Donald Trump is not the first American president to establish a series of concentration camps.
Andrew Jackson created a policy of Indian removal in 1830. His bill made systematic ethnic cleansing an official US policy. Implementing this policy involved the creation of both transient and permanent concentration camps. It involved the systematic violation of the human rights of hundreds of thousands of American Indians. The policies Andrew Jackson established as law remained, in one form or another, in place for well over a century.
Andrew Jackson is Trump’s favorite president.
We, as a nation have never fully reckoned with this shameful legacy, just as we have never truly reckoned with the history of slavery or Jim Crow.
So one answer is that Trump and his administration got the idea from his favorite president.
Here’s another one:
Joe Arpaio ran a self-proclaimed 'concentration camp' for years. Where was GOP outrage?
Arizona Republican Reps. Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs have been among the congresswoman’s many critics. Biggs called statements by Ocasio-Cortez “despicable.” [...]
Biggs and Gosar were supporters of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. They backed him politically and urged President Donald Trump to pardon Arpaio after he was convicted of criminal contempt.
What makes this odd is that Arpaio, unlike Ocasio-Cortez, didn’t compare some other detention facility to a concentration camp. He compared his own unique outdoor detention facility – Tent City – to a concentration camp. He said so at a public gathering. -— www.azcentral.com/...
Yeah, you read that right. This guy boasted about establishing concentration camps. His Republican colleagues said nothing.
Arpaio was prosecuted for racial profiling and illegal patrols targeting immigrants. He was convicted for contempt of court and sentenced, but was released after a pardon from Trump. He has yet to face justice for his illegal violation of the human rights of prisoners for years.
Arpaio is not the only Trump supporter who has run a system that grossly abused prisoners.
At least four people, including a newborn, have died in Wisconsin’s Milwaukee County Jail since April 2016. The facility, run by Sheriff David A. Clarke, Jr., houses about 950 detainees daily. The string of deaths has raised concerns about conditions at the jail, including whether adequate medical care is being provided.
The deaths have also led to questions about Sheriff Clarke, who claimed in May 2017 that he had been appointed by President Trump to serve in a leadership position in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security – a position he accepted. The White House refused to confirm Clarke’s appointment, which he then said he rescinded in June 2017 following news reports that he had plagiarized parts of his master’s thesis. — www.prisonlegalnews.org/...
Our legal system has yet to hold Arpaio or Clarke to account for the abuse and torture of people held by their departments. And sorry, “contempt of court” doesn’t cut it. We need prosecutions that acknowledge the fundamental human rights of people held in detention. We need to treat officials who abuse their power and violate our rights as the criminals they are.
That has not happened with Arpaio, Clarke and so many others in positions of power. We have excused the widespread neglect, prejudice and exploitation of people in detention. Mass incarceration has pushed millions of people into the maw of an abusive system led by sadists like Arpaio and Clarke. These policies, which have been made more inhuman over the decades have desensitized many to the inhuman treatment of imprisoned/detained people.
Just as people held in prison have been dehumanized though mass incarceration, detainees held overseas were dehumanized and tortured under the Bush administration. The impunity enjoyed by these torturers and abusers has emboldened the people in Trump’s administration. That is why Trump could openly advocate for illegal torture during his campaign. That is why they’ve felt unafraid to establish a system of concentration camps that abuse vulnerable people, including children.
But as important as the impunity enjoyed by modern day petty abusers is the historic impunity enjoyed by the presidents and high officials who established concentration camps and ethnically cleansed the US. We do not have to mince words here when it comes to our history, we need to grapple with it honestly. The policies we instituted in the 1800s against Native Americans served as a template for genocidal monsters who perfected that template further during the Boer wars, during World War I (in Turkey/Armenia especially) and then in World War II across Europe and in wide swaths of Asia.
As for Hitler and America, the issue goes beyond such obvious suspects as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model,” with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s “The American West and the Nazi East,” a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “The Nazi Connection,” which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking. This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.
The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.” To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies. The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand. — www.newyorker.com/...
But perhaps most damningly, there’s one more well Trump and his administration have drawn from:
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist. — www.vanityfair.com/...
— @subirgrewal