A Rumination on Concentration Camps

 

U.S Government Creeps Tour Alligator Alcatraz

 

Concentration Camps are back in fashion!

Well, to be precise, they never went out of fashion. They just kind of went underground. More on that in a minute.

The U.S. Congress has appropriated 45 billion dollars for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement – ICE – to build new “detention centers” such as, presumably, the already infamous Alligator Alcatraz in the Florida Everglades.

The funding, according to one report, “represents a 265 percent annual budget increase to ICE’s current detention budget.” It will about double the agency’s detention capacity, which is currently around 56,000 and includes some 200-plus facilities.

 And yes, these centers do qualify as concentration camps. The American Heritage Dictionary defines one as follows:

 

 A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable

Well, yep, that fits. Maxwell Frost, who represents central Florida in the U.S. Congress, recently visited Alligator Alcatraz and vouched for the harsh conditions there. He said:

 

“we saw abhorrent conditions, a lot of crowding, 32 male individuals per cage — these people are being caged — three toilets per area. And the drinking water, it comes from the toilet apparatus in the cell. Not only that, but there is not enough resources and not really an ability for them to be able to speak with their legal counsel or lawyers.”

Other investigations confirm what Frost saw. An AP story by two Miami reporters says this:

“…people held there say worms turn up in the food. Toilets don’t flush, flooding floors with fecal waste, and mosquitoes and other insects are everywhere.”

And this:

“Inside the compound’s large white tents, rows of bunkbeds are surrounded by chain-link cages. Detainees are said to go days without showering or getting prescription medicine, and they are only able to speak by phone to lawyers and loved ones. At times the air conditioners abruptly shut off in the sweltering heat.”

 

And it’s not just Alligator Alcatraz.  Barbaric treatment of detainees at three other immigrant detention centers in Florida was very recently reported by Human Rights Watch. For example:

n  Immigrants “were detained shackled for prolonged periods on buses without food, water, or functioning toilets; there was extreme overcrowding in freezing holding cells where detainees were forced to sleep on cold concrete floors under constant fluorescent lighting; and many were denied access to basic hygiene and medical care.”

n  “Officers denied detainees critical medication and detained some incommunicado in solitary confinement as an apparent punishment for seeking mental health care.”

n  On at least on occasion, “officers made men eat while shackled with their hands behind their backs after forcing the group to wait hours for lunch: ‘We had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs,’” one man said.

n  “Lockdowns—during which staff denied detained people access to medical staff and basic recreation—were sometimes imposed only because the facility was short-staffed.”

 

A Quick Recent History

You or I might have thought that concentration camps would be a thing of the past. They would have been banned after the revelations of the Nazi camps of World War Two.

Alas, that’s never been the case. The Soviet Union’s system of Gulags expanded after WW II, with an estimated  2.5 million people detained  at the time of Stalin’s death in 1953.

 But even in the enlightened global west, empires were secretly mass-detaining troublesome groups post WW2.  England is a great case in point.

 The rubble had barely been cleared in London and other industrial centers before the British Empire itself went right back to the dark side. By 1953 it was mass-detaining Africans in inhumane centers to try and maintain its colonial rule over Kenya.

 

 

One of over 100 British Camps in Kenya 1953-59.

This was Britain’s reaction to the so-called “Mau Mau Rebellion,” a violent uprising in the early 1950s by the indigenous Kikuyu people who finally had enough of British settlers stealing their land. An “Emergency” was declared, and, as historian Juiffe Duffy wrote:

From 1953 to 1960, between 70,000 and 150,000 Mau Mau suspects were detained without trial in an archipelago of camps. Conditions in the camps were dire and British colonials and loyalist warders meted out violence with impunity.

The Kenyan colonialists often interred entire Kikuyu villages. All were then

… interrogated about their political allegiances. …

To progress through the camp complex to eventual release, detainees (none of whom had been charged with or convicted of any crime) had to confess to their Mau Mau activities.

Camp staff achieved this by using systematic brutality that had been sanctioned by the colonial administration.

And meanwhile, in the U.S.

Here in the U.S., concentration camps have been disguised as “correctional facilities” and other nice terms. For a full century -- from post-Civil War and well into the cold war era -- places like the notorious Parchman Farm in Mississippi and Angola Prison in Louisiana used legalized slave labor to make profits for collaborating industries. They used brutal beatings and psychological torture to maintain order, packed inmates into crowded and unsanitary cells, and fed them as meagerly as possible to keep them alive and working.

Parchman, incidentally, was the model for the prisons  depicted in the films “Cool Hand Luke” and “Oh Brother, Where Art Though.”

Post-Slavery Slave Labor at Parchman, Mississippi

 

In the above cases, the inmates were wildly disproportionately black and often incarcerated for very minor breaches of the laws. Slavery, of course, had been technically abolished by then. But the Constitutional Amendment that ended slavery contained a huge loophole. The exact words are these:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” (Emphasis added)

Cruel internment camps pop up in many other places in the history of U.S. empire. In the action known as the Phillipine – American War (1899-1902), the U.S. military, in an effort to resist rebellion against its occupation:

 “forcibly relocated many civilians to concentration camps, where thousands died.”

 

 The U.S also used internment camps in its long war against the so-called Indians. One of the most notorious was the Bosque Redondo Reservation near present-day Fort Sumner in east central New Mexico. The inmates there included Navaho (Dine) people whose forced 300-mile journey to get there was a hellish experience in itself. The official website of New Mexico Historic Sites reports:

“The Diné call this the Long Walk, when over 50 different groups made the 300+ mile journey over a period of nearly three years. Several hundred Diné captives either died during the walk or were abducted by slave traders. Gross acts of brutality included stragglers being shot and pregnant women killed if they could not keep up with the group.” 

American Soldiers Supervise The Long Walk

 

Eventually, some 9,000 Navaho were contained at Bosque Redondo, along with several hundred Mescalero Apaches (Nde) brought in from the opposite direction. How both were treated there is well summarized by one paragraph from the above-mentioned website:

“During their internment, the Diné and Ndé were prevented from practicing ceremonies, singing songs, or praying in their own language. Daily depredations at the reservation were palpable on every level. Food rationing was both meager and completely foreign (coffee beans, white flour and rank beef), while the lack of wood for heating and cooking during the bitterly cold winters led to illness, and high infant mortality. When a small disease was contracted from the military, it ravaged the captives. The suffering from exposure, starvation, and sickness took an estimated 1500 lives.”

No surprise, then

 We shouldn’t be surprised, then, at the resurgence of these gulags. They are nothing new. The only innovation the Trump mob has offered is to express how proud they are of the cruelty of their system.

Empires have never been able to resist concentration camps. But their people sure should.