over 130 years in the world on six continents, Auschwitz is this tower that kind of looms above all of them. So, it is critical that we keep that in mind because that shows us where it’s possible for humanity to go. My work has been about, “How did we get to that point and how do we keep from returning to it?”
Now, we are really directly replicating a bunch of that history. And I think it’s become more and more important that we use that term to just to really bring information and educate people about how closely we are following history…..
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These questions of who is a foreigner, who is an outsider, and who is a citizen have gone to the heart of our country from the beginning. And that’s why I think we see immigrants being focused on today. There’s a tremendous hatred movement that’s actively being pushed against trans people right now in the U.S., but it doesn’t have as long or deep a history in the U.S. culture and in the U.S. rhetoric of, you know, deliberate propaganda and polarization. And so the reason immigrants are the people being locked up right now is because of these deep historical fissures.
What Trump is doing that is new is he is externalizing that violence, right? That stuff that was kind of hidden before. Trump is seizing the tools that he’s been left. And he and his allies are working together to do the purging of people of color. The purging of anyone that’s deemed the outsider or the foreigner. It has been weaponized into this much, much more dangerous state. And with the number of detention beds in terms of expansions and the warehousing, the potential for this, we’re really looking at stuff on the scale of the concentration camp systems that most people have heard of. The earlier years, pre-death camp, it’s important to say, Nazi concentration camp system, we are very much mimicking that. And if they get all the beds that they have funding for, we’ll be starting to approach the Soviet gulag as well….
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