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Next Comes What
5 Ways Concentration Camps Close
00:27:24
The ways that concentration camps get closed down and how we can make that happen. Read the post that inspired this episode: Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What and read Andrea's posts first:...
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A
You're listening to. Next comes what from Degenerate Art. This is Andrea Pitzer. Each week we'll figure out how we got where we are and how to fight back. Last week, the Washington Post laid out the planned expansion of detention by the federal government, noting that Washington will spend billions more than it ever has to have more than 107,000 detention camp beds at its disposal. Their stated goal for more than a year has been to deport at least 20 million people. That's more undocumented immigrants than exist in the country. They are already intermittently detaining those with green cards and even US Citizens. Bless says while officers were processing her into a detention center in downtown, she again tried to tell them she was a US Citizen and did nothing wrong. I gave them my real ID and at one point I gave them even my Kaiser health insurance card. She spent two days in the detention center where she says she had nothing to drink for 24 hours and you have to buy utensils to eat. Although those with representation are typically eventually released, the Department of Justice dismissed her case without prejudice, which means her case is closed temporarily. I don't have any criminal history. I've always tried to do the right thing. I've never hurt anybody in my life. The government has been seeking the ability in California to racially profile and target more people.
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Specifically, they want the court to allow ICE officers to arrest people based off how they look, what language they're speaking, and what kind of work they're doing. The literal definition of racial profiling.
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If they were able to arrest and detain 20 million human beings, as they say they want to, well, I think.
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You have to do it all those.
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People wouldn't be held at once, of course, but it would still be a logistical nightmare. To put that into perspective, the entire US prison and jail population in 2022 was around 1.9 million people. Those numbers would surp, as I've said before, the number of people who went through the Soviet Gulag, a system of concentration camps. The most comprehensive count we have is something like 476 camps. Each one could contain up to many thousands of smaller camps across its entire existence, which spanned more than two decades. If you add up altogether number of people who were in the camps at one point or another, you get 15, 18 million. I've made passing reference before also to ways that concentration camp regimes are brought down and how vast detention projects end. But it's worth focusing on this concept in depth today because it offers some pretty strong indications of what is useful to do at this moment. So for today's episode, I want to focus entirely on what have been the various driving forces to end mass detention of civilians without trial.
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We were able to finally go home after three years in these prison camps. While we were gone, the hatred against Japanese was really intense and it kept growing. So by the time we got home, we were greeted by signs like this, you know, keep moving.
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First thing to note is that a vast network of detention camps does not close on its own. That might seem obvious as I'm saying it, but it bears emphasizing for just a second. The ability to detain civilians is an incredibly potent form of power and historical historically, those who possess that power try to maintain it and to keep those camps. Those who are running the camps will not unilaterally close them. In rare cases, court battles can be the triggering event or at least begin the process.
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Breaking news, a major ruling regarding Alligator Alcatraz coming down tonight.
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A federal judge has indefinitely blocked the detention center from extending, expanding and adding new detainees. The judge's order doesn't explicitly completely shut down the facility, but essentially it doesn't seem like it will be able to operate as it is. But most of the time the power exerted is a tool that is more blunt than courts and requires more direct confrontation with the government. Today I want to go through how concentration camp systems end and what we can do to help get rid of US use of this kind of detention. Just a few minutes ago we heard from the communications director with Governor Ron DeSantis office and his statement said quote, the deportations will continue until morale improves. One quick thing to say is that concentration camps, the mass detention of civilians without any real trial on the basis of identity that these camps are in addition to whatever legal system currently exists in a given country, even when they're officially made legal through safeguard to human rights being limited or removed in some way, camps are an extra legal add on to get around some kind of limits on who can be detained by the government and what can be done to them.
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US Senator John Ossoff says his office has uncovered the abuse of pregnant women and children in immigration detention centers across the country.
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By the time a country gets to concentration camp detention, it almost always means that the pre existing society had deep flaws that allowed for human rights abuses of certain groups.
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The report also says it identified 18 instances in which children were mistreated, including being denied adequate medical treatment. The Department of Homeland Security has refuted the claim saying every single allegation is false. Or the Department of Homeland Security to immediately Issue a blanket denial without any due diligence or investigations of these credible reports of human rights abuses in US Facilities is absurd.
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In the US you can't get to the kind of camps we have right now without a huge prison system which has consistently delivered sky high incarceration rates compared to most of the world. And in the end, we aren't going to be able to protect any Americans from concentration camps without reforming our justice system in bigger ways for all Americans. The reality is we declared a war, a war known as the War on Drugs on poor folks of color. And we have gone into those communities even though studies have now shown for decades that people of color are not any more likely to use or sell drugs than whites. But for today, I'm going to focus on how to end this extralegal form of detention. These mass camps the government is currently expanding. New tonight, Fort Bliss in El Paso is now home to the largest migrant detention center in the U.S. yes, it's a huge step toward beginning that necessary work. And that will be the narrower focus of what I want to tackle today. The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas is condemning using that facility to detain migrants. In the statement, staff with the nonprofits say Fort Bliss has a history of abuse. The base was used to house German, Italian and Japanese people during World War II. I'll look at a handful of ways that massive extralegal detention has been widely downscaled or ended altogether together through defeat in war, through the death of a cult figure leader, through external pressure or intervention, through the courts and through citizen action. The group calls the site dangerous and cruel, adding they'll monitor operations to make sure detainees rights are not ignored. Defeat in war is what brought an end to the Nazis heinous concentration camp system.
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The Allies found thousands of people imprisoned in camps. They encountered piles of corpses and thousands.
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Of skeletal prisoners on the verge of.
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Death from malnutrition and disease. This was their first encounter with the horror of what would come to be.
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Known as the Holocaust. After defeat by the Allies, concentration camps ceased to carry out the Nazi agenda. As an aside, I'll mention that many of those camps did not close. However, they were used as relocation camps for a time and the Soviets made use of them in Russian held areas to deport elements in those countries seen as undesirable to the Gulag in the Soviet Union after the war. You had pouring into the camps, you had people from the territories that the Soviet Union had conquered. You had Russians who'd fought in the west being arrested upon their return to Russia. Soviet citizens being returning to the Soviet Union, you had enormous new categories of prisoners in those years. It's worth remembering that once camps are established they tend to be resilient and resistant to shutdown. Before Guantanamo became what it was known for in the early 21st century, the sort of forever prison in the war on terror, the way that its ambiguous sovereignty as a US base coercively held on Cuban soil functioned was to hold tens of thousands of circum Caribbean asylum seekers. Another example of defeat in war happened during Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia. A small nation, Cambodia then Kampuchea, had been effectively turned into one vast camp itself under the Khmer Rouge, leading to the death of a quarter of the population. From 1975 to 1979 the armed group killed an estimated 1 million Cambodians who they accused of being political enemies. Besides the executions, a million more people died from starvation, disease and brutal working conditions before Vietnam invaded and overthrew the government in late 1978 and the opening days of 1979. In an attempt to prevent the chaos and mayhem spreading across the border into Vietnam, Hanoi sent troops into Phnom Penh. Much to their horror, Vietnamese soldiers discovered mass graves of those killed by the Khmer Rouge. In countries where cult of personality has taken hold, when its leader dies, the country can sit at an inflection point for major change.
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I want to try and get to heaven if possible. I'm hearing I'm not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole.
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The most famous example of this is the death of Stalin in the Soviet Union in 1953. When Nikita Khrushchev took power and eliminated chief of secret police Lavrenti Beria, he almost immediately moved to begin dismantling the massive Gulag. The Soviet Union continued as a repressive state but it did change in significant ways, especially with regard to its vast multi generational detention project of preemptive re education. There were camps before that and there were camps after that, but they didn't have quite the same significance. Even with Berea and Stalin gone, it took several years to undo the larger gulag apparatus. And even after that, arbitrary detention through forced psychiatric holds and labor camps remained part of the regular legal system. Even after the extrajudicial camps were eliminated. Something between international intervention and all out war took place in Argentina in 1982 when the government claimed sovereignty of the Falkland Islands. Control of the island territories had long been a matter of disagreement between the UK and Argentina and the loss of that conflict helped to trigger instability in Buenos Aires as well. With the 1983 fall of military dictatorship that had been in power for nearly a decade. It was here, in the attic of a military school, that Carlos was imprisoned for 15 months. His eyes covered, his hands and feet bound. The school was an illegal detention center for political dissidents during Argentina's dictatorships. It also served as a maternity ward. Pregnant detainees gave birth with hoods placed over their heads. Mothers never saw their babies. The end of the military dictatorship there launched the end of the secret detention, torture and murder of tens of thousands of Argentinian citizens. If outside pressure from an unfriendly nation helped speed an end to detention and repression in Argentina, it was action from a friendly government that created pressure to end mass detentions in Chile in the 1970s. After its 1973 military coup, Chile's generals received support despite widespread detention camps and murders of opponents, real and imagined. The Directorate of National Intelligence, known as dina.
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To the DINA can be attributed. Most of the horrific incidents of torture documented by the Catholic Church and abroad by organizations such as Amnesty International had.
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Likewise been encouraged by the US during its reign over camp and torture sites.
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Its notorious torture centers, including the Villa Grimaldi, which DINA Swisshumer nicknamed the Laughter Palace. The DINA worked together with the dictatorships of Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. And they planned Operation Condor, which was a large scale operation to purge the whole of South America of left wing sympathizers. An estimated 60,000 were killed across the continent.
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But this dynamic changed in 1976 when Dina orchestrated the Washington D.C. assassination of Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier.
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Letelier was now a leader of the opposition against the Junta and a powerful critic of the secret police.
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An assassination that also killed his assistant Ronnie Moffat, who was a US citizen.
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I can see straight in a circle.
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From my window and I see the.
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Place where Orlando's car explodes.
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He made only one mistake.
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He was convinced that nothing like this could happen in Washington. He was absolutely sure that Pinochet wouldn't dare to act here.
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DINA lost US support and was officially disbanded by the Junta not long after. Significant repression in Chile continued for more than a decade, but the massive detention camp phase of largely ended with the fall of dina. Actual change often comes from a combination of both international and internal pressures. To use two examples I've already mentioned today, human rights activists in Argentina and Chile both kept pressure on their governments in ways that forced change over time. In Chile, as in some other South American countries, the Catholic Church played a role. So sometimes, even when government has fallen into authoritarianism, civic institutions can mitigate or even help end mass detention. Outside of outright invasion and defeat in wartime, internal pressure of some kind nearly always plays a role with other factors, creating openings for those who are willing to act. In rare cases, courts have ended camps, or at least the threat of them. This is one of the reasons that keeping even a semi independent judiciary as we now have in the US is important.
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Mitsui Endo and hundreds of other state workers were fired solely because of their Japanese heritage. Mitsui joined 62 others in the Japanese American Citizens League in challenging the firing.
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But even independent judges trying to uphold the law are limited by what they can do.
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With Mitsui and all other Japanese Americans on the west coast imprisoned, the focus was no longer on the state's dismissal of workers from their jobs. So attorney James Purcell shifted to challenging the incarceration of loyal Japanese Americans as unconstitutional.
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So even if we were to magically have a court system that could work entirely independently, there would still be challenges.
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Purcell filed the petition on July 12, 1942. While the case proceeded through the legal system, the government offered to free Mitsue, hoping to weaken her case. But she refused to leave Topaz until the Supreme Court ruled on her petition, which it did in her favor in December 1944.
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Court systems are typically passive receivers of actions launched by other branches of government or by the general public.
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Mitsue's was the only successful challenge to the incarceration.
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They're designed to play a role when cases come before them. Being able to bring a case usually involves a tremendous amount of work. The right plaintiff has to emerge. The case has to be deemed worthy of consideration. There have to be sufficient legal and financial resources to research the matter and bring that fight effectively before a court and pursue it through however many appeals it's going to have a chance to have. So there's often an internal dissent aspect that is required to be active enough to even have detention camp issues reach the courts and be heard in the first place. Concentration camps are one of the favorite tools of repressive governments, but they're also one of the most visible, which means that they sometimes become casualties of that visibility. So, as in the case of Chile or Soviet Russia that I've mentioned, even after that peak of mass detention has passed and most or all concentration camps are dismantled, it doesn't mean that the society is no longer under significant repression. What stops authoritarianism in the long run is a broader question, and it can be brought about by other things, like economic collapse. But in societies where democratic principles are human rights have not been sufficiently bulwarked through institutions. Without a massive reorientation of society, an end to one authoritarian ruler is likely to just lead to the next one. Why are troops stationed here at Union Station on the National Mall instead of areas in D.C. where crime is statistically highest?
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Well, if you've ever been to Union Station and the last few years with your family, you know that crime is actually extremely high right here in Union Station. You have vagrants, you have drug addicts, you have the chronically homeless, you have the mentally ill.
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Concentration camp detention is typically a marker for when the regime's opponents can be openly targeted, where authoritarians have managed to become the governing party or leaders. In regimes without concentration camps, political actors often still have a chance to intervene to halt or undo authoritarianism, as happened recently in South Korea and in Brazil. In Brazil, the courts took the lead and upheld institutions of democracy and electoral integrity. In South Korea, a combination of public protests, courts, police, and legislators acted to preserve the country from an attempt to entrench power via martial law.
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They become the first ever former first lady and former president to be arrested and held in detention here in South Korea. That's the first time in the country's political history that this has happened.
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The US Right now is in worse shape democratically, in terms of its institutions than either South Korea or Brazil.
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You know, Vladimir Putin said something one of the most interesting things.
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The courts are still an important avenue to interfere with the president's illegitimate seizure of power. And the lower courts are doing tremendous amounts to uphold the rule of law right now. But the Supreme Court is corrupt and compromised. And in a high profile case directly related to presidential authority on extrajudicial detention systems in the way that they're being expanded right now, the current Supreme Court is likely to side with Trump as he tries to accumulate more power. Major news from the Supreme Court. The conservative majority handing a victory to the Trump administration by limiting the power of the lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions. So what does this mean for the president's controversial executive order on birthright citizenship? For now, I do expect lower court rulings to continue to do a lot to mitigate the harm being done. Odie Wafsy, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants Rights Project, what's the significance of today's ruling by this federal judge?
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As you know, this criminal court recently opened the door to the potential enforcement of this grossly unconstitutional order against some children. And what today's order means is that no child in the country can be subjected to this order. No child Citizenship can be stripped away.
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But the fact is that we can't count on the highest court in the land to protect democracy. So how final is this? Will this be appealed? Does it go to another court? Or this is it it?
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No. The Trump administration will almost certainly appeal.
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Democratic legislators seem to be at a tremendous loss for how they themselves could take action.
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Right now, Republicans are on the run with respect to the economy. Donald Trump consistently promised that grocery prices.
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Were going to be lowered on day one.
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But costs aren't going down, they're going up.
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And at this point, the US Is unlikely to face invasion or defeat in war. There are a few outside nations with the power to influence US Policy away from developing this suffocating network of concentration camps. But most serious global powers that Trump would be inclined to listen to are in favor of this kind of arbitrary detention.
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I've always had a fantastic relationship with President Putin, with Vladimir.
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Though I would say it is a good idea for democratic countries to consider banding together to impose sanctions on the US against these kinds of activities.
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We have gathered more than 500 credible reports of serious human rights abuses in these Homeland Security facilities. You know, there at some point is going to be a reckoning for all.
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Of this on the cult of personality front. If Trump were to die in office, it would provide an opening for a massive shift in the country's direction.
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If I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.
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But once the infrastructure and bureaucracy of a system of the kind the administration has described as its goal is put in place, it's much harder to get rid of camps. This project of ending them typically takes years and is prone to backsliding or altogether new uses for existing camps. So the fate of the country will depend more on the actions of the people than in many of the cases I have mentioned.
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The question, can it happen again? My answer is yes, under a similar situation to other people, it can happen.
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As I say, almost every week. Here is our grand opportunity. Our courts are still semi functional. We still have access to our legislators and elections. But most of all, unlike so many concentration camp systems I've researched, dissent has not yet been effectively crushed in the U.S. at this point, most of us can act. And the more of us who do, the more we will limit the future actions and capabilities of the current administration. We need only look at North Korea with concentration camps in place for more than 50 years to recall that some camp systems that began haven't ever ended.
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Look at it this way. This could be your child looking at an armed guard wondering, where is he taking this? Could be your daughter standing inside the prison camp after three years wondering, when am I going to get owned?
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So we shouldn't wait for all this to pass.
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The primary way that authoritarians we see this across the globe in Hungary and Brazil and Turkey. The primary way that authoritarians are able to claim control isn't through a lot of repression. It's through occasional repression that scares people. So they know what to do in this administration and therefore they see power right away. Power you don't use, you lose.
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We need to educate ourselves and our friends on how to push back on the role of ICE and border enforcement actions in our communities. The episode from two weeks ago, ICE out of youf Town lists exactly how to do that that we need to support every immigrant in detention or going before a judge, making sure they have legal counsel and their families have support. We need to pressure national and especially local officials to stand up for due process and human rights, immigrant rights, trans rights, and yours and mine as well. These are all bound up together.
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The major tool of an authoritarian is fear, and we're not going to feed that fear. In fact, quite the opposite. We're going to express and show bravery in the face of it.
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And if you still don't know what to do, one way you can learn how is to go to no King's One Million Rising Project where you can look at some recorded events that will teach you not only what you can do, but how to bring other people into action with you.
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So I think we have a lot of control and in fact everybody has a lot of influence about how to what kinds of stories do we tell when so and so gets arrested out of the government or fired or whatnot? We should cheer. Congratulations. Welcome to the club.
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These are real actions that you can take close to home on a regular basis to make a difference. You can find links to those actions every week in my newsletter. Degenerate Art posts are free to everyone and you can subscribe without any financial commitment, but I encourage you to become a paid subscriber to help me continue this work work. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, please subscribe at andreapitzer. Com and consider giving Next comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.