The concentration camp tendency, part 2

Hi, everyone! Many of you know that I took a two-week hiatus to help crew a ship from the Netherlands up to Norway for its work in the Arctic this summer. Except that’s not quite what ended up happening… The ship had some issues, and our voyage was cut short.

The other big personal news is that I have a new book deal. I’m thrilled to be working on Snowblind: Death on the Polar Ice with executive editor Elisabeth Dyssegaard at St. Martin’s Press. It’s the true story of a lost voyage from over a century ago. I went on my own expedition to the High Arctic chasing this story back in 2021, and I’m excited to tell you all about it soon. I’ll write more about Snowblind, as well as the ill-fated voyage to Norway I just returned from, in this week’s Friday roundup.

But for today, I want to focus on another topic, and bring you the second half of an idea I covered at the end of April—the concept of the concentration camp tendency. I talked about this tendency as the desire to exclude those deemed undesirable from society and carry on as if they didn’t exist.

From actual detention policy to the treatment of immigrants, trans people, and minorities, I suggested this impulse sat at the heart of everything dangerous the Trump administration and others are doing in the U.S. right now. This week, I’ll address the ways in which this exclusionary impulse isn’t just at the root of what’s poisoning the U.S.—it’s taking shape in dangerous ways around the world.

Please remember that I’m never claiming that the trajectory we’re on is fixed or unchangeable. As always, I’ll finish off today’s post with ways you can ponder taking action—of which there are many.

The global tendency

When I first wrote about the concentration camp tendency, I explored how camps are typically meant to remove a group of people from society and exile them in detention.

Within weeks of Trump taking office, this domestic tendency had already reached beyond U.S. borders. Expanding on agreements made with with other countries during his first administration, Trump has sent immigrants so far in his second term to Panama, including Christian refugees. As I’ve addressed extensively, Trump transferred hundreds of other immigrants to a mega-prison in El Salvador.

Since I covered both those events, news organizations have reported the administration as planning to or actually delivering immigrants to even less stable, more repressive third nations (meaning not the U.S. or their country of origin). Those include Libya, Rwanda, and South Sudan. The U.S., the most powerful country on Earth, is striving mightily not just to act on the concentration camp tendency at home but is simultaneously attempting to create an international detention network.

Bigger than MAGA

At first, Trump’s return to office appeared to offer a cautionary tale for voters in countries frustrated by inflation or other ills, seeming to influence voters (or voter turnout) in places like Canada. But now, just a few months into his new term, Trump seems to be inspiring deeply reactionary constituencies elsewhere.

Reform party leader Nigel Farage is adopting the DOGE model to bring the same crackpot approach to the U.K. In Poland’s presidential elections, Karol Nawrocki, the candidate backed by Donald Trump, won a bare majority over the weekend. He’s slated to take office in August and is likely to derail the current liberal policies of the rest of the Polish government, as well as damaging European solidarity. According to the Guardian, he’s tapped into anti-refugee sentiments about Ukrainians in Poland. In addition, to return to our camp theme, he has reportedly downplayed the involvement of Polish citizens in abetting the Nazi Holocaust.

It’s important to note that U.S. influence is not at the heart of every overseas political drama. Cultural frameworks that fit the United States do not fit cleanly everywhere. Many kinds of conflict, repression, and detention happen globally based on domestic politics that sometimes have little to do with the U.S. directly.

In India, for instance, a law promoting preferential treatment of certain religious groups and the stripping of citizenship for those who can’t provide documentary evidence going back a half century has been a flashpoint for conflict since 2019. In the western state of Assam, detention camps for those deemed illegal immigrants have existed for several years, with recent efforts by the Supreme Court to intervene in the indefinite detention that’s been festering.

The treatment of Rohingya Muslims as illegal immigrants in Myanmar and elsewhere, as well as the ongoing targeting of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang by the Chinese government, show that the issues the US is wrestling with—citizenship, human rights, and detention—are being weaponized by ruling parties around the world.

All of this is to say that the concentration camp tendency—the use of exclusionary tactics against stigmatized groups for political gain—exists globally and not just in the U.S. But I’d argue that with the U.S. government on the runaway Trump train in terms of policy right now, our country is reproducing or exacerbating countless crises in other countries.

Long-term camps

A significant part of the harm currently being done by the U.S. is due to the massive cuts to U.S. aid around the world. The New York Times recently noted (based on the work of Boston University researcher Brooke Nichols) that the estimated number of deaths due to the cutoff of aid from USAID since January 20 is now in excess of 300,000.

In the coming months and years, we’ll see more of another kind of suffering that’s already started. Tying it back into the concentration-camp tendency, there’s a type of long-term camp I wrote about in my book One Long Night—a prequel kind of camp that exists on a continuum that often ends up tipping over into concentration camps itself. I’ve written about refugee camps persisting year after year in places like Dadaab in Kenya, holding people fleeing political violence or starvation where the situation is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. Some of these refugee camps have existed for decades.

Over the weekend, ProPublica reported on the effects of the withdrawal of U.S. aid in these camps, tying it to increases in crime, sexual, violence, and trafficking, as people turn more desperate. In Kenya, demonstrations against cuts in daily rations have led to gunfire and death. In Malawi, the decrease in U.S. funding led the United Nations’ World Food program to reduce calories by a third in the Dzaleka refugee camp, destabilizing conditions and increasing danger for everyone, but particularly women and children who make up the vast majority of camp residents. 

The massive suffering underway in Gaza is likewise bound up with local history and politics—particularly corrupt political leadership by both Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas. But the U.S. role in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre and what turned out to be a lethal turbocharging of Netanyahu’s extremism by both the Biden and Trump administrations have had tremendously destructive effects on civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, and certainly now, for U.S. Jewish community members as well.

The starvation of Palestinians unfolding in Gaza is repeating ghastly moments from camp and ghetto history, in which civilians are scapegoated by unethical political actors unable to meet their military objectives. Various plans that have been floated to clear out the civilian population in order to put an end to an independence movement likewise have echoes in more than a century of concentration-camp history, going back to the very beginnings of the phenomenon in the nineteenth-century colonial era.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., a Supreme Court decision last week upended protected status for half a million refugees. The administration wants to revoke this status for targeted groups, and SCOTUS ruled it legal for the president to proceed as he wishes while the courts debate the legality of his actions. This decision may have terrible repercussions in Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

The big picture

Six years ago, during the first Trump administration I asked a question in an essay for the New York Review of Books.

What does a country owe desperate people whom it does not consider to be its citizens? The twentieth century posed this question to the world just as the shadow of global conflict threatened for the second time in less than three decades. The dominant response was silence, and the doctrine of absolute national sovereignty meant that what a state did to people under its control, within its borders, was nobody else’s business. After the harrowing toll of the Holocaust with the murder of millions, the world revisited its answer, deciding that perhaps something was owed to those in mortal danger. 

In the twenty-first century we’re witnessing the undoing of any sense obligation to the dispossessed. Current leadership across much of the world is reversing the whole theoretical approach to international affairs since 1945. (Which is not to say that there were not very bad policies in place in the last 80 years. But the dominant public pressure was toward democracy, asylum, and human rights.)

The return to a pre-1945 mindset has other consequences. I don’t think the expansion of concentration camp-style indefinite detention is random, nor is the targeting of vulnerable classes. All of this mirrors the period between World War I and World War II, when it became acceptable around the world to indefinitely detain the homeless, the mentally ill, or suspect ethnic groups—and even Black people in the wake of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Involuntary mass detention was seen as ubiquitous, unremarkable, and even desirable.

Humanity is currently on a path to repeat that era. But this time we have lost the excuse that we cannot imagine where it will lead.

These crises of asylum and detention are only likely to get exponentially worse with climate change, which will amplify water and border disputes, lead to more natural disasters and heat-related death, as well as spurring overall conflict. Unfortunately, climate change is another area where the administration and much of corporate America are actively accelerating current, dangerous trends.

Mark your calendars

But there are things we can do! And next Wednesday, June 11 at noon, I’ll be part of a special event, where we’ll address many ways you can take action. I’ll join a conversation hosted by Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, which I hope you’ll all sign up to attend virtually. It’s free, but you do have to register (here). I’ll be talking with former Kamala Harris advisor Ami Fields-Meyer, who recently wrote a great piece with Julia Angwin for the New Yorker talking about dissident tactics around the world.

I’m also delighted to share that Erica Chenoweth will be part of the conversation. She’s the Harvard professor who has looked at the characteristics of successful resistance movements worldwide. There’s no cookie-cutter strategy, given that each country is different. But there are approaches she’s identified that can give us a head start on what’s likely to succeed.

As a little food for thought until then, I’ll offer up Camden, Delaware, a community in which public outcry over local law enforcement partnering with ICE led to a reversal of that collaboration. The decision was made hours after Spotlight Delaware, a local news nonprofit published a story about the partnership.

I’ve said before that we currently have a lot of tools to reverse what’s happening in the U.S. It’s important that we not lose sight of all the things we can do. For those who are just getting started, joining in on an activity that gets you out in the streets can be great. You can find a community of like-minded people, feel less alone, and get charged up to make a difference.

For those of you who have been doing that for a while, I want to add an additional level of challenge. In the long run, we’re going to have to not just make a stand for good principles, we’re going to have to demand change. Last week Kelly Hayes and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò talked about how simply raising awareness through mass demonstrations does not actually solve social and political problems.

Táíwò noted that past successes came because organizers “were able to command not just attention, not just cause awareness of political issues, but they could meaningfully mess things up for the powerful as a result of being able to organize people at scale, whether it was the bus boycotts, whether it was strike actions, whether it was withholding rent. And I think we need to think about that kind of leverage if we believe our own criticisms of the people in power.”

Along those lines, I would say to take a look over time at what efforts you’re making and how you can interfere (or threaten to interfere) with the status quo in ways that will pressure those in power to shift course and make specific changes. Work together with those who have already identified strategic demands to make, or who have past experience organizing those kinds of actions. Figure out what demands you have the leverage to insist on, and find ways to acquire more power as a community, so that you can expand the pressure on powerholders and ask or even more.

Frederick Douglass’s line is famous and ubiquitous, but no less true for that: Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.

Your paid subscriptions support my work.