Concentration camp nation?

Is Donald Trump's gift to these disUnited States to build a national system of concentration camps? Is that what the massive new system of DHS detention warehouses ostensibly to hold victims of his immigrant cleansing policies portends? We're not used to thinking of ourselves as a concentration camp country, but perhaps we should. 

Journalist Andrea Pitzer wrote a massive book that came out in 2017 that surveys the spread of these camps around the world through the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps argues that internment camps are a novel feature of modernity, peculiar to our time. Should we be surprised that the backward looking Trump regime is recreating one of the recent pasts' worst features? 

Pitzer defines her subject:

... The history of concentration camps circles from Cuba [under Spanish rule in 1896] around the world and back [to the USofA's Guantanamo], visiting six continents and nearly every country along the way. Camps have been in existence continuously somewhere on the globe for more than a hundred years. Barracks and barbed wire remain their most familiar symbols, but a camp is defined more by its detainees than by any physical feature. A concentration camp exists wherever a government holds groups of civilians outside the normal legal process -- sometimes to segregate people considered foreigners or outsiders, sometimes to punish.

If prisons are meant for suspects convicted of crimes after a trial, a concentration camp holds those who, most often, had no real trial at all. ... Concentration camps house civilians rather than that combatants -- though at many points, from World War I to Guantanamo, camp administrators have not always made an effort to distinguish between the two. Detainees are typically held because of their racial, cultural, religious, or political identity, not because of any prosecutable offense -- though some states have remedied this flaw by making legal existence next to impossible. Which is not to say that all detainees are innocent of criminal actions against the government in any given system; rather, the innocent and the guilty alike may be swept up without distinction or recourse.

... detention is announced as preventative, to keep a suspect group from committing potential future crimes. If mass civilian detention without trial is the defining feature of a camp, then it becomes possible to look at a whole host of categories of camps, many of which have interrelated histories over time. ... Political philosopher Hannah Arendt described concentration camps as divided into Purgatory, Hades, and Hell, moving from the netherland of internment to the labor camps of the [Soviet] Gulag and [to] Nazi death factories. But nearly all concentration camps share one feature: they extract people from one area to house them somewhere else.

It sounds like a simple concept, but both elements are distinct and important. Camps require the removal of a population from a society with all its accompanying rights, relationships, connections to humanity. This exclusion is followed by an involuntary assignment to some lesser condition or place, generally detention with other undesirables under armed guard. ...

... Concentration camps are at heart a modern phenomenon and belong in the company of the atomic bomb as one of the few advanced innovations in violence. Just as other kinds of bombs existed before nuclear devices were developed, concentration camps also had precursors, but nonetheless represented a deliberate escalation and transformation of previous tactics. In both cases, observers realized that some dangerous genie was being released from a bottle, but in neither instance would it have been possible to imagine everything that would follow. 

The book, as befits its subtitle, is a historical-geographical tour of horrors, each with its peculiar national characteristics. Pitzer credits Spanish generals' doomed effort to hold on to their Cuban colony with inventing the modern form; within a few short years, the Americans who had thrown the Spaniards out of Cuba were using a similar system of civil internment to attempt to subjugate our newly acquired Philippine colony. Soon the British were replicating such camps during their imperial war against Boer Afrikaners in South Africa; nearby, German imperial authorities in Southwest Africa came close to exterminating the Herero people by forcing them into detention.

World War I saw internment of foreigners implemented widely by belligerent countries across Europe. And after that war and through the troubled decades that followed came the most widely known detention facilities -- Nazi extermination factories and the Soviet Gulag -- which usually we think of when we hear "concentration camps."

Across the globe, the long series of post-1945 decolonization struggles and internal wars across Asia in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Malay peninsula led to further camps run by several authorities. Concentration camps of a sort went alongside wars of liberation.

Africa was not spared. Both Algeria and Kenya were the sites of murderous concentration camps during their independence battles.

And so, Pitzer comes back the Americas, focusing on "dirty wars" on citizens who opposed right wing dictatorships in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s. She highlights the United States' experiment with internment of Japanese-origin residents and citizens during WWII and goes on to our Guantanamo camp created after 9/11.

Pitzer is a journalist, not an historian. She recounts these horrors through individual personal stories. The result is both horrifying and very partial. But just maybe, this mode is the only way we can begin to imagine the cruelties (and infrequent eruptions of kindness) that some people are willing to inflict on others under enabling circumstances. 

She is well aware what her method adds and erases.  

It is tempting to see the prisoners' stories braided through this book as somehow representative. In many ways, they are not. Most crucially, these are by and large stories of those who survived. In addition, the prisoners mentioned here are, on the whole, more educated, more politically active, and more likely to have been tied to networks of people inclined to help them. They often got administrative jobs, medicine from friends, or special favors.

While many concentration camps did hold intellectuals, political figures, writers, and business owners, the majority of those sent to camps across the century were poor, illiterate, or apolitical. They are the least likely people to have a chance to tell their stories, and perhaps also the least likely to end up having their stories told by someone else.The loss of their accounts necessarily makes any panoramic picture of the camps incomplete. 

This book is literally weighty -- 400 plus pages. Fortunately, Pitzer offered a solid summary of her research in this six minute video interview which some may find more approachable. The interviewers are weird -- one ignorant, one pretentious -- but Pitzer knows her stuff and applies her knowledge to our present circumstances. 

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In case you wondered as I did, the title phrase "One Long Night" comes from an epigraph she takes from Holocaust survivor and memoirist Elie Wiesel in Night:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.