Glamour shots in a gulag

By M. Gessen

The image of Kristi Noem, the secretary of Homeland Security, posing in front of a cage filled with men shocked me. In late March, Noem traveled to El Salvador to visit the maximum-security prison to which more than 200 men had been sent by the United States. In the video of the visit, the men had shaved heads. Most are shirtless and wearing identical white shorts. Some of them stood facing the iron bars through which they were being filmed; others sat on bunks arranged in three levels.

Every aspect of this visual — the bunks, the bars, the men visually stripped of their identities — harks back to images of 20th-century concentration camps. Noem, a member of the presidential administration, was there to brag that “this facility is one of the tools in our tool kit.”

And then there is the look she chose: beachy curls, athleisure, what appeared to be diamond rings, a baseball cap with an ICE logo, and, of course, the $50,000 Rolex. Polished, female, in control: in every way the opposite of the people in cages. As though she were in a different category of human.

The history of modern-day concentration camps is often traced to South Africa at the turn of the 20th century, during the Second Boer War, when the British interned more than 100,000 people. But the practice of rounding people up and confining them in subhuman conditions on the basis of belonging to a group and not for any individual action has roots in this country.

Under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, tens of thousands of Native Americans were rounded up, imprisoned in camps, marched west and dumped in another place where they had no connection to the land; up to 25% died. British colonizers in Australia, Spanish colonizers in Cuba and, once again, Americans in the Philippines employed such practices in the next decades. Then came the camps in the USSR and Nazi Germany.

If you don’t know much of this history, that’s because countries are generally ashamed of it. Twentieth-century dictators tried to keep the reality of their camps secret in real time. In Hitler’s Germany, one could be punished for “atrocity propaganda” for speaking publicly about the camps. In Soviet Russia, famous writers and filmmakers were taken on carefully staged visits to the camps so they could portray these places as happy educational experiences for citizens in need of reform. Even President Andrew Jackson claimed that the deportation of Native tribes was driven by a concern for their well-being.

The Trump administration has chosen to flaunt its concentration camps — to brag about them. The display is meant to terrify, to be sure, but secret concentration camps can scare people just as much. The message here is that neither laws nor shame will stop the terror, for this administration has no regard for the former and, apparently, no capacity for the latter.