Will Bunch writes:

When it comes to the topic of concentration camps, Andrea Pitzer wrote the book — literally. The Washington, D.C.-area writer’s own personal curiosity about the origins and history of this inhumane practice — and her sense that many people view the subject too narrowly through the lens of Nazi Germany or Joseph Stalin’s USSR — sparked her 2017 book, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.

Although her book traces the long arc of cruel and often disease-ridden detention camps beginning in 1890s’ Cuba on the eve of the Spanish-American War, one question loomed largest, especially when it was published in the first year of Donald Trump’s first term and a crackdown on immigrants at the southern border.

Eight years later, Pitzer has no doubt: The push for a network of American concentration camps — rounding up people based on their identity rather than their crimes, holding them indefinitely without due process, in crowded, squalid conditions — isn’t just underway. It’s happening faster than the veteran author could have imagined, especially when compared with the growth of Germany’s camps between when Adolf Hitler took power in 1933 and the start of World War II six years later.

“I’m particularly concerned about where we are now, because we’re well into that five-year period in terms of we’re already doing sweeps, right?” Pitzer said. “We’ve already got masked guys. We’re already disappearing hundreds of people to … foreign countries, or to the Everglades, or now to Fort Bliss” — the El Paso, Texas, military base, which the Trump regime just awarded a $1.2 billion contract for a large new camp.

When I connected with Pitzer this week, she was trying to finish an unrelated project, but kept getting interrupted by pesky journalists like me wanting to talk about One Long Night and the rapid push to erect a U.S. gulag archipelago of camps like the large one hastily thrown up by Florida officials in the fetid swamps of the Everglades.

Anyone clinging to their belief that a democracy like the United States could never go down the trail of large-scale inhumanity blazed by 1930s’ Germany or Russia should have had that faith shattered by the $600 million-a-year, constructed-in-days immigrant detention camp that opened on July 1 in the swampland west of Miami.

Just the quasi-official name bestowed on the new camp by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and others — “Alligator Alcatraz,” reinforced by government tweets of fierce reptiles wearing “ICE” caps and Trump’s jokes about immigrants running from the Everglades’ man-eaters — is the cruelty-is-the-point exclamation mark. Pitzer and other critics of the regime’s mass deportation agenda refuse to call it by the sadistic name, but the alligator branding is hardly the only clue to intentional inhumanity. [Continue reading…]