Andrea Pitzer writes:

Events are moving so quickly that it’s worth stopping to assess where we are. The U.S. government is currently building massive detention facilities, already detaining tens of thousands of people there and elsewhere, with incompetent and deeply racist secret police sweeping undocumented all kinds of people—immigrants, those with their paperwork in order, and US citizens alike—off the street.

We’re hearing grass-roots calls to abolish ICE, while opposition leadership instead speaks mostly about affordability issues. When they do address the current crisis, as House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries did recently on MS NOW, they’re prone to saying things like “we need massive reform to the way in which ICE and DHS are currently conducting themselves.” Note that the “massive reform” mentioned is to the way that the agencies conduct themselves, not to the bad-faith mission of these agencies.

I’ve looked at mass civilian detention around the world. I’ve visited the facilities where people were held. I’ve talked to the people involved—those detained and tortured, those who supported camps, and those who stood idly by. It’s critical to recognize that each of the societies that has had camps underwent a lengthy process. This process is often easier to see happening in your own country if you first look at an example in another one.

My goal today is to warn you that the U.S. has already been seized by the same camp dynamic. It’s not that I’m trying to tell you that bad things are coming, and you have to look out for them. What I’m saying is that the camps have already taken root and are on a fast-track to get exponentially worse. We’re already deep inside the process.

Yet there is power in that knowledge, because in some big ways, we can know what will happen next. We have models for how other societies have moved out of our current perilous state. And we have a ton of tactics we can use to fight back against the expanding harm directed at all of us.

I’ll add right up front that nobody sane now thinks the answer to abuses at Dachau was to give the guards more training.

Today I’ll write about how a society comes to concentration camps, the process we’re already deep into, why the ways we’re talking about events in the U.S. may be unhelpful, and how we can undo it this mess. [Continue reading…]