What Exactly Is a ‘Concentration Camp’?

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.

So let’s talk about that history for a moment. When does the concentration camp emerge as a technique for how governments manage populations?

One thing that’s important to get out of the way up front is that without centuries of colonialism and imperial rule, particularly the British and the Spanish, a lot of it in the Americas, but also in Africa and Asia, you don’t get to modern concentration camps. Native American genocide also relates to similar kinds of displacement and detention. But the modern concentration camp, for the purposes of my book, starts in the 1890s. And it only becomes possible due to the invention, mass production and patenting of barbed wire and automatic weapons. So suddenly you can hold a lot of people with a very small guard force.

That starts with Spanish rule in Cuba in the 1890s, putting down insurrection and very quickly appears again in South Africa with the British during the Second Boer War, where they’re rounding up civilians. And that’s a critical thing to say about who is getting held in these kinds of camps. These are not prisoner of war camps. It’s the mass detention of civilians without due process on the basis of identities — political, religious, racial, ethnic. And almost always it is done to expand or entrench political power.

When do Americans enter this story?

Unfortunately, the United States does it very early in the history of these modern camps. We see it in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century. Ironically, and this is something that’s been lost to history, but I go into in my book quite a bit, the reason that America backed that war against Spain in 1898 was because of the images of these earliest concentration camps that they had been presented with. Americans were horrified with what Spain was doing in Cuba and that provided a lot of impetus for the war.

We won that war very quickly. We took over the Philippines. I’m condensing a lot of history here, obviously. This is a very simple version of it. But after some question of whether we had promised the Philippines their independence, we did not give them their independence. And we wound up with an insurrection on our hands as an imperial power. And we immediately, after denouncing concentration camps as something that, for example, President William McKinley said would lead to nothing but “the wilderness and the grave,” the U.S., in fact, installed those camps in the Philippines to put down that rebellion. So it was a very quick turn.

This is a bit of a sidebar, but the Philippine war and the Philippine occupation, the Spanish-American War, are this kind of blank spot in popular memory, right? I bring this up because with the occupation of Iraq, the American experience in the Philippines was brought in to contextualize kind of some of what the United States is doing in the Middle East. These are not the first American experiences with this form of occupation. I think it’s useful to consider, right, how the American experience in the Philippines is again coming back to us in the use of concentration camps.

I do think there’s something really important to say about that, which is people never want to think that the camps they’re doing, that their country is doing, are like those other camps. That’s something I found across the board, across a whole 130 years. As soon as there was one system to compare to the next, as soon as they were comparing the Boer system to the Spanish system in Cuba, people said, no, our camps aren’t like that. These are actually bad people. But if you bake a cake with the same ingredients, you don’t have to have the same recipe exactly, right? You’re going to get something similar.

So in the period you’re talking about in the Middle East with U.S. actions, we see a pre-emptive war, right? It was not a necessary war. It was a war of choice. And you see waterboarding, right? Very specific tactics. You see this same kind of detention. You see torture. You know, Gitmo rose out of that same phenomenon as well. So you see this proto-concentration camp that is between domestic soil and foreign soil. It’s slowly being brought into the U.S.

I think there is this feeling of recognition, right? Oh, wait, we know what this constellation of things is. And it approaches a concentration camp society. We’ve been on this road for some time.

To fast forward to the present, and looking at the administration’s current detention policies, how much of this is truly unique to the Trump administration? How much of it is an outgrowth of American detention policies on the southern border?

It is, of course, both. And that’s an important thing that I’ve been trying to write a lot about. It’s in my book, but I’ve been emphasizing it even more with the second Trump administration because concentration camps are not just a thing that shows up like an alien ship and lands, right? It has to grow out of something in this society.

What are the things in U.S. society that will allow this kind of detention, this mass detention of civilians to take root? The answer is twofold, I would say. It is that we have an extremely carceral state in which local police departments have all of this equipment of war brought over from the very conflicts we were talking about. It is a weirdly militarized, highly violent society where we already lock people up. That’s one important piece of it.

The other important piece of it is that across U.S. history, what is the flashpoint in our society? In Germany, it was Jews that had been vilified for centuries, right? That’s the point where they could have this cultural wedge. What is it in the United States? It is who gets to actually be American. And I mean that in terms of citizenship, but I also mean it in some broader terms as well, right? So from the beginning, Native Americans are not considered Americans. Chattel slavery, we literally are litigating whether Africans brought to the U.S. for chattel slavery are going to count as human. And then with Japanese American internment, which I do frame as a concentration camp system during World War II, the majority of those people were actually U.S. citizens, right? But they were not allowed to actually be citizens in that moment. So who gets excluded that way?

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.

Can you tease out that distinction between the “concentration camp” and the “death camp?”

So Auschwitz and a handful of other death camps were expressly built as part of what was termed the “final solution.” And it was for the mass extermination of targeted populations, particularly Jewish communities and Jews that were rounded up and shipped there deliberately for extermination.

But before that, for almost a decade, the Nazis had opened and run their concentration camp system. And I don’t want to say, death camps were really bad and concentration camps weren’t. It was all terrible. But those camps were not deliberately aimed at mass extermination as quickly as possible to remove people from the planet. They were seen to re-educate people. They were to punish people. They were to hide people. The concentration camp tendency, as I define it, is this impulse politically to remove groups of people from society for various reasons.

When the Nazis took power, they were not necessarily imagining the death camps. They were not necessarily imagining Auschwitz. But it was after having these other camps in place for many years that you then see the doors open to worse possibilities.

Yes, you have this line in your recent piece that “Concentration camps are a process, one that can be interrupted at the beginning but less easily further along, and often only at dreadful cost.”

What I would say to people is that if a concentration camp is a process, how do you know if you’re in it? It is less immediately the instant conditions of detention, because sometimes detention can start out a little more neutral in terms of daily life and the kind of abuses that are there. But always, always, always concentration camps are an end run around the existing legal system. These people that are getting rounded up because whoever’s in power wants to do something that they can’t do using the letter of the law. And anytime you create or expand that kind of detention — and again, we already had some of that before Trump came to office, we’ve got to be clear about it — but when you expand that, when you lean into it, things always get worse in there because it does not have the same kind of oversight.

The very definition of what it is means a lot is going to happen in secret. A lot of it is not going to be accounted for. And we are looking at even more of this lack of accountability, this lack of transparency, with the warehouse-ification. The warehouse-ification will allow people to be more isolated. And I think that the conditions we’ve already been hearing of lack of food, lack of clean water, lack of medical access, lack of hygiene, sexual assaults, beatings, one homicide’s already been declared, other deaths, those are going to get exponentially worse.

I want to return to a point you made earlier because it is so critical, which is that the purpose of these facilities is to do things that you cannot do in the open. This perspective extends to other aspects of the government’s authority, like the use of masked agents, who are masked because they don’t want the legal and political accountability that comes with being identifiable.

Yeah, so it isn’t just that concentration camps are a process, it is that concentration camps are part of a larger thing that happens, right? They’re very visibly and violently getting people off the streets. That’s not hiding it. And the point isn’t that they hide it. The point is to instill terror on the society as a whole, right? To particularly terrorize one group and then to make the rest of the community that’s not currently targeted feel like “I better lay low because I don’t want to be on their radar.”

So the terror side of that on the streets is scaring people very visibly and very publicly. But the terror side of that in the camps is you don’t know what’s happening in there and you don’t want to go there, do you? And so it’s so you can have that secrecy and that public performance of violence both be part of what’s going on. They’re both part of a concentration camp society. And the goal is always to use one group as an example of what can happen to everybody. But first, you have to target that group that people will tolerate being harmed. And for far too long in the U.S., we have actively as an economy and as a country pulled in immigrants, right, while still punishing them.

The answer in the long run is going to have to be, if we’re going to undo the concentration camp society, it has to be that nobody gets that end-run treatment, that nobody gets that performative cruelty on the streets, or that illicit detention in which they are outside the protection of the law. And I think more people are seeing that now that it’s right in front of their faces. But with all the talk of small reforms, I really hope that we, and we do have a few politicians, but I hope we’ll have even more who keep their eye on the big picture, which is in the end, this is going to have to get undone. So you can call it abolish, you can call it dismantle, you can call it whatever, but our existing immigration system is a funnel to create a concentration camp society. We have to change that somehow.

This gets to what I wanted to end on, which is that it is easy for people to think, oh, we can elect, put the political opposition into office after the next midterm elections and impose some accountability. But in terms of actually reversing or dismantling what we’re experiencing — and taking away the tools altogether — it does seem like what ultimately is necessary is a fundamental re-envisioning of just what we want the relationship of immigration to be to the United States.

I think that it’s easy to say that, right? And it’s harder to do it. And one thing we haven’t talked much about here that I’ll just throw one word in that’s really critical is you don’t get to a concentration camp society without years and years of sustained, active propaganda. And so I think we’re going to have to really look at how propaganda functions in the U.S. and its role right now and what’s happening and how we can and how we can press back against that.

But in addition to that, the elections this November are, I think, critical. At the same time, I think we as people can’t wait for those elections to happen. And we can’t assume that they’re going to resolve everything because the natural tendency for anybody just psychologically is to want things to kind of feel normal. And so I think that that’s why we need some leadership staking big visions. And if they don’t do it, then we the people have to do it.

Forty-six percent of Americans were on the record in a recent poll saying they supported abolishing ICE. Like if you can’t seize the public momentum for the reaction to this, then we need better politicians who can, because I think there is a tremendous desire to see something different. And I think that it’s possible to do it. There’s real possibility to make these changes in a way that I will say I have not seen in the other countries that I have looked at around the globe across this time. Because there is still so much individual freedom to act, we have a lot of potential to make those changes. But assuming that we don’t have to actively do it would be a huge mistake.

What I Wrote

My column this week was on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech to the Munich Security Conference and its ahistorical vision of “Western civilization.”

Nothing in Rubio’s account bears any relationship to the exceptional qualities emphasized by either the Revolutionary generation of Americans or the Civil War generation or even those Americans who, during and after World War I, developed and deployed the idea of the study of Western civ as part of an effort to improve “the citizenship, the intelligence and the moral and spiritual life of the nation,” as Nicholas Murray Butler, a former Columbia University president, put it.

I joined the Slate Culture Gabfest to talk, among other things, the new adaptation of “Wuthering Heights.” I also discussed the 1997 action-drama “G.I. Jane” on my podcast with John Ganz.

Now Reading

Stuart Schrader on authoritarianism and American policing for The New York Review of Books.

Adam Shatz on being American for The London Review of Books.

Adam Harris on Black History Month for The Atlantic.

Saida Grundy on the legacy of Jesse Jackson for The Guardian.

Danielle Wiggins in conversation with Perry Bacon Jr. on what today’s Democrats can learn from Jesse Jackson for The New Republic.

Photo of the Week

A slowly decaying pickup truck, seen while I was walking a few months ago.

Now Eating: Rice Pilaf with Carrots and Parsley

This is a very simple rice pilaf that can be used as the base for almost any protein, although I prefer to prepare it with a pan-fried fish, like trout. No modifications but if you want to make this a little less virtuous, add a knob of butter in when you fluff the rice. Recipe from NYT Cooking.

Ingredients

• 1 cup basmati rice

• 2 cups water or stock (chicken or vegetable)

• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

• 1 small onion or 1 medium leek, finely chopped

• ¾ pound carrots (2 large), peeled, cut in half lengthwise if large, and thinly sliced on the diagonal

• Salt to taste

• ½ cup finely chopped flat-leaf parsley

Directions

Place the rice in a bowl in the sink and rinse several times with water, or soak for 30 minutes, to wash away some of the starch. Drain through a strainer.

Heat the water or stock to a bare simmer in a saucepan or in a measuring cup in the microwave.

Meanwhile, heat the oil in a wide, heavy skillet or saucepan over medium heat and add the carrots, onion or leek, and salt to taste. Cook, stirring, until the vegetables begin to soften, about 3 minutes, and add the rice. Cook, stirring, until the grains of rice are separate and beginning to crackle. Add the hot water or stock and salt to taste and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat, cover and simmer 15 minutes, until all of the liquid has been absorbed.

Uncover the rice and place a clean towel over the top of the pan (it should not be touching the rice). Replace the lid and allow the rice to sit for 10 minutes, undisturbed. Add the parsley and gently fluff the rice, then pile the pilaf onto a platter or into a wide bowl and serve.

The post What Exactly Is a ‘Concentration Camp’? appeared first on New York Times.