concentration camp labor

(This is an excerpt from historian Timothy Snyder’s excellent Substack.)

       With the passage of Trump's death bill, we face the prospect of many great harms, including an archipelago of concentration camps across the United States.

      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."

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.

      Just signing a petition might seem like a disproportionately small reaction to huge funding for American concentration camps. But it is the small choices now that open the broad, bright terrain of action later. If we miss these opportunities, that terrain closes and darkens.

(This is an excerpt from historian Timothy Snyder’s excellent Substack.)