"The correct response to Dachau was not better training for the guards."
Excerpts:
Because I wrote a history of concentration camps, I tend to use the phrase. I understand that not everyone will want to label our expanding detention network as concentration camps....
The Nazi death camps. . . . were launched ...almost a decade after the Nazi concentration camp system was first created. Before, during, and after the Nazi era, other concentration camp systems have existed around the world.
Concentration camps involve the mass detention of civilians without due process on the basis of political, racial, ethnic, or religious identity. And that is where we’re at right now. ...
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.
