Revolution Dispatch

The world’s economic crisis had threatened

Bosses everywhere, the people inspired,

To have their very own communist uprising

So all these governments attempted to crush them

Churchill, Mussolini, and Hitler among them

Now we have a point that is usually lost

In the rewrite of history you won’t come across

The U.S., Britain, and France supported

Fascist Germany with all of its torture

All of its savagery all its aggression

Hoping it would step in the Russian direction

-Marcel Cartier, “27 Million”

Fascism, and all of its characteristic atrocities, serve to try to fortify the capitalist power structure. Fascism becomes necessary when capital gets weakened. This is why no U.S. administration, Republican or Democratic, will get rid of the perpetual campaign of human rights abuses against immigrants. The conditions of capitalism and imperialism have grown too dire for concentration camps to not be expanded within the United States.

“Expanded” is the key word. In some form, concentration camps have always been part of U.S. history. From slavery, to the shoving of Natives into small and economically deprived reservations, to the poor black neighborhoods where police can enact violence with near impunity, to the for-profit prisons from America’s ongoing mass incarceration era, the U.S. has always been forcing disfavored groups into concentrated areas where they can be coerced, exploited, or easily killed. The only unique thing about these migrant concentration camps is that they’ve been created in reaction to the crises the empire has been experiencing throughout the 21st century.

The cages and inhumane prison facilities for the impoverished people who’ve come across the border, which largely began to be built under Obama and partially began to gain legal precedence under Clinton, exist because of the destabilizing events that U.S. imperialism itself has brought about. The climate crisis, which has been exacerbated by the globally unparalleled greenhouse gas emissions of the bloated U.S. military, has driven the influx of refugees. So have Washington’s recent imperialist interventions in Latin America, such as the 2009 Honduras coup which has created a dictatorship that’s forced many to flee from the country’s intensifying poverty and violence. So has the cruel neo-colonialism Washington has carried out during the neoliberal era, with the North American Free Trade Agreement and other corporate policies within Mexico driving much of the country’s population to economic deprivation and compelling them to cross the border out of hope for a better life.

These factors, along with the recent U.S./NATO wars which have created a historic refugee crisis throughout Africa and southeast Asia, are symptoms of an empire in decline. Washington’s recent economic warfare that’s gone along with destructive military adventures, increases in global neo-colonial exploitation, and backings of brutal anti-democratic regimes are all measures to keep up profits in the face of waning U.S. hegemony and escalating 21st century economic crises. Covid-19 and the latest global depression have accelerated this trend towards destabilization, which is naturally causing the U.S. imperialists to further double double down on their necro-political practices.

Biden may be giving immigrants more opportunities for citizenship (something the Republicans will reverse the moment they get back into power), but he’s also been opening an overflow facility for children caught at the border, and he just made a step backwards in human rights by giving ICE almost full discretion over who it can deport. The former move was rationalized as a practical necessity amid the chaos at the border, and the latter is rationalized as a way to ensure “national security.” Which shows that in this era of increasing global instability, the imperialists see concentration camps and forced removals of ethnic groups as an unavoidable part of keeping capitalist society functional.

The media is trying to obfuscate this reality, painting a picture of a diverse White House cabinet that’s doing what’s needed to return things “back to normal.” This is what the ruling class propagandists did last month, when Biden signed a crime bill which supposedly ended for-profit prisons; in reality, the bill barely changed anything, and the corporations which are profiting off of the incarceration of both poor U.S. citizens and detained refugees will be able to continue their reign of terror for as long as the U.S. exists.

As the ruling class tries to paper over the system’s rot, those within the concentration camps will continue to be subjected to the types of horrors that have been revealed to be the norm within ICE facilities in recent years: forced sterilizations of migrant women, physical and sexual abuse of children, appallingly unsanitary living conditions that have caused many of these detained children to die, engineered exposure of detainees to Covid-19, ICE directly emulating the Nazis by using gas against the detainees. ICE has already expanded its deadly repressive campaign to the point where it’s frequently detained U.S. citizens. The next logical step is to put political prisoners within the concentration camps, which Biden’s enabling of ICE to detain far more people for “national security” reasons has made more possible.

What we’re seeing is the expansion of Washington’s 21st century system of secret prisons, where individuals the state deems undesirable are put into detention facilities that operate outside the norms of civil liberties. All the torture and death camp characteristics that the ICE facilities have exhibited show that they perfectly fit the criteria for this; when someone is detained by ICE, it’s even more likely than in the regular U.S. justice system that they’ll be tortured, held without due process, or killed. Through ICE, the regime in Washington has found a way to bypass the remaining pretenses of legal protections for prisoners.

Again, “expansion” is the operative word, because the U.S. has had a secret prison system for longer than these camps have existed. The construction of Guantanamo Bay, with its wildly lax rules on who can get indefinitely detained within it and its torture of the arbitarily detained prisoners, was the first sign to Americans that something sinister would come to meet them during the 21st century. First they came for the Muslims, then they came for the brown people. Who they come for next will likely be radical political organizers, or journalists like Julian Assange. In recent years, ICE has already begun regularly detaining activists and journalists. All that needs to happen now is for their definition of a dangerous political actor to be broadened, which Biden’s recent ICE reform again creates an opening for.

This is the nature of the U.S. concentration camps of the 21st century: facilities which are being built to take care of the undesirables, be they disfavored ethnic groups or political dissidents. This is the face of the desperate capitalism of our era: a monsterous regime that’s abandoning all pretenses of civil or human rights to try to keep up profits and crush a potential internal class uprising. Will this regime be defeated like the Nazis were?

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