Tonight's thread, & the last recap of the arc of ONE LONG NIGHT: What happened to concentration camps after the Holocaust?
In the wake of the war, the recognition that genocide had taken place and that millions had been murdered in Nazi concentration camps sharply recast the idea of what a camp was.
The world began to wrestle with the singular nature of the Holocaust. As part of that process, the term "concentration camp" began to find use only in reference to Nazi camps. The name shift happened in part out of respect for the unprecedented tragedy of places like Auschwitz.
It also happened because countries no longer wanted their detention projects associated with the term "concentration camp." The result was that the kinds of places that were widely known as concentration camps for decades before the Second World War no longer had a name.
(This process had begun before the end of the war. When detaining some 120,000 people of Japanese descent, many of them American citizens, the US was careful to call the sites "relocation centers" & "assembly centers" so that they would seem less like concentration camps.)
The links to colonial history and especially WWI—the camps that had made it possible to launch projects like the Gulag or the early Nazi concentration camps—were lost. Places in which governments held groups of civilians without trial became an amorphous category without a label.
But concentration camps as an institution did not disappear. Instead, the bulk of their descendants fell (sometimes imperfectly) into two broad categories that reflected the binary postwar political order: Communism vs. Western Democracy.
The Gulag continued for years postwar and influenced or inspired a host of similar camp systems around the world devoted to reeducation through forced labor. Revolutionary states to varying degrees embraced the Gulag model, which was refracted through local detention traditions.
Behind the Iron Curtain and under Soviet pressure, Eastern European states had Gulag-style camps. Both sides in the Chinese Civil War had used camps during the conflict. When the Communists won, they adopted aspects of the Soviet model, shaping it to their own history & needs.
Vietnam, Cuba, & Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge all saw mass civilian detention & forced labor under a revolutionary banner, in widely varying approaches. In Cambodia, genocide precluded even the possibility of rehabilitation through labor that served as a fig leaf for the Gulag.
Meanwhile, Western democracies denounced Communist tactics but resorted to camps themselves. Battling revolutionary parties and independence movements in current or former colonies, the West returned to the kind of concentration camps used to fight rebels half a century before.
In Kenya, the British set up a model village camp system that had adjunct torture sites for those suspected of aiding rebels. In Algeria, the French forcibly relocated nearly 2 million civilians, promising camps with modern housing but failing to provide adequate food & shelter.
The French then the US in Vietnam partnered with weak, corrupt leadership that imposed a variety of "agroville" and "strategic hamlet" policies that ended up forcing peasants off their land into camps in which they could not be kept safe during wartime.
Trumpeting the threat of terrorists and Communists was used to excuse every kind of torture. Under dictatorships in South America from the 1960s to the 1980s, impromptu and long-term camps alike were created in football stadiums, in vacation housing, and at military facilities.
This began the atomization & just-in-time aspects of mass detention. As world attention to abuses grew, fewer people were held in barracks; smaller groups were hidden in disparate, unlikely places. At some sites, detainees were tortured & killed, then more arrests were made.
The traditional barracks-and-barbed-wire concentration camp never vanished entirely, of course. It reared its head monstrously in the Balkans in the 1990s. And I saw elements of it again in the camps for Rohingya Muslims that I visited in Myanmar in 2015.
But in the wake of 9/11, the US developed a parallel kind of camp, borrowing in part from the South American model it had condoned & supported decades before, a clandestine (& in this case, global) network of black sites centered on the interrogation & torture of terror suspects.
I also visited Guantanamo for research. It was an amazing black hole of legal contortions, a vast bureaucracy of detention. We're seeing something similar now on the southern border. Both of these systems have deep roots that predate Trump and will not be solved by his departure.
Meanwhile, China has detained in the neighborhood of one million Uighur Muslims. One million. And more than a half century into its own lethal concentration camp history, North Korea appears unlikely to dismantle its system under the current generation of leadership.
After WWII, the term "concentration camp" became contested language, but humanity never for a minute stopped building them. I started my book to understand how we got to the Holocaust, but later came to wonder how we learned so little from it.
Anyway, thus endeth a week of celebrating the publication of the paperback edition of ONE LONG NIGHT by writing a series of very long concentration camp threads. If you want to know more, go read it! It has a new afterword addressing events from this year.
