Tim Dickinson writes:

Donald Trump’s brutal ICE detention facilities have been blasted as “concentration camps.” This is a freighted term — summoning more than a century of deplorable history. But experts in the field have no hesitation in using these words to describe the network of facilities that the federal government is using to literally warehouse tens of thousands of immigrants — men, women, and even children — snatched out of their communities by masked federal agents.

The activist group 50501 recently hosted a video call on this topic. It featured Andrea Pizer, the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, as well as journalist Frank Abe, co-editor of The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration and a longtime activist in pursuing redress for the abuses of America’s World War II camps.

In his introductory remarks, Abe insisted that Trump’s new ICE warehouses “are nothing but 21st Century American concentration camps.” He added that the subject was personal to him: “I’m a third-generation Japanese American, and I know a concentration camp when I see one.”

The words “concentration camp,” for many, evoke the horrors of Hitler and of facilities like Auschwitz, where more than 1 million people were murdered by the Nazis. But Pitzer drew a firm distinction (as do other experts) between “extermination centers” and concentration camps. The latter are not synonymous with “death camps” — although people held in concentration camps often die by disease, deprivation, or indifference.

Concentration camps have been around since the 1890s and documented on six continents. Pitzer, who has traced that history, offered the audience her own general definition: “A concentration camp is a mass detention of civilians on the basis of identity — something you are, rather than what you’ve done,” she said. “It is generally used without due process. And it is done to entrench and expand political power for an authoritarian-style government.”

The label “concentration camp” has always been controversial. Nearly from the beginning, Pitzer explained, authorities running concentration camps have routinely denied that they are, in fact, running “concentration camps.” The first camps were established by the Spanish in Cuba — followed shortly by the British in southern Africa. But even those Brits were adamant that their camps were different. “Literally from the beginning of concentration camp history, every country that had concentration camps would argue, ‘No. These aren’t really like those other camps,’” making the claim that their regime of mass-incarceration was somehow justified on the basis of public safety, rather than cruelty and control. [Continue reading…]