The U.S. Is Much Closer to Making Concentration Camps Than You Think

Timothy Snyder, who is never wrong about these things, looks down the road leading away from “Alligator Auschwitz” and sees that it leads to a horrible place. From his Substack:

Concentration camps are sites of tempting slave labor. Among many other aims, the Soviets used concentration camp labor to build canals and work mines. The Nazi German concentration camp system followed a capitalist version of the same logic: it drew in businesses with the prospect of inexpensive labor. We know this and have no excuse not to act.

What happens next in the U.S.? Workers who are presented as “undocumented” will be taken to the camps. Perhaps they will work in the camps themselves, as slaves to government projects. But more likely they will be offered to .American companies on special terms: a one-time payment to the government, for example, with no need for wages or benefits. In the simplest version, and perhaps the most likely, detained people will be offered back to the companies for which they were just working. Their stay in the concentration camp will be presented as a purge or a legalization for which companies should be grateful. Trump has already said that this is the idea, calling it “owner responsibility.”

I may be way out on a limb here, but I recall that a lot of Americans shot a lot of other Americans over this concept of “owner responsibility” between the years 1860 and 1865. And, apparently, I’m not alone. As Snyder warns us:

And slavery is not entirely illegal in the United States. The Thirteenth Amendment allows slavery if only as punishment for a crime. The people described as “undocumented” or “denaturalized” (and other categories sure to be invented soon) are portrayed as criminals. If the Trump regime tries to enslave such people on a large scale, there will be a court case. But waiting for the Supreme Court to do the right thing is, to put it gently, no substitute for action. It would be good if there were explicit legislation banning slave labor in all circumstances. But such a law is unlikely without a movement behind it.

If you don’t think Stephen Miller has a folder full of hack legal opinions on this subject on his desk, I have a fort in Charleston harbor to sell you. And Snyder, rightly, puts the job in our hands. He has seen Congress roll over, and he has even less respect for the current Supreme Court than I do.

The government is putting before us the temptation to cooperate in fascist dehumanization on a grand scale. But that does not mean we must do so. This is an area where actions by individuals, by civil society, by the professions, and by companies can be decisive.

I’m good with all of that, except that experience has taught me that the average American corporation has the moral conscience of a pole saw, so I’m not optimistic about them resisting cheap labor no matter what you call it. But Snyder does a good job painting the mark of Cain on those that don’.

If this is not done now, some Americans companies will start using slave labor from concentration camps, and then others will claim that they must do so as well so as not to lose competitiveness or shareholder value or something. The appropriate euphemisms will be found, and all will soon seem normal. But everything will have changed. We will all be implicated. And we will all be more vulnerable.

It all comes down, as it always does, to what we as the citizens of a constitutional republic are willing to tolerate, what do we believe is the revolutionary end of what Thomas Jefferson called, “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evincing a design to reduce them under absolute despotism.”

On July 4, I went downtown early to hear the Declaration read from the balcony of what is called the Old State House, where it was first read on July 18, 1776 by Colonel Thomas Crafts of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts. It hit a lot harder this year than it ever has before, maybe as hard as it had hit 249 years ago. It felt like it, anyway.