result of the US Border Control being unable to afford to house people properly; in
fact, there are empty beds in longer-term Immigration and Customs Enforcement
facilities. It seems, rather, that despite President Trump’s insistence he is merely try-
ing to persuade would-be migrants not to travel to the US, we are witnessing a policy
of humiliation. Although the conditions in China’s camps holding Uighur people are
no less outrageous, such occurrences seem to us more frightening when supposedly
liberal states act in a similar way. Where is left to hide? Whose rights are not at risk?
Of course, a liberal state such as the United States allows for opposition in a way
that is not permitted in authoritarian regimes. There are plenty of people publish-
ing outraged comments about what’s going on in the US, as well as those who argue
that any comparison between the detention centres and concentration camps is
unfounded. There is much historical precedent for dissent: the British humanitari-
an activist Emily Hobhouse, for instance, campaigned to highlight and change the
conditions of women and children in Boer War concentration camps. Conditions
did improve, but not before tens of thousands died in the camps.
Still, it’s important to phrase such criticism carefully. Ocasio-Cortez’s words
may have done her argument a disservice, because they refocused the debate to
one about terminology. Historians are obliged to stress that the various examples
discussed in this piece (and many more could be added) are not all the same: they
occurred at different times, in different places, and were administered by different
regimes with differing ideologies. So although in some ways it could be argued
that it’s entirely reasonable to use the term ‘concentration camp’ in the case of the
facilities on the US border – because it’s been used to describe all sorts of sites of
incarceration throughout the 20th and 21st centuries – it needs qualification, and
the claim is inherently risky.
I would argue that, when we consider the examples considered here, the term
‘concentration camp’ has always connoted – as we have defined – the forced
detention of civilians against their will, who are denied access to basic rights most
of us take for granted, including recourse to law. The civilians held in concentration
camps are completely at the mercy of the guards and of the regime by which they
are imprisoned. Unlike at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba – for all of
the horrific treatment there – they have no access to law. No one represents them.
Aside from the instinctive reaction that wrongly associates concentration
camps solely with the Holocaust, much of this debate turns on whether one can
find an adequate definition of a concentration camp. The fact that, like any
concept that has a long history, such an attempt is so fraught with historical and
political risks means that we are less in need of a consensual, timeless definition
than of the need to understand that it is a term that has, at different moments in
time, connoted different things. The term ‘concentration camp’ has a broader
conceptual histor y that we need to understand to make sense of the situation in
the present day. Rather than obsess over whether the detention centres on the US/
Mexico border are ‘concentration camps’, we should be outraged that such places
with such appalling conditions exist at
all, housing not criminals but
enterprising people who – in the
tradition of American history and
nation-building – seek a better life
for themselves and their children.
Dan Stone is professor of modern history at
Royal Holloway University of London, and
author of Concentration Camps: A Very Short
Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2019)