American Dachau
Trump Takes the Next Step
Six months.
That's all it took for the Trump regime to make the move from kidnapping people on the street, to threatening to strip political enemies of citizenship, to selling swag celebrating the construction of an American concentration camp.
Six months.
And Republicans say that merch promoting the newly built Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp is "going like hot cakes."
Some detractors have called the camp Alligator Auschwitz, but this may not be the most accurate comparison. Not yet anyway. Because the death camps didn’t just appear; it took years of increasing brutality and degradation before they got to Auschwitz.
It began at Dachau.
Like the Trump regime, the Dachau concentration camp was established in the first months of Nazi rule. But unlike Trump, the Nazis were careful to downplay the barbaric cruelty of the newly-built camp. They presented propaganda photos to show “the truth about Dachau” as if it were a “model” prison for rehabilitation.
Trump’s supporters on the other hand are gloating over the fact that this is no normal prison. It is a series of cages in the swamps of the Florida Everglades. And MAGA is celebrating a camp built for the express purpose of dehumanizing and brutalizing the people brought there.
The inmates being brought to Alligator Alcatraz are those who Trump claims are “poisoning the blood” of America. Language that could have been taken right out of Nazi speeches.
Will political enemies be sent there? You bet.
Will mothers be thrown into the cages? Why not?
What about children? Expect this too.
Trump has understood from the beginning that he can keep his MAGA supporters in the fold through the spectacle of cruelty. In fact, his tour of the concentration camp came as he was pushing through his "Big, Beautiful Bill," legislation that will rob health care and social supports for many of his working-class base.
But Trump has always reassured the faithful that he will be even crueller to the people his base has been taught to despise. Being part of MAGA is feeling that you can always beat down on someone below you.
And elected MAGA officials are fighting to get in on the act.
Take for example, South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace who says she wants a concentration camp in her home state. Will she try to outdo Florida in the degradation department?
No doubt. After all, the crueler the better.
That is why Alligator Alcatraz meets all the architectural requirements for the torture porn fantasies promoted by Kristi Noem and Donald Trump.
On his tour, Trump took viciousness to a new level by gleefully describing how a detainee might try to outrun an alligator in the fetid swamps. When sadism becomes official government policy, you can bet that much darker abuses are around the corner.
I wrote in an earlier piece about the establishment of a modern Gulag system where the Trump government can arbitrarily detain and deport people to foreign locations – offshore concentration camps.
American Gulag
"[A primary feature of the gulag or concentration camp is that]…the human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead and some evil spirit gone mad were amusing himself by stopping them for a while between life and death."
American Dachau represents the first of a new kind of staged cruelty and abuse of legal rights. Once normalized, all manner of abuses against people become inevitable.
Remember when it was reported that Kristi Noem was looking to set up a reality TV show where desperate migrants fight for the right to citizenship? At the time, Homeland Security went out of their way to deny the rumour.
Maybe she was just ahead of the times. But now the trashy reality-TV nature of Trumpland is merging into a circus atmosphere of fascist repression. Trump has announced he will stage a cage fight on the lawn of the White House. And nobody is surprised.
Trump isn’t just some white trash boyo who took over the reins of power. These are staged spectacles that are designed to degrade important symbols and institutions.
Grifter fascism has changed the traditional far-right playbook. Hitler, for example, was careful to curate a spectacle of a nation held together by the Volk, the nation, the blood. Trump has no interest in a unifying national story.
His objective is to make the judges, politicians, religious followers and the media complicit in the debasement of once sacred symbolism. And so Trump uses his office to sell crypto memes, gold bibles, and the promise of cage matches on the lawn of the White House.
Trump knows he will get no blowback from the powerful.
The Moral Rot of Guantanamo Has Come Home
Trump didn’t create this moral crisis. He is a manifestation of those who have turned their backs on traditional give-and-take politics. They have opted to gamble on the dark force that could be conjured by the right wing ouija board.
Guantanamo Bay plays its own dark part.
The reality is that the American legal and political establishment has been decaying for years over its longstanding willingness to turn a blind eye to torture and the abuse of law.
Over the last 24 years, four American presidents lived with the notion that men could be kidnapped, hooded, and disappeared to a brutal detention facility. Guantanamo was a place beyond the rule of law. The men there were held beyond the bare minimum protections offered under international law.
Torture and humiliation were widespread. The abuse was codified and sanctified by American law. The so-called "torture memos" were written by John Yoo, the Deputy Assistant Attorney General.
But karma is a bitch.
If you let the rule of law slip for the sake of convenience in going after some "bad guys," then you let it slip for all. This led to the sickening photos of American soldiers torturing detainees in Abu Ghraib.
And now we are dealing with a reality where people on American soil are being kidnapped, hooded and taken to the homegrown Guantanamo.
Does anyone think that the abuses of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib won't occur in a cage match world?
The Rise of the American Caesar
But there is another factor here that explains the particular nature of American fascism. The American right has long been obsessed with moving from a democracy-for-all to a so-called Republic of elites similar to the Roman Republic. And Trump is channelling the spirit of an American Caesar.
The problem with the Roman Republic was that it was corrupt and unstable, ultimately replaced by the dictatorship of the Caesars. Trump isn't interested in emulating the supposed merits of the great Caesars, like Augustus or Marcus Aurelius. He favours the likes of Caligula, Commodus, and Nero.
French Senator Claude Malhueret has pointed this out.
"Washington has become Nero's court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a buffoon on ketamine [Elon Musk] in charge of purging the civil service."
Look at the bio for any of those despicable Roman rulers, and you see a legacy that Trump aspires to. They were tyrants who were not interested in a greater vision of the Empire because they focused on petty narcissism and cruelty.
With American Dachau, we are witnessing the dangerous slide into mass abuse. Just how dark things might get, we cannot say. But already, Trump’s base is using alligators as a metaphor for mass killings. And that should tell us something.
Far-right internet personality and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer boasted on social media that "if we get started now," the alligators will be supplied with 65 million meals. That is the population of Latino Americans.
When public figures can joke publicly about the mass killing of a people, the next step becomes all too possible.
At present, the Democrats have decried the selling of concentration swag as being in "poor taste." No, Dems, this is way beyond poor taste. This is a gleeful descent into the darkness.
Dachau was the first step on the road to atrocity.
Will America go there?
Eight months ago, I would have said never. At that point, America was still a nation under the rule of law. Now, we have politicians cheering the image of people being fed to alligators.
Now, anything is frighteningly possible.
But remember, as difficult as the times are, it is much easier to resist fascism now than when the abuse of law becomes absolute.
"Being part of MAGA is feeling that you can always beat down on someone below you."
President Lyndon Johnson knew this when Republicans used race politics in the 60's: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
A quote from Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec that may be helpful context:
"Too often we develop myths of innocence, like calling that concentration camp in Florida Alligator Auschwitz, as if there aren't myriad examples of this kind of race-based detention in US history. Hitler was inspired by the US after all, it isn't the other way around."
https://www.thousandworlds.ca/you-g/
The current Trump regime is not the anomaly some people wish it to be, and to confront the real issues requires confronting British North American settler-colonialism generally (consolidated into USA and Canada). All this pointing at individuals is simply an attempt to move to individual innocence.