An Expert on Concentration Camps Says That’s Exactly What the U.S. Is Running at the Border
By: Jack Holmes
Esquire
Arrested refugees-immigrants in Fylakio detention center, Evros, Greece.
Photo: Ggia, via Wikipedia
Surely, the United States of America could not operate concentration camps. In the American consciousness, the term is synonymous with the Nazi death machines across the European continent that the Allies began the process of dismantling 75 years ago this month. But while the world-historical horrors of the Holocaust are unmatched, they are only the most extreme and inhuman manifestation of a concentration-camp system—which, according to Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, has a more global definition. There have been concentration camps in France, South Africa, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and—with Japanese internment—the United States. In fact, she contends we are operating such a system right now in response to a very real spike in arrivals at our southern border.
“We have what I would call a concentration camp system,†Pitzer says, “and the definition of that in my book is, mass detention of civilians without trial.â€
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