March 20 Friday roundup

For the podcast this week, we made an episode from a Friday post I did for the newsletter in February. In it, I address the question of what should count as a concentration camp—a question that has literally been asked for more than a century. A number of people said that the essay had been helpful, so producer Jason and I decided to turn it into an episode. You can watch it on YouTube or listen to it on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere.

Every now and then, I try to remember to throw out a reminder that it’s actually normal and a healthy reaction if you’re feeling overwhelmed right now. Just imagine going back to your innocent, dewy-eyed 2024 self and saying this:

“In the first half of 2026, there will be masked gunmen on the streets kidnapping people and shooting citizens and noncitizens alike. Trump will have turned federal grants over to Elon Musk’s flunkies so that they can use AI to cut funding to anything he doesn’t like. Congress will pass a budget with sufficient funding to make immigrant detention rival or surpass U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons detention, almost doubling the national debt while slashing Medicaid and giving billionaires an enormous tax cut. Trump will impose tariffs globally, alienate all our closest allies, except Benjamin Netanyahu—oh, and start a war with Iran.”

I say that not to depress you, but to remind you that each day we wake up and eventually get reminded about all this. It’s a lot to process morning after morning, even if somehow no new crises come along overnight.

Earlier today, I went online and posted, “Make the thing you want to exist in the world or support someone already working on it.” And it struck me that the words might come off as facile, but I meant them to be absolutely serious.

I’ve mentioned it in a couple interviews, but I don’t think I’ve ever written here on Degenerate Art about how my history of concentration camps came to be. While I was working on my first book, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, different detention camps kept popping up in my subject’s life and work. Most obvious was the Gulag, the seeds for which were planted at the end of Nabokov’s teenage years in Russia. In addition, his younger brother Sergei died near the end of World War II at Neuengamme, a Nazi concentration camp in northern Germany.

But camps came up in other ways, too, including in Nabokov’s 1930’s novel Otchayanie, or Despair. Hermann, the narrator of that book, is deeply delusional in strange ways. No direct reason for his mental condition is ever given. But a passage in which he ruminates on his past caught my attention.

“During the war,” he recounts, “I was interned as a German subject . . . jolly bad luck, considering that I had just entered the University of St. Petersburg. From the end of 1914 to the middle of 1919 I read exactly one thousand and eighteen books . . .”

I hadn’t ever thought at length about World War One internment, or that some civilians had spent five years in exile or detention. Or that more than a thousand books might be available to someone in those conditions. I wondered if those throwaway lines might be a hint of the cause of Hermann’s mental and moral collapse long before the timeline of events that unfolds in the novel.

But most of all, I began to think about camps. I wondered how the idea of mass civilian detention had entered the world in the first place. Had it always existed? What was the relationship between camps in World War I and the Nazi or Soviet systems? Clearly, I needed to find a book that would answer this question.

But the book I wanted didn’t exist. Though a tremendous amount had been written about specific camps systems and individual camps, no one in English, and no one in any language as far as I could ascertain, had published a history of the concept of a concentration camp—how this kind of detention entered the world, how humanity got to Auschwitz, and what happened to camps after that.

Those would be the questions that I wound up striving to answer in my second book, and it was an audacious step to assume I could write it. My educational background was in fact focused on international politics, history, and government. But I’d earned only a bachelor’s degree. I’d recently done some non-degree graduate-level coursework, but had nothing approaching a Ph.D.

Yet during the first months of research for the book proposal, what I found convinced me more and more that not only was this book necessary from a standpoint of world history, but the United States was already hardening into a concentration camp regime. And the ways it was doing so seemed potentially much more lethal than the shameful period in which the U.S. government had used concentration camps to detain Japanese Americans during World War II.

Who was I to attempt such a challenging book? In the end, the answer I came up with was that my writing it was better than it not getting written at all. Some publishers balked at the proposal—after all, I wasn’t a university historian. But two or three expressed interest. And in the end, I wrote the book I’d hoped to find, the one I’d wanted to read. My thought was that at the very least, it might spark a critical conversation.

So when I wrote today about making the thing you want to see in the world, I was thinking about not only how One Long Night came into existence, but also the many ways that people have already risen up in such creative ways to meet the current crisis, building networks for people to come together and learn from one another, using their existing strengths and resources to chip away at the vast government apparatus that’s been weaponized against Americans (and most of the globe) under Trump.

But making the thing you want to see in the world doesn’t just have to revolve around Donald Trump. There’s real value in all kinds of creation. Imagine the world you want to live in ten or twenty years from now. What art or writing or music, what community programs, what inventions and knowledge should exist in that world? What question do you find yourself obsessed with? If you’re not the kind of person to act on your own, or your project is too ambitious to work on alone, who do you want on the team with you to bring it into reality?

Don’t wait to start. We need a beautiful universe waiting on the other side of the current mess to help pull us through. And what if no one thinks to make that thing but you?

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