Summer Camp
Editor’s note: well folks, I did it again; originally this essay was going to be part of a “Six Things I Think” feature about the rise of Americanized modern fascism but it quickly grew into a full-length and heavily sourced article of its own. Although I still intend to finish the now-twice delayed “Six Things I Think” piece, hopefully readers will understand that the timeliness and importance of today’s topic has once again forced my hand.
Please note that this article is part of a larger series of posts about fascism that I’ve been sharing across all of the websites I currently use to publish my work; interested readers are encouraged to follow the links provided in this paragraph to find out more about these discussions.
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“Most white Americans were willing to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of national security as long as they were the civil liberties of someone else.”– Neil Nakadate, Looking After Minidoka: An American Memoir
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Summer Camp
“I’m a Jewish historian. Yes, we should call border detention centers “concentration camps.”: speaking frankly, I think it’s a pretty sick goddamn joke that we as a society are still engaging in a scholarly, and largely semantic debate about the real meaning of the label “concentration camps” while the Pork Reich is in U.S. federal court arguing that imprisoned migrant children don’t need beds or soap, and on my TV defending “detention centers” that keep killing brown kids. As you undoubtedly will have already read in any number of surprisingly frank mainstream news articles, it is indeed absolutely accurate to call U.S. migrant detention centers at the southern border “concentration camps” and yes, detention conditions that could and should also be called “concentration camps” have existed outside of Nazi Germany and the uniquely inhuman tragedy of the Holocaust; to pretend otherwise is to further an objectively ahistorical argument likely delivered in bad faith.
Despite the relevance of correct terminology to this discussion however, I still think there is something entirely too clever by half about the now seemingly mainstream belief that “yes, they’re concentration camps but the situation is not that horrifying because concentration camps aren’t necessarily as bad as you think.” While it’s certainly true that not all prison camps are Dachau and not all crimes against humanity are the Holocaust, quibbling with fascists who’re hiding behind the most horrifying instance of genocide in modern human history, over lexicon, risks obscuring the reality that these atrocities don’t have to literally be “The Final Solution” to be inhumane, unacceptably cruel and objectively genocidal. Furthermore, not even Dachau itself started out as the Dachau that lives in historical infamy – in 1933, conditions inside the camp were probably better than conditions inside American migrant “detention centers” are today; that would of course soon change drastically.
Why is this concept so important to understand? Well, as Pig Empire history has clearly demonstrated time and time again, concentration camps are not an end unto themselves – historically they are part of a multi-stage process that often begins with the dehumanization, criminalization, and detention of the eternal “other” and usually accelerates over time into literal crimes against humanity; including forced labor, callously inhumane or dangerous confinement conditions and finally, at the very end of that process, organized death camps and mass graves. This typically multi-year progression, which has been clearly studied and defined by respected scholars from all around the globe, even has a familiar name; specifically “genocide” and horrifyingly enough, the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that America is already marching merrily down that same tragic path as we speak. Thus, to minimize the very real horror of modern concentration camps is to also help pave the way for future atrocities, crimes against humanity and yes, even genocidal mass murders.
In light of this reality using the term “concentration camps” to describe our vast network of migrant detention centers isn’t hyperbolic or merely correct; it’s a vital act of truth-telling and societal preservation because nowhere is this accelerating progression of genocide more evident than in the historical record of the Holocaust itself – from Israel’s oldest newspaper, Haaretz, emphasis mine:
“The Nazi genocide and ethnic cleansing efforts did not begin as a specific plan to gas Jews and others in concentration camps, but rather evolved over time, beginning with systematic persecution aimed in part at encouraging Jewish emigration from Germany to other countries. It grew from spontaneous murders to planned massacres of Jewish communities, to the establishment of an industrial apparatus for the efficient, wholesale slaughter of a people.”
A Legacy of Silence
Of course acknowledging much of this then leaves us with a number of uncomfortable truths to address, while simultaneously revealing openings for reactionaries, collaborators and apologists to justify continuing along the path towards unspeakable horrors. After all, if migrant detention centers are concentration camps, and concentration camps are part of the process of genocide, then that means American society started that process long before the election of swine emperor Donald Trump.
Confronting reality and halting the progress of genocide requires us to acknowledge that the dehumanization, persecution and criminalization of all manner of politically convenient migrants has a long and often distinctly bipartisan history in America. At a very minimum, it requires us to admit in the present that former U.S President Barack Obama also built concentration camps, locked innocent children in cages and deported millions of migrants while most of society shrugged; our collective legacy of silence has undoubtedly empowered and will continue to empower horrifying men like Stephen Miller until we as a people are prepared to acknowledge our own culpability and cowardice in the face of these mounting atrocities.
By that same measure however, it would also be intellectually dishonest and morally negligent to pretend that the horrors Trump has unleashed on migrants merely represent a static continuation of admittedly racist immigration policies established by the previous, Democrat administration. Much as in the cases of fascism and white nationalism, it seems clear that the Trump administration represents both a byproduct of, and an accelerator for the latent American white supremacy behind these immigration policies.
Personally, I can’t recall a previous administration trying to force Congress to fund an absurdly racist “Border Wall” scheme by taking migrant toddler hostages and subjecting them to such heinously inadequate confinement conditions that they could credibly be described as torture, can you? Herr Donald can try to blame Obama for setting a precedent, and the Pork Reich can parade out its feckless fundie fascist Vice President to blame torturing toddlers on a Democrat-controlled Congress, but at the end of the day the Trump administration is still choosing to persecute migrants and punish brown babies for political purposes and corporate profit. When you see a Department of Justice lawyer on television arguing before a court that migrant children don’t need soap, toothbrushes or beds and implying that there’s nothing wrong with (highly profitable, for some) kiddie concentration camps featuring children looking after sick children and cages packed with kids kept in such squalor, that they literally emit “a stench”, I think it’s pretty clear we’re smashing through the kind of barriers healthy societies simply do not break.
On the streets of our communities, Herr Donald’s fascist rhetoric and the Pork Reich’s hard right shift on immigration are transforming our already violent and reactionary enforcement agencies into an army of brownshirts more suited to conducting the swine emperor’s war on migrants. Under Stephen Miller and Donald Trump’s constantly evolving “Zero Tolerance” edict, ICE has been unleashed; the enforcement violence has increased, the cruelty has increased and the terrorism deployed against migrant communities has increased. Frankly, you don’t have to take my word for it; the Gestapo pigs in ICE have spent the past three years gushing about Trump’s willingness to “take the gloves off” and allow them to abuse (mostly) brown people more freely. Taken individually, apologists have been allowed to pass off each of these changes as merely “getting tougher on immigration” but when studied as a whole, a clear picture of an objectively White Nationalist immigration policy quickly emerges.
Intentions of Violence
In turn, I think this larger viewpoint is necessary to understand why the Trump administration’s racist and cruel immigration policies represent an existential fascist threat; which brings us back to the importance of understanding genocide as a process that can be prevented or stopped, rather than as a tragic event that has already occurred – as is currently implied by the woefully inadequate Rome Statute and UN Genocide Convention.
After many years of studying the history of genocide, I believe the critical element that transforms marginalization and persecution into ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and mass killings is the unleashing of a “genocidal intent” – quite literally, the stated or, in my opinion, understood intention by one empowered group to physically remove, wipe out or otherwise eliminate another targeted group. As it is unwise to announce your intention to commit mass murders in the open public discourse, history clearly demonstrates that this genocidal intent is often of the understood variety and almost always covered up under a fig leaf of enforcing or restoring law and order. The understood or assumed nature of this intent is further reinforced and protected by very public efforts to criminalize, stigmatize and dehumanize the targeted group; thus over time largely guaranteeing mass complicity in the atrocities that are to come. Unfortunately the ongoing international disagreement about whether intent must be uniformly explicit or can be “understood” has also ensured that genocidal intent has often been extremely difficult to prove in a purely legal sense, which is one of the reasons why there remains a furious but largely academic debate about precisely which historical crimes against humanity officially qualify as a genocide. Factually however, the difference between ethnic cleansing, mass murders and a legally recognized genocide means very little to people living under the thumb of murderous fascists; the process is the same no matter what you choose to call it.
Only by keeping this historical perspective in mind and examining the totality of the changes the Pork Reich has brought to “the immigration debate” does it then become possible to grasp the terrifying implications of what swine emperor Trump and his “Waffen SS” advisor have accomplished for the American fascist movement in just over two short years. Although the ultimate outcome of this administration’s revanchist machinations remains unclear, I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to state that Donald Trump has already presented arguments that will be (and have been) used to justify racialized violence in defense of a mythical white ethnostate and helped thereby helped to foster an environment of assumed or understood genocidal intent all over the Pig Empire. The key here is to stop pretending the moronic Klepto Kaiser is playing chess and consider the horrifying logical conclusions of taking the Pork Reich’s fascist dog-whistles on immigration seriously; you and I may know the “war on white people” is a neo-nazi fantasy, but homicidal bigots who already want to wipe out all the brown people, simply don’t care – Trump’s militant, racist rhetoric justifies and normalizes the genocidal ideas they already believe.
Tragically, the fact that Donald Trump happens to be POTUS makes it impossible to dismiss his reactionary, nativist claptrap as merely bigoted words attached to an already cruel but not necessarily white nationalist, preexisting U.S. immigration policy. Trump has been a confirmed racist for decades, but when Downmarket Mussolini calls Mexicans “rapists” and describes migrants as an infestation from the White House lawn, he’s now openly and even officially stigmatizing and dehumanizing brown people in a way that furthers the process of genocide above and beyond the deportation police state apparatus he inherited from Obama. When Trump threatens house to house raids and mass deportations or suggests the U.S. will violate international law by criminalizing asylum seekers, he’s stating his intent to undertake actions that will clearly accelerate the process of genocide in America; and by virtue of his position as president, effectively speaking that result closer to reality. In light of the fact that the swine emperor and his administration keep threatening to seal the border and have all but admitted they’re purposely terrorizing communities while holding prisoners in appalling conditions to encourage non-white migrants to self-deport or stay out of America entirely, it’s probably time to stop assuming this is all some sort of careless accident.
Slowly but surely, with each outrageously racist declaration and objectively white nationalist policy, Donald Trump and the Pork Reich are making the unthinkable more and more likely; and they’re doing it on purpose. Citing neo-nazi conspiracy theories about “white genocide” and “the great replacement” theory while mobilizing the army to address the “national emergency” of asylum seekers at the border may seem like the bumbling machinations of a politically desperate whackjob when taken in isolation, but the underlying consistency of Trump’s ethno-nationalist dog whistle politics reveals a method to the Klepto Kaiser’s madness. By explicitly casting non-white migrants (illegal or otherwise) and even Latino-Americans as an existential threat to white American society, the Pork Reich is establishing the ideological framework for militant, racialized violence in “patriotic” defense of the white American volk; in common vernacular, a race war – and all wars, have casualties.
Trump might not be Hitler, but in the end he simply doesn’t have to be; Andrew Jackson will suit the purposes of a burgeoning American fascist movement well enough in the moment. Once you realize that, a vigorous debate about the precise historical meaning of the term “concentration camps” starts to feel a little bit like trying to drown a fish. As horrifying as the camps are, it’s what history says will happen next unless we find a way to stop the fascist creep, that should truly shake your soul to its very foundations.
– Nina Illingworth
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