The business of barbed wire

Concentration camps arrive by different routes. In some cases, leaders of a military coup rely on immediate and broad crackdowns. In others, elected officials slowly make certain categories of human beings illegal in the country before resorting to vast roundups. Yet pretty much across the board, these societies have a few key aspects in common.

I’ve talked before about the concentration camp tendency being a process, and that many events have to take place in a country long before camps open. What happens in the middle of that process has predictable patterns, too.

In each case, whatever the existing legal system is gets worse as it warps and buckles under the pressure of extrajudicial processes and detention that become the dominant mode in the country. Another shift occurring in the middle is that the rising extralegal police state entrenches itself. Even if the country had police-state aspects well before its camps era began, those aspects will expand and institutionalize in ways both familiar and new, taking on new powers and using violence in places or against people that might have been exempt before.

In an actual concentration camp regime, the machinery of abduction and detention at some point develops a large enough bureaucracy and budget that it no longer relies on the energy of the malice of individuals at the top who had to move mountains in order to create it. While that malice can certainly be applied in new ways to make the system worse going forward, in the middle stages, the system coalesces to have its own grim institutional momentum, and becomes less reliant on the support of individual champions.

The United States is now solidly in that middle state and moving closer to the back end of the span of time in which we can shut down this process. Today, I want to look at Flock cameras and electric-shock gloves. I want to look at a airline contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars that may well have a sidecar of international detention facilities folded into its details. I want to sit a moment with what it actually means to impose a policy of ankle monitors on Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio.

I’ll address how the police state in the U.S. is metastasizing and institutionalizing in ways that we can act against now but which will become harder and harder to uproot if they aren’t institutionally constrained soon. I’ll give some historical and specific examples of how these processes evolve locally and internationally. And I’ll take a little time to ponder what might be effective resistance.

To start off, let’s look briefly at two very different mid-process historical cases from international developments in concentration-camp detention. Because most Americans know only about Nazi and Russian camp systems, I’ll choose two examples from the Americas, both of which have ties to the United States.

The Oliver Brothers syndrome

The first historical footnote worth exploring is the mass production in Pittsburgh production of barbed wire by Oliver Brothers in the 1890s. As you may recall from prior posts on here, many—but not all—historians consider the first example of modern concentration camps to have taken place in Cuba in the late nineteenth century.

At that time, Spain was trying to put down a rebellion by Cubans in Cuba—a drive for independence the empire had failed to put an end to across decades. In 1896, during a guerrilla war, the man leading the Spanish military on the island, General Valeriano Weyler, decreed the civilians in several contested regions had to evacuate their homes and move behind barbed wire into fortified towns and cities.

Little to no accommodations were made available in those towns. There was even less planning or capacity for providing the extra food that would be required to feed new residents. There was also no opportunity to leave, as barbed wire had been used to divide the country and to not only keep the rebels out, but also to keep the peasants who had been forcibly relocated trapped where they were.

Dividing up the country into multiple sectors via barbed-wire reinforced routes and barbed-wire reinforced towns, as you might imagine, takes a lot of metal. You might ask yourself where on the island of Cuba, in an agricultural economy on terrain paralyzed by war and resources in short supply, the Spanish Empire could come up with so much barbed wire? The answer? In the United States. The enormous corporate empire run by the Oliver Brothers produced barbed wire for Spain in Pittsburgh.

In early 1897, Oliver Brothers shipped out two million pounds of barbed wire to help Spain defeat the rebels. The day they shipped it, the U.S. was only fourteen months from declaring war on Spain. William McKinley, the president of the United States, was less than ten months from declaring reconcentración—this policy of mass forced relocation behind barbed wire—to be horrific. Describing the Spanish government’s atrocities, he said of Spanish tactics, “it was not civilized warfare. It was extermination.”

How did a U.S. company come to supply the means by which to carry out reconcentración in the middle of the war, just months before that same policy would be condemned at the highest levels of government? The deal was arranged by Señor Depuy De Lome, then Spain’s ambassador to the United States.

I would like to note a few details about this delivery. First, the means of warfare and the means of detention were both framed as protective by the authorities at the time. Much of the expansion of both detention and war was conducted by those who would profit from it directly. And those businesses often operated entirely outside the orbit of any kind of government control or regulation, even in a country with leadership ostensibly opposed to both the war and the mass detention itself.

The grill and the gégène

In a bit, I’ll circle back to who’s producing the means of detaining people in camps and violence against civilians in and outside those facilities today. But the other historical case I want to think about before we get to that isn’t related to the origins of the material tools used to harm or detain people, but instead about the origins of the ideas for how to do that harm, because those have their own production lines and distribution, too.

When I interviewed Felipe Aguero about his detention and torture in the Estadio Nacional in Santiago Chile in the wake of the 1973 coup for my book One Long Night, he described various kinds of premeditated violence committed against detainees. One of several that his interrogators inflicted on him was electrical torture.

In preparation, his assailants told him to strip naked then lie down. Wires were attached to his wrists and testicles. As his captors demanded answers to questions, they turned on the switch, completing the circuit that his body had become part of, shocking him painfully.

It was an obscene form of torture, combining terror with physical trauma and the cruelty of coopting the body to take part in harming itself. Where had these interrogators learned such inhumane tactics?

One possible source is Paul Aussaresses, who had been an advocate of (as well as an apologist for) torture by French forces during Algeria’s fight for independence from France in the 1950s and early 1960s. A former French Army general who joined the Free French forces during World War II, he also embraced torture against Algerians a decade later. After moving to Brazil in 1973, he advised military dictatorships in several South American countries on methods of torture—Chile among them. 

Through this route, or related ones, what was known as la parrilla in Chile—”the grill”—may have had origins rising out of the earlier use of the gégène—a nickname for the generatrice, a hand-cranked generator common in the first half of the twentieth century. And where did French forces in Algeria come up with the gegene? In their police forces at home in France.

While an early form of electric torture had been used by the French in Indochina, the first known use of it in France itself was during World War II, by Pierre Marty, a French traitor who was fighting the Resistance at home. Part of a group known as the “French Gestapo” and onetime top policeman in Toulouse, Marty is thought to be the person who brought electric torture to France. Small wonder it found its way to Algeria in the years that followed.

High-level government instruction has surely played a role in the introduction of new tactics in torture. But research from Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy, suggests that government-level meetings at the highest level may be less important than what happens on the ground. He tracks the paths by which torture is passed interrogator to interrogator, locally, almost as a craft. What is allowed in one particular setting can be shared when that torturer goes to the next place. Innovations in pain get passed along.

Evolution of tactics

Why bring up this nasty history? In the middle stages of concentration camps, a system often goes from one dominated by chaotic sadists to one that has a corps of clinical torturers. They learn all the ways to not leave marks while still doing significant harm. This transition from perverts to professional torturers is a common one, and a key step on the path to institutionalizing a camp system.

This process is how you go from a few high-visibility violent cowboys urging mayhem—such as Gregory Bovino egging on his officers in various U.S cities at demonstrations against Trump’s immigration policies—to something that appears calmer. Excessive violence in broad daylight shocks the public and leads to dissent. As a result, after an initial period of terror, that public excess often gets dialed down and hidden away, as the system transforms from one requiring active malice to one that can be sustained almost entirely through malicious negligence.

With a budget of tens of billion dollars for new detention beds already secured and an existing system that has long been designed to harm immigrants, much of the groundwork of creating a massive expansion of extrajudicial detention is already in place. Administration officials now understand, more or less, that if they want this current terror against immigrants to persist, they need to move more quietly and entrench what they’ve built. With the exception of Stephen Miller, most of the apparatchiks under Trump have shifted gears to lower decibels. But they have not stopped.

Those signs of entrenchment are visible outside government offices as well. The Oliver Brothers of yesteryear supplying barbed wire for concentration camps in Cuba may well have have become Eastern Airlines today, winning what may become a $327 million contract to support ICE air operations. As Gillian Brockell has reported, the original call for bid asked contractors to include proposals for running detention sites in third countries with beds for up to a thousand people each. We’ll soon find out whether Eastern is going into the concentration camp business. 

This month, we’ve seen pushback to Flock cameras’ omnipresent surveillance of civilian life. Incidences of stalking ex-partners by police officers using the data from the cameras have been reported. Measures to restrict their use in immigration enforcement are widely seen as insufficient. Recent concessions on the length of time that data is preserved may make a difference, but I’m dubious that they will hold, given that the fundamental nature of the devices relies on and tends toward facilitating a concentration camps society.

We’ve also recently seen the ankle monitors now put on Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. These immigrants have lived and worked legally for years in the U.S. but have now been criminalized by the sweeping changes to immigration policy. The tools used against innocent civilians to control them are not all new, but are used in new ways to exert the kind technological control that secret policemen in the Third Reich could only dream of.

And we see the gloves that give a painful electric shock to anyone grabbed by the wearer. ICE is planning to buy $20 million worth of the gloves, insisting that they won’t be used for torture. But one of their selling points, as with so many past kinds of torture, is that they cause pain but leave no mark. ICE is already torturing people by other means; what will happen if ICE agents wear these gloves isn’t a mystery.

What you can do

It’s difficult, given the budgets allocated, to keep every instance of entrenchment from happening. But for more than a year now, DHS has been struggling to find ways to use that money that will actually create the ever-expanding number of detention beds they want.

Why are they struggling? Because every time they try a new tactic, it gets slowed down or even shut down, and winds up getting a bad reputation. How does that happen? Through what so many people are doing locally—by turning their towns against forced labor in concentration camps like Delaney Hall in New Jersey, and using vigils to call attention to conditions at detention facilities at places like Broadview in Chicago and 26 Federal Plaza in New York. These tactics get foiled locally when people resist warehouses in their backyards, as we’ve witnessed nationwide in recent months.

Just as torturers on the ground teach their tactics to one another, and someone from the police department ends up working in a detention camp and using something he established there, we can claw back our culture on the ground, locally, too. Organize with local nonprofits, and connect with other groups in other towns and cities who have developed successful tactics.

Raise awareness in your community, press your local officials and businessowners to stand against profiting off of inhumane and criminal actions. Where they cannot be cajoled, make them afraid of legal consequences later.

Most people don’t approve of actual harm to their fellow human beings. If you can get out the story of what’s actually going on, these abuses will be met with disgust by a majority of people in the United States. It is tremendously dispiriting that any company would make gear capable of torturing others and sell it to people who torture other human beings. It is dispiriting that some companies are currently submitting bids to build additional ICE detention facilities for massive bonuses on an expedited basis.

But it can happen in large part because most people in the U.S. don’t realize these processes are underway. I am not saying that no one approves of what Trump is doing. Millions upon millions do. But millions of others have no idea what to think, because they don’t actually know about the terrible harm being done in their name.

The more people who find out, the less popular all this becomes. None of us can be responsible for filling the entire gulf in information created by propaganda, the dismantling of the U.S education system, and the collapse of journalism nationwide. But just as with the intimate tactics of cruelty in torture, passed along at the local level, we can reestablish a culture of humanity.

We can institute a refusal to support officials and businesses profiting politically or economically from others’ misery. We can demand basic decency from our neighbors where we live.

People who get captured by heinous political ideas online or who willingly enter groups that encourage them to be their worst selves are not highly susceptible to change. But a public effort close to home reframing what’s normal or acceptable is possible. We can illuminate the crisis for those not yet tuned in to our current reality.

We can keep the next Oliver Brothers from taking that contract. We can keep the government from normalizing the next torture device that it would like to use against the most vulnerable among us. Each tactic we stop helps break the torturers’ guild. Each contract we foil might shut down one more barbed-wire factory. And victory is contagious.

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