(Orig to FB)
Andrea Pitzer’s video piece What counts as a concentration camp? isn’t too long (24 mins) and is really interesting — in part for how it’s edited, which feels like the video equivalent of a rough cut of an academic essay. Like most tendentious exercises in applied neoplatonism, the debate about whether Trump & Co are building “concentration camps” is tiresome, artificial, and unnecessary; and arguments that they aren’t are starting to smell increasingly suspect. Pitzer’s history of CCs, One Long Night, is very good, and it’s hardly the first of its kind. Sid Mintz’s history of plantations, Sweetness and Power, traces a similar trajectory of how that form was developed through experimentation over centuries. There is no fixed, clearly bounded model of a CC. On the contrary, as Pitzer argues, CCs are best understood as a process.
There was a time (and, arguably, reason) to assert that certain words and phrases — notably concentration camp and genocide — had particular origins and associations that discourages using them widely. Under Netanyahu and Co, Israel has pissed away the last vestiges of that exceptionalism; and those of Israel’s supporters who’ve failed to responsibly criticize its excesses have relinquished any right to claim some sort of ownership of those terms. Those claims, well past their sell-by date, appear under a new sign, as efforts to control discussion and debate — and, as such, are part and parcel with efforts to intimidate, silence, and persecute effective critics of Israel’s policies and practices.