I was in the middle of writing my history of concentration camps when Trump announced his candidacy in 2015. He did so many disturbing things ahead of the election. People asked me if the red flags meant inevitable disaster, if we were doomed to repeat grim 20th-century history. It was all certainly alarming, and I drew several parallels in essays I wrote at the time. But I also noted some key differences in that moment--elements which distinguished 2015 and 2016 from the worst historical moments.

A friend in Russia is now part of a network of thousands of volunteers trying to offset the harm their government is doing. As Ukrainians arrive in Russia, they meet them, feed them, coordinate transportation, find them places to stay, & get them to the Estonian or Finnish border Obviously, these Ukrainians made it through the filtration camps unscathed--and many do not. For now, once they're released in Russia, if they can get to the Finnish or Estonian border, they face some extra scrutiny on the Russian side, but they are generally allowed to leave.

This is astoundingly well done: a city councilman elected as a Democrat in my hometown of Parkersburg, WV, who ended up joining in the insurrection in the US Capitol on January 6. It may be the best journalism I've seen on what's happening in America. theintercept.com/2022/01/05/jan… And here's a shot of part of the former councilman's district. I grew up not far from the top of the hill in this picture. "A low-income district, a lot of poverty..."

In honor of Gonzaga winning last night, here's another strange thread, this time about my mother and someone who was president of Gonzaga University. To be clear, he was not president of Gonzaga when this story happened. This story happened at Georgetown University in DC in the late 1980s. There are three characters: a Jesuit priest, my mother, and me. It will be a long thread, and I won't name the priest, although you can figure it out yourself if you want to.

Here's a thread that won't end up where you think it's going. In college, I had two roommates who were widely regarded as stunningly beautiful. It made me grateful not to have that kind of beauty, because they were pestered nonstop. But they also met a lot of interesting people. I went to Georgetown University, which was a kind of culture shock for me. I'd come from living in a split-level house in West Virginia that was intermittently without electricity or enough food. And suddenly, I was in class with people who few off to Angkor Wat for spring break.

It's so telling that in a natural disaster, he doesn't imagine himself or anyone else out there helping people. Just "the gang" coming for him. The bogeyman he helped create lives rent-free in his head, with real consequences for the millions whose lives he makes decisions about.

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1376173348842000385

My grandfather, who was born a century ago, told me a story a long time ago about how as a child, he woke in the night to a terrifying noise. He wasn't sure what it was, but it had him quaking in fear. It sounded, he said, "Like two colored men in the room with me, fighting."

Pondering the story of how my 3 books (a literary biography of Nabokov, a global history of concentration camps, & ICEBOUND, an Arctic story from 400 years ago) all rose out of my search for the King of Zembla, which began in 2008. The Zembla Trilogy. Would you like to hear more? All right! So I'll tell the story. But I'll want to pull together some neat images for it, so it won't be tonight. I'll try to post it this weekend...

It's not just Barr but the Department of Justice as an institution that has become the willing tool of a cowardly, revenge-obsessed leader. This is a laughable designation, invented only to settle political scores.

https://twitter.com/NBCNewYork/status/1308018445770993667

But designating certain regions as contested territory is the quickest route to the use of counterinsurgency tactics against civilians domestically on a broad scale. I think this isn't primarily a matter of defunding, though that will have consequences. It's something worse.

All right, I know everyone is stressed. So I have a wild story for you. It has nothing to do with elections, Trump, the coronavirus, or the sorry state of the world and all the hate in it. It has a dead man, a locked door, a mysterious license plate, and a surprise ending. My stepfather died of lung cancer in May. He declined across a year. My mother has dementia and paranoid delusions. They saved almost nothing; they spent all their money on things. So in 2019, I drove to their house, and over several trips, began collecting info on these things.

Somebody tell @RadioFreeTom that the verb "to mau-mau" comes directly out of a super-successful propaganda strategy that demonized Black Africans in Kenya and allowed the British to promote crushing testicles with pliers, raping women with bottles, & building concentration camps.

https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1269736359050313729

About the verb "mau-mau": I wanted to take a minute, so as not to limit the answer to things I'd run across in my book research, which was more focused on British propaganda used inside Kenya. This isn't a comprehensive thread--it's just what I had time to do today. @EddieMmwangi

A little more about the trip! We sailed last month for Novaya Zemlya on the appropriately named Alter Ego, an 18-meter yacht devoted to Arctic expeditions. Here is it in early August at the port in Murmansk. Just out of frame at left is the nuclear-powered icebreaker Lenin. The unflappable Mikhail Tekuchev was captain of our boat and a faithful pilot of the drone Zhuzha.

Nova Zembla is stupendous. Our crew was just as fabulous. A polar bear! Walrus serenades! Dolphin escorts. Canyons. Climbing. Artifacts. Engine failure! Sometimes happiness hits you like a tidal wave, you don't know where to put it all, and you can hardly hold onto your heart. SO MANY things happened on the expedition. I'm still in Russia for now, but will post photos and thoughts introducing you to places and people (and our boat) when I get back to DC mid-week and have a better connection.

This kind of ignorance is such a problem right now. Even serious people don't know this history and then misread the current situation because they know so little about the past. washingtonpost.com/opinions/my-fa… 1) Scholars call those British camps in southern Africa concentration camps. It's not whimsy on a couple people's part. Some debate whether the earlier, Cuban example should be called concentration camps, but he's ignoring the vast majority of scholars regarding the British camps

Trump will take every part of this--corruption, abuse of powers, targeting minorities, doing harm to those he identifies as enemies--as far as he can. He's limited only by institutional barriers, which are fairly flexible with the current makeup of the Senate and Supreme Court. Leaders who ended up instituting concentration camps and other repressive measures weren't necessarily smart. Even in cases where they were, many have tended to be reactive. They respond to things in the moment. They do as much as they can get away with & wait, & then go further.

I've been thinking a lot lately about this idea that a positive form of nationalism for the US exists, or as is said here, in my opinion, incorrectly, "People need to belong to something. People need to have, well, a people." washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editor… The great strength of America has been and is that it has no Volk, no ethnic or racial group that defines it.

When I went into the Rohingya camps in Myanmar in 2015, I also talked to people in town who were happy their former neighbors were in camps. Insisting they weren't racist or bigots, many said all they really wanted was for the government to deport the Rohingya to another country. They claimed the Rohingya were illegal immigrants, rapists, and terrorists. If I mentioned a Rohingya they actually knew, they would sometimes acknowledge maybe *that* Rohingya person wasn't a criminal. They often argued that the Rohingya should be deported as a group anyway.

I'm out of the country right now and only able to get online at random moments. But in the spirit of the fabulous @BlairBraverman, I will offer a brief photo version of my running essay. Here I am the summer before I first tried and failed to become a runner. I'm not even running yet, but somehow I'm already tired.

In my book, I tell a story from the first months at Dachau in 1933, where Hans Beimler was forced to wear a humiliating sign for the amusement of camp personnel. cnn.com/2019/07/04/us/… No two historical situations are ever the same. But it's a very bad sign that an agent reported the alleged incident, that supervisors appear to have taken no action, and that "the incident is one of many," Abuses that are reported but ignored proliferate.

The New York Times posted an opinion piece this weekend saying that what we're doing on the border isn't concentration camps, but is more like Vichy internment. I have some concerns about this essay. nytimes.com/2019/06/29/opi… The essay includes some great information about French camps under the Vichy regime, but is missing the larger history of concentration camps. Civilian internment IS part of concentration camp history. We can't get to the most lethal camp systems without going through such camps.

@ChaseMadar Just looking at it analytically, the odds suggest things will get much worse. There's so much to cover, I can't put it all in a couple tweets. I really need to write a piece on this. But here are a few random things. @ChaseMadar 1) so far, what the US is doing is similar to some prior systems, all of which degenerated further before they were ended (and many of which are still defended in surprising places today).

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.