Concentration Camps Redux

A few weeks ago, I noted an essay by author Andrea Pitzer about her book on the history of concentration camps and the applicability of her work on contemporary US politics. Let me add the following Will Bunch column to the discussion, which includes more from Pitzer: This column on U.S. concentration camps is the one I hoped I’d never write.

Given the ongoing debate about words and their meanings, let me start here.

One of Pitzer’s goals in writing One Long Night and her follow-up works has been to define what exactly a concentration camp is.

She called it “the mass detention of civilians without any real trial. So if there’s a trial, it’s a show trial.” Detainees are held “on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, or some aspect of identity instead of as a consequence of a specific crime that they’ve done and been convicted of. And it was almost always done for political gain. And what I saw all over, but also in the U.S., was the way, particularly after 9/11 in ‘the war on terror,’ that it was used to sort of consolidate political power.”

By the way, the reference to 9/11 reminds me of Michelle Malkin’s book, In Defense of Internment, which was both a defense of Japanese internment and also argued for Muslim internment in the wake of 9/11.

But back to the discussion at hand.

Bunch addresses the “concentration camp” v. “death camp” issues as follows.

The most famous case study, in Nazi Germany, is also the source of many current misconceptions, since the “final solution” death camps, such as Auschwitz in Poland, where some of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust died in gas chambers, have often been what people think of. But the first well-known German concentration camp, Dachau, opened less than two months after Hitler took power in early 1933, and was used to detain — not slaughter — the Nazis’ political opponents.

The following from Pitzer is especially noteworthy given the reports that James Joyner noted about the Trump administration’s approach to homelessness.

“It was used in a kind of social engineering way,” Pitzer said of Hitler’s early camps. “There were a lot of homeless people, there were a lot of career criminals that they put in the camps to kind of dilute the percentage of political prisoners. So it would be more of a PR thing. People would support it more. You saw detention, particularly, of gay men.”

She also has a warning, based on her research.

Pitzer said her research has shown these camps “almost always transcend whatever were the original goals of even the very bad actors that imposed the camps in the first place. And so what we are looking at potentially happening here is not just sort of Stephen Miller’s visions being fulfilled. We could be looking at something much worse over time that we aren’t even imagining yet.”

To me, all of this raises the question as to when we should be alarmed and, therefore, when strong and appropriate language should be used. I am in the “now!” camp (and fear that we may already be too late–not that I didn’t try before Trump won last November).

The scale of it all is daunting.

Right now, the surge in raids on unauthorized immigrants by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already created an all-time high number of detainees at more than 56,000, which is far more than the federal government can handle. That’s led to horrendous makeshift situations like an ICE office in Manhattan, where leaked videos show detainees held in what’s supposed to be an office, as a man shouts that “they’re treating us like dogs in here.”

The Florida concentration camp model will expand, now that Congress has approved a massive $45 billion appropriation for new immigration detention sites, with another $29 billion to hire more masked agents to arrest people and fill them.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has unveiled a plan for a new network of sites in military bases across the country, including one at New Jersey’s Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst that a critic has already dubbed “the Garden State Gulag.” A 5,000-bed camp planned for Fort Bliss, near the border with Mexico, has already raised red flags after the contract went to an inexperienced firm, but Pitzer noted this isn’t the only problem with using military sites.

“It’s not like it’s a secret prison, but it is a closed space,” she said. “And it’s going to be harder to know what’s happening and to keep track of it.” The author shares my concern that as the concentration camps gain momentum, the purpose of them will shift — maybe to incarcerate protesters or political prisoners, or Americans stripped of their citizenship.

Conditions in these places are unacceptable, in my view. Note the Manhattan office noted above, but also reports out of Florida.

“It’s like a dog cage,” a detained Cuban immigrant, Rafael Collado, said by phone to reporters in Miami, describing a wetlands facility that floods frequently, where detainees lack showers, the food is rancid, the overhead light is continuous, and the mosquitoes are voracious.

For Pitzer, the mosquito plague at the Everglades camp is a revelation of its common bond with the worst camps of the last 130 years. “Mosquitoes have likewise long had a starring role in concentration camps around the world, starting with the first reconcentrados in Cuba in the 1890s,” she posted recently on Bluesky. Malaria was endemic at early camps there and with America’s early 20th-century detainees in the Philippines, but later the USSR and China would intentionally torture their prisoners with exposure to the biting and disease-bearing insects.

There are two arguments for not calling these things concentration camps. One is that they don’t fit the definition. I reject this position, as per the above, they clearly are places of mass detention of civilians without adequate due process, based almost exclusively on ethnicity, instead of as a consequence of a specific crime that they’ve done and been convicted of.”

As a simple matter of historical reality, I am not sure how this definition is not applicable. The notion that only late-state Dachau and Auschwitz are “concentration camps” is a misreading of history and a misunderstanding of the lessons that those places should be teaching us.

However, the public’s association of death camps with concentration camps is the other argument for not using the term. It is the same reason that using “fascist” or other terms that are deeply embedded in our national psyche are often avoided because it takes time to make a case for their deployment.

By the way, I don’t think that this is just an argument over semantics or just something that goofy academics like to engage in. At some point, the selfish person does end up being a psychopath. At some point, “flirtation” does end up being sexual harassment. At some point, “mov[ing] on her like a bitch” and “grab[bing] them by the pussy” is, in fact, rape. At some point, celebrating one’s “heritage” transcends patriotism and pride and becomes white nationalism.

I could go on and on. There is often an ugly endpoint to attitudes, behaviors, and public policies. And, therefore, at some point, the uglier terms are the ones that need to be applied.

Also, I would note that it is one thing to just throw a definition out of a table and say, “See! That is all you need to know!” and writing thousands of words explaining and arguing for that definition (as well as providing a public forum for discussion of the topic).

I agree that sometimes word games and semantics can be a distraction or even an exercise in academic navel-gazing. But more often than not, the meaning of terms and the ideas that undergird them are profoundly important. We mostly communicate with words. Words convey ideas. And power is often linked, for good and for ill, in what we understand words to mean about the objective reality around us.

By way of conclusion, I will state that I hope that I am wrong. That these shouldn’t be considered concentration camps and that the federal government isn’t about to spend millions creating more such site like Alligator Alcacatraz. Indeed, I hope that I am wrong about the conditions in Florida. Maybe all those people are just having a nice visit to the Everglades and are earning HHonors points while they enjoy lovely meals, comfy beds, and the beauties of Mother Nature.

Or, at least, that they are being treated humanely with appropriate legal protections and due process.

For me to think any of those things requires evidence, however. And the evidence to date makes me think that these are, in fact, concentration camps. There may be some political rhetoric reason to use some other term, but not only am I unconvinced of this notion, using another terms doesn’t change what we are witnessing.