O say can't you see
Concentrate on what is happening
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming
Back in September, I wrote a piece called Here's exactly what the first year of a second Trump Administration will look like. I’m bringing it out from behind the paywall because I think it might help people understand what is going on in the US at the moment. It foregrounds the underlying post-legal nature of Trump’s plan and gives us a way to see more clearly what the once and future president and his apologists are trying to obscure.
The only Democrat who seems to understand all this and who is willing to call it out is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has previously used the c-word to describe Trump’s camps, and yesterday in Congress she explained how the Laken Riley Act will create what amounts to a system of concentration camps for extra-judicial imprisoning of immigrants.
"In this bill, if a person is so much as accused of a crime, if someone wants to point a finger and accuse someone of shoplifting, they will be rounded up and put into a private detention camp and signed and sent out for deportation without a day in court," she said. "So when a private prison camp opens in your town and they say we didn't know this was going to happen, know that they did, and they voted for it."
None of this is accidental: it is the way such regimes operate and we have very clear historical precedents. We need to get this through our heads.
All of those declarations and constitutions and values and human rights we thought were chiselled in stone were in fact written on tissue paper, and Trump is dropping them onto a bonfire while Elon dances around the Oval Office throwing seig heils! amongst the ashes.
Here’s the original piece from September, edited somewhat.
The gloves are off, they will take a victory in November as a green light for their extremism, and it is increasingly apparent that immigrants will bear the brunt.
In her book, Into That Darkness, journalist Gitta Sereny interviews Franz Stangl, the former Commandant of the Treblinka death camp, and she asks him why he bothers to humiliate and torture his prisoners when he knows full well that he is about to kill them all.
“To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies,” Stengl replies. “To make it possible for them to do what they did.”
The white, patriarchal, Christianist supremacy that underlies Maga-Nation is deeply inflected by the sort of racist demonisation of immigrants with which all far-right politics is concerned. Hitler’s Germany may be the extreme case, but that extremity allows us to clearly see the outlines of how the process works, and so considering that history will help us see what Trump has in store.
There is no doubt that Trump and his team are trying as hard as they can to dominate the news cycle, and the more outrageous the lie, the more likely the mainstream media is to allow them to do that: yes, the media is that irresponsible. But what Trump and Vance are doing now, openly and flagrantly, is confirming that hatred of immigrants is central to the Maga GOP project and that if they are elected in November they will use attacks on migrants, not to distract us from other things, or dominate the news cycle, but because that’s what they believe in.
If we are going to draw lessons from history, then the institution we need to understand is the concentration camp because knowing that history will make clear what the first year of a new Trump Administration will look like.
Day One is coming and this is what it will look like
Most of us have been taught to equate concentration camps exclusively with the Holocaust, and we should never forget that singular event, and none of what I say is meant to distract from that. Nonetheless, we need to examine what “preceded the unprecedented,” as the historian Jane Caplan has written.
There is a huge and vital difference between extermination camps like Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau and the enormous network of concentration camps that came to dominate the German landscape, including the regions across the parts of Europe occupied by the Nazis:
The Nazis established about 110 camps starting in 1933 to imprison political opponents and other undesirables. The number expanded as the Third Reich expanded and the Germans began occupying parts of Europe. When the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum first began to document all of the camps, the belief was that the list would total approximately 7,000. However, researchers found that the Nazis actually established about 42,500 camps and ghettoes between 1933 and 1945. This figure includes 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettoes, 980 concentration camps; 1,000 POW camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm; “Germanizing” prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers. Berlin alone had nearly 3,000 camps.
Any definition of concentration camp, then, exists on a continuum, and so we have to be careful in how we deploy it. To that end, we need to understand the concentration camp primarily as an extra-judicial space in which a regime houses those groups—groups, not individuals—it considers a threat. In the case of Nazi Germany this included political opponents, journalists, a broad range of petty criminals—basically anyone with any sort of police record—as well those the Nazis considered “work shy” or social misfits.
The extra-judicial nature of the camps is key because this lack of legal justification allowed the Nazis to round up any sort of undesirable they chose and put them into what they called “protective custody” (Schutzhaft).
In the spring of 1936, Werner Best – Heydrich’s deputy at the Secret Police Office – defined the political police in an ‘ethnic-popular Führer state’ as ‘an institution . . . that carefully monitors the political health of the body of the German people and recognises in timely fashion every symptom of illness, identifying and employing appropriate means to eradicate the destructive bacilli, whether they be products of self-induced decay or intentional infection from without’.
Operating under the premise that they were carrying out racial-hygienic preventative measures, the police could extend their persecution of Jews, Communists and socialists to more and more ‘enemies of the state’ and ‘parasites on the people’. Their victims included Freemasons, politically active clergymen, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gypsies, homosexuals, prostitutes, ‘antisocials’, the ‘work-shy’ and ‘habitual criminals’.
Ullrich, Volker. Hitler: Volume I: Ascent 1889–1939 (Hitler Biographies Book 1) (p. 761). Random House. Kindle Edition.
In his incredible book KL: A History of Nazi Concentration Camps,1 historian Nikolaus Wachsmann offers detailed research about how the camp system developed within Germany under the Nazis, building on measures already in place during the Weimar Republic. He notes that “Hitler came to regard the KL as indispensable, as they allowed him to swiftly settle scores with personal enemies,” and in so saying we don’t have to listen too closely to hear echoes of Trump.
According to Hannah Arendt, in her book about Adolf Eichmann, one of the difficulties the Nazis anticipated was about how to manage the professional bureaucracy once they (the Nazis) came to power. They recognised that this class of white-collar workers were necessary for the efficient running of the Reich, but they worried how they would respond to Nazi plans to persecute Jews and instigate the extra-judicial logic of the concentration camps. Arendt writes, they needn’t have worried; most of the bureaucrats fell into line. She further notes the more general problem once a regime assumes a certain disposition:
[J]ust as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ even though man’s natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler’s land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: ‘Thou shalt kill,’ although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people.
…Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom (for that the Jews were transported to their doom they knew, of course, even though many of them may not have known the gruesome details), and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics) (p. 148). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Wachsmann makes a similar point in KL:
German judges and prosecutors, like most other civil servants, largely backed the regime. They wielded old and new laws against Nazi opponents, rapidly filling the judicial state prisons. But most arrested opponents did not end up in court, at least not in 1933, because they were not detained for illegal acts, but for who they were—suspected enemies of the new order.
…“Only those who still mourn a past liberalistic era,” a Gestapo official crowed in [a] leading legal journal, “will regard the application of protective custody measures as too harsh or even illegal.”
Wachsmann, Nikolaus. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (pp. 31-32; p.95). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.
Trump and Vance and the Project 2025 team are already addressing this potential problem and have made it abundantly clear that they will replace the current bureaucracy with one more amenable to their predilections.
Project 2025 lays out a plan for sweeping changes to the federal workforce, aiming to replace career civil servants with political appointees. This includes reclassifying tens of thousands of federal workers; reinstating and expanding the "Schedule F" job classification; creating a database of 20,000 pre-screened personnel; expanding direct presidential control over federal agencies; and eliminating job protections for government employees. Key Trump figures describe the project as a "wrecking ball for the administrative state," with the goal of reshaping the federal bureaucracy to align more closely with a new administration's agenda, potentially resulting in job losses and agency restructuring.
In a Vanity Fair article about the rise of the alt-right, journalist James Pogue recounts an interview JD Vance did with rightwing YouTuber Jack Murphy during which Vance spelled out the desire to gut the federal bureaucracy:
“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said. “And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”
…. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
This is a description, essentially, of a coup.
“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
Just as significantly, Jack Murphy, the YouTuber conducting the interview, cites the logic of the concentration camp as being on their to-do list, saying, “Among some of my circle, the phrase ‘extra-constitutional’ has come up quite a bit.”
Authoritarian governments always inhabit the space between legal and illegal and will often dress up their most heinous acts in in the garb of legality. Think of Stalin’s show trials, for instance. It is a consciousness of wrongdoing that such governments never seem able to completely shake. The early days of German concentration camps were still “hampered” by the need for at least some pretence of law and indeed, in the wake of the Reichstag fire, “cabinet approved the draft of a Decree for the Protection of the People and the State submitted in the morning by Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick. The first paragraph ‘suspended until further notice’ fundamental civil rights including personal liberty, freedom of speech and the press, the right to assemble, the privacy of letters and telephone conversations and the inviolability of house and home. The second paragraph enabled the government to ‘temporarily take over’ the responsibilities of the upper administration of Germany’s states ‘in order to restore public security and order’. That opened the door not only for the Nazis to persecute anyone who disagreed with them but also to bring Germany’s often resistant states into line.”2
Let’s not forget that Trump already has in place more than 200 federal judges appointed during his last administration, as well as a Supreme Court stacked in his favour and that has already announced a future President Trump will have a general immunity from prosecution.
The pillars of genuine authoritarianism are being shored up.
And at the heart of all authoritarianism is the creation of an enemy, the demonisation of some other, or others, onto whom the “good citizens” can project their fears and concerns. When Trump and Vance warn of immigrants eating cats and dogs, they are participating in this age-old ritual of demonisation and as I’ve said, this is not just a media strategy.
Hitler certainly made no secret of his antisemitism, and as far back as 1921, an article in the Nazi daily newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, mentioned the idea of a future Nazi government using camps to deal with their enemies. But as Nicholas Wachsmann cautions, “The improvisation after the capture of power makes abundantly clear that there was no blueprint in Nazi files. When Hitler took charge of Germany in 1933, the Nazi concentration camp still had to be invented.”
The Trump team are more organised in this regard, frighteningly enough, and Project 2025 sets out in detail their plans to deal with immigrants and other “undesirables”. This includes calls for drastic reductions in both legal and illegal immigration through measures including cutting off new applications for 15 categories of legal immigration with "excessive" backlogs; eliminating T and U visas for crime victims; repealing the diversity visa lottery; and limiting family-based immigration to nuclear family members.
More concerningly, and relevant to this discussion, the plan calls for expanding expedited removal, allowing for rapid deportation without a hearing before an immigration judge, exactly the sort of extrajudicial activity that underpins the logic of a system of camps.
Project 2025 also suggest reassigning federal agents and deputising state law enforcement for deportations, which could lead to more rapid removals with less oversight, as well as shifting from targeted arrests to large-scale workplace raids and public sweeps, allowing a move away from individualised proceedings. That is, without due process or a court trial.
As well, the plan wants to establish mass detention centres—hello—potentially using military funding, which could also limit immigrants' access to legal counsel and due process. The plan seeks to allow ICE raids in locations like schools and hospitals, areas that are currently off-limits. Project 2025 also proposes consolidating key immigration agencies under a single entity, which is yet another way to erode checks and balances and ensure less accountability.
Talk about extra-judicial.
Project 2025 estimates that there are already 34,000 daily beds available in various detention centres and the like across the United States, but they estimate this number will have to rise to at least 100,000. A similar shortage of accommodation was faced by the Nazis in 1933 and they requisitioned cells and beds wherever they could find them, long before they started constructing the purpose-built network of concentration camps. Workhouses and regular prisons were used, with whole wings of state prisons being cleared for extrajudicial prisoners. Wachsmann notes that “many hundreds of new sites were set up, which collectively can be called early camps.” He also notes that the term concentration camp wasn’t always used and that labels like them detention home, work service camp, and transit camp were preferred (p.30-31). But such coyness would eventually pass.
Really though, it doesn’t matter what we call them. The point to make is spelled out by Dan Stone: “The crucial characteristic of a concentration camp is not whether it has barbed wire, fences, or watchtowers; it is, rather, the gathering of civilians, defined by a regime as de facto ‘enemies’, in order to hold them against their will without charge in a place where the rule of law has been suspended.”3
Or as Javier Rodrigo, a historian from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, has said, concentration camp “refers not so much to a place with a set of uniform features over space and time as to the status that has been conferred on such a place.”
Attacking immigrants is front-and-centre of everything a new Trump Administration has planned, and the current “they’re eating pets” strategy is just a more overt and media-friendly version of what Trump has been telling us for months. He and his acolytes are blaring their intentions with a Hitler-like clarity, with Trump telling a January rally that “On my first day back in office, I will terminate every open border policy of the Biden administration and immediately restore the full set of strong Trump border policies.
“Then, we will begin a record-setting deportation operation. Joe Biden has given us no choice. The millions of illegal aliens who have invaded under Biden require a record number of removals. This is just common sense.
“To achieve this goal, I will make clear to every department and to state and local governments that we must use all resources and authorities available. We will shift massive portions of federal law enforcement to immigration enforcement — including parts of the DEA, ATF, FBI, and DHS.”
Camps will be built, and as the Heinrich Himmler-like figure of the Trump campaign, Stephen Miller, told a rightwing podcast host, “large-scale staging grounds” will be constructed near the border, where they can “create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft.”
Zones of Interest, anyone?
At every Trump rally, demonisation is front and centre and Trump’s first solution—deportation—is evoked at every turn. “The ex-president also fearmongered,” journalist David Smith wrote in May in the Guardian, “asserting that Michigan is being ‘torn up to pieces by migrant crime’ and that prisons and mental institutions all over the world are being emptied into the US ‘because we’re a dumping ground’. He promised the biggest ever domestic mass deportation of undocumented immigrants – a notion that thrilled this gathering. ‘When I return to the White House, we will stop the plunder, rape, slaughter and destruction of the American suburbs, cities and towns.’”
Asked by Time Magazine if more camps would be necessary, Trump said “It’s possible that we’ll do it to an extent but we shouldn't have to do very much of it, because we're going to be moving them out as soon as we get to it. And we'll be obviously starting with the criminal element.”
As if you can manage a million deportations a year—Trump’s proposed number—without building camps.
He also told Time that “I want to give police immunity from prosecution because the liberal groups or the progressive groups, depending on what they want to be called, somewhat liberal, somewhat progressive, but they are—they’re very strong on the fact that they want to leave everybody in, I guess, I don't know.”
Trump said he “will be complying with court orders” but that’s the whole point of the camps, to remove the prisoners from judicial oversight.
Camps represent a logic and architecture of whatever state they happen to emerge in. Trump’s version won’t look like the version that scarred Nazi Germany, but the Nazi version, in its extremism, allows us to see what is true of camps wherever they have appeared, that they embody something intrinsic about the sort of regime that institutes them. It is a political space as much as it is a physical space. It activates a “state of exception” through which governments can exercise extra-judicial control, and they come to mirror the society in which they exist, and more concerningly, the vice and versa of that.
By telling us all that immigrants are eating cats and dogs, Trump is not trying to distract us; he is telling us exactly who is. If he wins on November 5, what are the chances that this aging man, with his best and last opportunity to be the authoritarian ruler he has always wanted to be, will do anything other than be who he is?
The camps, and all they represent, are coming, whatever we end up calling them.
The German word for concentration camp is Konzentrationslager, generally abbreviated to KL, though sometimes more colloquially to KZ.
Ullrich, Volker. Hitler: Volume I: Ascent 1889–1939 (Hitler Biographies Book 1) (pp. 552-553). Random House. Kindle Edition.
Stone, Dan. Concentration Camps: A Very Short Introduction (p. 105). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.
Australia already has public servants who just went along with the illegal Robodebt program. And nothing can be brought against them because of the toothless NACC stacked with sinecures.
As well, it's seven years since Dutton made his comments about Victorians being scared to go out to restaurants because of African gang violence. Those comments were widely reported but who criticised them? ~ a few letter writers to newspapers? He's planted those lies which feed the prejudices of the ignorant and/or conservatives.
More than ever, Australia needs more widely accessed independent media and politicians from all parties, as well as the Independents, to call out rubbish.
AOC and Bernie S are the only politicians in the US with any guts.