{"id":1311967,"date":"2019-06-30T20:52:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-01T02:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/koehler-column-american-concentration-camps\/"},"modified":"2019-06-30T20:52:00","modified_gmt":"2019-07-01T02:52:00","slug":"koehler-column-american-concentration-camps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/koehler-column-american-concentration-camps\/","title":{"rendered":"Koehler column: American concentration camps"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Robert C. Koehler<\/strong>
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\u201cThese aren\u2019t people. These are animals.\u201d<\/p>\n

These words alone set off the alarm \u2014 the fascism alarm, you might say. Donald Trump is by no means the sole source of America\u2019s democracy nosedive, but he\u2019s its current, deeply troubling manifestation.<\/p>\n

Should I write this week about the wars he wants to wage or the refugee border cages he continues to fill? They\u2019re all connected, by their domination and punishment mindset, their subservience to war profiteering and the geopolitics of empire, their ignorant certainty that American exceptionalism is the cornerstone of national security, their indifference to human suffering and need.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were in American concentration camps. We were held under indefinite detention. We were without due process of law. We were charged without any evidence of being a threat to national security, that we were in an unassimilable race, that we would be a threat to the economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The speaker is Satsuki Ina, a woman who spent part of her childhood at a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II and who, with fellow childhood internees, recently stood in protest at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a U.S. military base slated to become a detention center for 1,400 immigrant children.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe hear these exact words today regarding innocent people seeking asylum in this country,\u201d she went on. \u201cAnd unlike 1942, when America turned their back on us while we were disappearing from our homes, our schools, our farms and our jobs, we are here today to speak out, to protest the unjust incarceration of innocent people seeking refuge in this country. We stand with them, and we are saying, \u2018Stop repeating history.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The only way to avoid repeating history is to face it squarely and atone for it. There\u2019s a hell of a lot of history this country has not yet faced, but the Trump administration, with its blatant disregard for political correctness, is making it front-page news.<\/p>\n

Indeed, you might say that Trump the blowhard is at best an amateur fascist, failing, as he so often does, to hide U.S. aggression behind established clich\u00e9s. Thus, during the Obama administration, border internment wasn\u2019t news at all, but Trump has managed to expose the hellish conditions and the ripped-apart families to the world.<\/p>\n

Recently, for instance, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez generated some indignant outrage when she tweeted, referencing an article in Esquire, that the United States has created a system of concentration camps to detain the asylum seekers flooding into the country from Central America. That was too much for Liz Cheney, who counter-tweeted: \u201cPlease @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in point of fact, these are concentration camps. Historian Andrea Pitzer, quoted by Jack Holmes in the Esquire article that AOC cited, defines \u201ca concentration camp system\u201d simply<\/p>\n

and logically enough as \u201cmass detention of civilians without trial.\u201d<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re the equivalent of Nazi death camps, but the term\u2019s reverberations are legitimately troubling, because the process it defines is the same: dehumanizing a group of people based on race, religion, ethnicity or whatever (\u201cThese aren\u2019t people. These are animals\u201d); fomenting fear that their presence constitutes a \u201cnational emergency\u201d; conducting mass roundups and detaining the arrestees indefinitely.<\/p>\n

What could go wrong?<\/p>\n

As Pitzer writes in her book, \u201cOne Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps\u201d: \u201cThere\u2019s this crystallization that happens. The longer they\u2019re there, the worse conditions get. That\u2019s just a universal of camps.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of these declining conditions were recently described on Democracy Now! by lawyer Warren Binford, who interviewed children at a detention facility in Clint, Texas: \u201c(V)irtually no one is taking care of these children directly. . . . They are locked up in these cells 24 hours a day. There are open toilets in many of these cells. There\u2019s no soap, no way to wash their hands. . . . And many of them are being forced to sleep on concrete because of a shortage of beds and mats and sleeping space. Children described sleeping on concrete floors. They described sleeping on cement blocks.\u201d<\/p>\n

And, my God, when the children get sick, they\u2019re placed in quarantine under conditions that are \u201cjust horrendous. These very sick children, with high fevers . . . being put on the floor, on mats, largely unsupervised, locked up together for days at a time.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Holmes points out: \u201cAnother issue is that these camp systems, no matter where they are in the world, tend to fall victim to expanding criteria. The longer they stay open, the more reasons a government finds to put people in them. That\u2019s particularly true if a new regime takes control of an existing system, as the Trump administration did with ours.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus, asylum seekers once had legal rights, but not anymore. As their numbers increased, due primarily to worsening conditions in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras (countries the United States helped ravage politically), virtually all the refugees started getting treated as \u201cillegals.\u201d And, writes Holmes: \u201cThere is reason to believe the criteria will continue to expand.\u201d<\/p>\n

These are American concentration camps, not simply in the tradition of the Japanese-American internment camps or World War II, but in that other tradition as well, across the ocean. They\u2019re not death camps, but they\u2019re evolving, I fear, in much the same moral and political void.<\/p>\n

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert C. Koehler \u201cThese aren\u2019t people. These are animals.\u201d These words alone set off the alarm \u2014 the fascism alarm, you might say. Donald Trump is by no means the sole source of America\u2019s democracy nosedive, but he\u2019s its current, deeply troubling manifestation. Should I write this week about the wars he wants to wage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1311967","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-19 20:16:38","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1311967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311967\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1311967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1311967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1311967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}