nothing wrong, but who came under suspicion by the US
government of owing allegiance to an enemy state simply
by virtue of being Japanese. Again, though, the history is
complicated. The camps in which they were held, such as
Tanforan and Minidoka, are regularly referred to as ‘concen-
tration camps’, yet – despite the fact their inmates were held against their will –
they had facilities such as post offices and visiting hours. Clearly, they were a far cry
from Nazi camps such as Dachau.
Yet here is the point: whether or not the facilities in which Japanese-Americans
were held were concentration camps is less important than understanding that their
internment reveals the paranoia that lies at the heart of many modern states. Further,
it’s exactly the same paranoia that we now see in the United States, in the response of
President Trump’s administration to migration from Latin America to the US.As such, these ideas – of statelessness and state paranoia – speak to a wider historical
story. As president, Trump clearly has enormous power and influence over these
kinds of decisions. But the camps in the US of 2019 tell us not just about the
attitude of a particular administration but about the temper of the times more
generally. They exist not just because people with particular views are speaking
louder. They also have to be operationalised by regimes that believe their actions
will win them political capital.
Such camps can, therefore, usefully be seen as a kind of symptom of political
disruption, and of wider structural and geopolitical issues: the movement of
peoples, the perceived transfer of power from rich countries to developing coun-
tries, and the effects of climate change on nations around the world. These
circumstances are putting pressure on resources and on states to provide for ‘their’
populations in ways that are feeding this kind of paranoia. And so the people of
a land such as the US, which is built on immigrants, increasingly express the idea
that they have to keep migrants out because they’re threatening ‘their’ livelihoods.
In other words, it’s not just because there are lots of people who don’t like
foreigners that we see the growing use of detention centres; it’s because people feel
that their ways of life are somehow under threat, and that these foreigners are
icebreakers for a larger, oncoming change. All of these large-scale phenomena feed
through into the rise of xenophobia and nationalism, and the sorts of sentiment
that many people hoped, in the decades after the Second World War, were dead.
We should be cautious about attempting to identif y too strongly a recurring
pattern. This isn’t exactly the same phenomenon repeating through history. But
it is symptomatic of the fact that moments of crisis (or perceived crisis) lead states
to behave in certain ways. The report of conditions at the facility at Clint, Texas –
children with their own bodily waste on their clothes, people drinking toilet water,
guards mocking the inmates – is reminiscent of some conditions at concentration
camps. As in concentration camps in other settings, these phenomena are not a GETTY^ IMAGESJapanese-American
children during a
class in Minidoka
War Relocation
Center, Idaho, 1943.
Inmates at such
facilities were held
against their will,
but had access
to post offices
and schools
Such internment reveals the paranoia
at the heart of many modern states.
We now see the same paranoia in the US