From: fedora@fea.st   
      
   NY Times,   
   February 21, 2026   
      
   By Jamelle Bouie   
      
   For the past month or so, I’ve been writing about the abysmal   
   conditions in ICE detention centers. Last week, I argued that you   
   could use the term “concentration camp” to describe the system the   
   Trump administration is using to seize and detain immigrants, legal or   
   otherwise.   
      
   Both to expand on that point and to bring in a broader perspective, I   
   spoke to Andrea Pitzer, author of “One Long Night: A Global History of   
   Concentration Camps.” Pitzer also tackled this question of   
   identification in a recent piece for her newsletter, “Degenerate Art.”   
   As we spoke about her argument, we tried to place the White House’s   
   relentless drive to expand immigration detention in a larger context.   
   Our conversation covers quite a bit of ground. If, in particular, you   
   want to learn more about the United States’ 19th and 20th century   
   imperial expansion, let me recommend two books, both by journalists.   
   The first, by Spencer Ackerman, is “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era   
   Destabilized America and Produced Trump.” And the second, by Jonathan   
   Katz, is “Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and   
   the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire.”   
      
   Hi, Andrea. First, could you introduce yourself?   
   My name is Andrea Pitzer, and I am a journalist as well as the author   
   of a few books. I think probably the most important one in this moment   
   is “One Long Night, A Global History of Concentration Camps.”   
      
   You recently wrote an essay for your newsletter called “What Counts as   
   a ‘Concentration Camp’?,” in relation to the use of the term to   
   describe the ICE detention facilities. What prompted you to write this   
   particular piece?   
      
   I think there is a lot of concern that I see from different   
   communities, certainly from the Jewish community in the U.S. and   
   abroad, that when people start trying to compare the Holocaust to   
   anything, they’re doing so out of antisemitism. It is a natural   
   response to say, “Wait, wait, wait” — are you diminishing this   
   historical event in some way? And my point is always: absolutely not.   
   If there is a plain of concentration camps over 130 years in the world   
   on six continents, Auschwitz is this tower that kind of looms above   
   all of them. So, it is critical that we keep that in mind because that   
   shows us where it’s possible for humanity to go. My work has been   
   about, “How did we get to that point and how do we keep from returning   
   to it?”   
      
   Now, we are really directly replicating a bunch of that history. And I   
   think it’s become more and more important that we use that term to   
   just to really bring information and educate people about how closely   
   we are following history.   
      
   So let’s talk about that history for a moment. When does the   
   concentration camp emerge as a technique for how governments manage   
   populations?   
      
   One thing that’s important to get out of the way up front is that   
   without centuries of colonialism and imperial rule, particularly the   
   British and the Spanish, a lot of it in the Americas, but also in   
   Africa and Asia, you don’t get to modern concentration camps. Native   
   American genocide also relates to similar kinds of displacement and   
   detention. But the modern concentration camp, for the purposes of my   
   book, starts in the 1890s. And it only becomes possible due to the   
   invention, mass production and patenting of barbed wire and automatic   
   weapons. So suddenly you can hold a lot of people with a very small   
   guard force.   
      
   That starts with Spanish rule in Cuba in the 1890s, putting down   
   insurrection and very quickly appears again in South Africa with the   
   British during the Second Boer War, where they’re rounding up   
   civilians. And that’s a critical thing to say about who is getting   
   held in these kinds of camps. These are not prisoner of war camps.   
   It’s the mass detention of civilians without due process on the basis   
   of identities — political, religious, racial, ethnic. And almost   
   always it is done to expand or entrench political power.   
      
   When do Americans enter this story?   
      
   Unfortunately, the United States does it very early in the history of   
   these modern camps. We see it in the Philippines at the turn of the   
   20th century. Ironically, and this is something that’s been lost to   
   history, but I go into in my book quite a bit, the reason that America   
   backed that war against Spain in 1898 was because of the images of   
   these earliest concentration camps that they had been presented with.   
   Americans were horrified with what Spain was doing in Cuba and that   
   provided a lot of impetus for the war.   
      
   We won that war very quickly. We took over the Philippines. I’m   
   condensing a lot of history here, obviously. This is a very simple   
   version of it. But after some question of whether we had promised the   
   Philippines their independence, we did not give them their   
   independence. And we wound up with an insurrection on our hands as an   
   imperial power. And we immediately, after denouncing concentration   
   camps as something that, for example, President William McKinley said   
   would lead to nothing but “the wilderness and the grave,” the U.S., in   
   fact, installed those camps in the Philippines to put down that   
   rebellion. So it was a very quick turn.   
      
   This is a bit of a sidebar, but the Philippine war and the Philippine   
   occupation, the Spanish-American War, are this kind of blank spot in   
   popular memory, right? I bring this up because with the occupation of   
   Iraq, the American experience in the Philippines was brought in to   
   contextualize kind of some of what the United States is doing in the   
   Middle East. These are not the first American experiences with this   
   form of occupation. I think it’s useful to consider, right, how the   
   American experience in the Philippines is again coming back to us in   
   the use of concentration camps.   
      
   I do think there’s something really important to say about that, which   
   is people never want to think that the camps they’re doing, that their   
   country is doing, are like those other camps. That’s something I found   
   across the board, across a whole 130 years. As soon as there was one   
   system to compare to the next, as soon as they were comparing the Boer   
   system to the Spanish system in Cuba, people said, no, our camps   
   aren’t like that. These are actually bad people. But if you bake a   
   cake with the same ingredients, you don’t have to have the same recipe   
   exactly, right? You’re going to get something similar.   
      
   So in the period you’re talking about in the Middle East with U.S.   
   actions, we see a pre-emptive war, right? It was not a necessary war.   
   It was a war of choice. And you see waterboarding, right? Very   
   specific tactics. You see this same kind of detention. You see   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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