Stephen Kessler | 'Detention centers' is a euphemism - Santa Cruz Sentinel

Getting your

Trinity Audioplayer ready...Of all the sickening things afflicting our daily lives for which the antidote has yet to be delivered, “detention centers” are to me the most nauseating. Hard as it is to witness the misery of people I see on the street hauling their stuff in garbage bags or rolling their carts or battered suitcases in search of temporary shelter; distressing as it is to read or hear of the suffering of civilians in Kyiv or Gaza or Tehran or Minneapolis under the onslaught of state aggression; disgusting as it is to smell the latest political abomination spewing like raw sewage from the White House — nothing touches me with the moral horror I find in the words “detention centers.”

These warehouses where human beings, most of whom have hard-earned history in and positive contributions to this country and no criminal record, are rounded up and confined in squalid conditions, can’t be sugarcoated and must be called what they are: concentration camps. To deny this reality is increasingly impossible as the gulags for immigrants proliferate faster than measles among the unvaccinated. Too bad there is no cure for this malignant virus, not even the midterm elections, and even they may be contaminated and compromised by executive attempts to cancel, fix, “nationalize” or suppress participation in them.

But let us consider the concentration camps here in the land of the free sprouting like deadly mushrooms from sea to shining microplastic sea. Remember the post-Holocaust slogan “Never Again”? Forget it. Variations on organized genocide have continued to proliferate almost everywhere governments exercise their power to oppress, brutalize, ethnic-cleanse and exterminate populations for nothing more than their identity. The squalid, unsanitary, cruel and unusual conditions — overflowing toilets, spoiled food, no medical attention for the unwell — in which “detention center” detainees, including children, are confined may not yet include gas chambers, but the industrial-scale sadism of enforcement operations is giving the Third Reich a run for its money. Historians can sort out the distinctions and note the rhymes between the times, but the facts now unfolding on American soil are equally appalling.

This soil is not the fertile earth of agriculture but the human waste that is fouling our souls. We are soiled by what is being perpetrated in the name of immigration enforcement and subsidized by our taxes. Even if we are not directly touched by the terror of armed, masked agents of the state smashing our car windows, invading our homes, raiding our workplaces and dragging us away from our families and communities, we are implicated in their actions because we are paying for them, and the stains will stick to us and stink for generations.

A late friend of mine who was an activist for Native American rights in the 1970s and ’80s told me the Nazis got the idea of their camps from the All-American invention of the Indian reservation. So “detention centers” are not unprecedented and follow a tradition that runs from Manifest Destiny through the imprisonment of Japanese Americans in World War II up to the present roundups of racially profiled people to be warehoused at the whim of stormtroopers authorized to exercise absolute power over anyone who looks to them “alien.” From one historical perspective, this is merely the continuation of a social pathology perennially infecting the Republic. Despite the successes of the civil rights movement, skin color continues to determine one’s fate in these States.

It hurts to write this, but how can we not acknowledge it? The ethical, political and moral abdication of Congress, specifically the invertebrate Republicans, is shameful; they have voluntarily surrendered their spines and souls to the ideology of the monumentally repugnant Stephen Miller, architect of the nation’s Nazification.

And yet, there is some encouragement to be found in the fact that most Americans disapprove of the antidemocratic avalanche burying humanity all around us. Human warehouses are unwelcome even in some Trump-drunk communities. If elections in the fall somehow manage to be fair, if decency prevails and record numbers of voters turn out and election officials defy the white-out conditions, perhaps our ideals of liberty and justice for all have a fighting chance.