Thought Shrapnel

This is a must-read from Andrea Pitzer. As she points out, the window of opportunity to do something about what’s happening in the US is closing.

I’ve looked at mass civilian detention around the world. I’ve visited the facilities where people were held. I’ve talked to the people involved—those detained and tortured, those who supported camps, and those who stood idly by. It’s critical to recognize that each of the societies that has had camps underwent a lengthy process. This process is often easier to see happening in your own country if you first look at an example in another one.

My goal today is to warn you that the U.S. has already been seized by the same camp dynamic. It’s not that I’m trying to tell you that bad things are coming, and you have to look out for them. What I’m saying is that the camps have already taken root and are on a fast-track to get exponentially worse. We’re already deep inside the process.

Yet there is power in that knowledge, because in some big ways, we can know what will happen next. We have models for how other societies have moved out of our current perilous state. And we have a ton of tactics we can use to fight back against the expanding harm directed at all of us.

I’ll add right up front that nobody sane now thinks the answer to abuses at Dachau was to give the guards more training.

[…]

[I]f we count the Biden administration as simply a pause on the larger Trump authoritarian agenda in several ways, the U.S. is currently approaching the end of that three-to-five year window. We may already be living in a concentration-camp regime, but it hasn’t yet hardened into the kind of vast system that becomes the controlling factor in the country’s political future.

Still, we’re on the verge of entrenching a massive system, which is a very bad place to be. It’s my opinion that we have a limited window in which to act. What happens this year will be critical for significantly dismantling the existence of and any future capacity for building the extrajudicial camp network the government is constructing today.

Again, we need to do more than stop the construction of additional facilities, more than just get ICE agents to behave more politely. We need to dismantle the current system and remove the possibility for it to exist again. In my opinion, that is what “Abolish ICE” should mean.

[…]

You can’t reform a concentration camp regime. You have to dismantle it and replace it. We have a thousand ways to do it. And most U.S. citizens—particularly white ones—have the freedom to act, for now, with far less risk than the many people currently targeted.

Source: Degenerate Art

Image: Bradley Andrews