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In the latest episode of “Movement Memos,” host Kelly Hayes talks with journalist Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, about what it means to live under a concentration camp regime — and how people can fight back. Pitzer explains how mass detention systems are built through “end runs” around the law, how they become normalized, and why the rapid expansion of U.S. detention infrastructure signals a dangerous escalation.

Music by Son Monarcas, Ballpoint, and David Celeste

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about the realities of organizing against a concentration camp regime. We will be hearing from Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps and the newsletter Degenerate Art. Andrea has studied how concentration camp regimes are constructed, entrenched, and normalized. At a time when detention infrastructure is rapidly expanding in the United States, her analysis can help us understand what we’re confronting, and what meaningful resistance requires.

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KH: Andrea Pitzer, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Andrea Pitzer: Hi, Kelly. Thanks for having me on.

KH: How are you doing today?

AP: Probably like a lot of people. I am weighted down by the reality all around us. So many people are suffering and that suffering is so deliberately inflicted on them. It’s a hard thing, but I am also buoyed up by all the people who are meeting this moment with grace and joy and beauty and a lot of bravery as well. And so it’s kind of a burden and a relief to have a really specific idea what I need to be doing these days, and so I’m trying to show up for that.

KH: All of that resonates so much. My heart is constantly breaking, and I’m also constantly finding strength in solidarity, and in people who are leading by example in this moment.

For folks who may be unfamiliar with your work, can you tell the audience a bit about what you do?

AP: So I am originally from West Virginia, so I grew up in the U.S., and have lived a lot of my adulthood in the greater … in Washington, D.C. or in the surrounding area. And I am a narrative journalist who mostly writes books about international history. I’ve written about Vladimir Nabokov, the guy who wrote Lolita. My most recent book was a shipwreck book from the time of Shakespeare that also dives into imperialism, climate change, the very idea of a polar hero.

But really, I guess the reason you and I are talking here today is that my second book, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, and that really runs from the 1890s up to the present. I wanted to tackle the idea of the modern concentration camp, so what happened after barbed wire and automatic weapons showed up. And I went to 18 countries, I think it was, on four continents to report that and also to Guantánamo.

And in addition to that background, and that’s so important for what we’re going to talk about today, I’ll also just add that for most of a decade, I worked in D.C. I have a black belt in martial arts, and I did a lot of self-defense work with rape crisis survivors and refugees, political refugees from various countries that experienced violence. And so before I got into journalism and before I became a book author, I was really working at a community level and looking at violence that way, and I think that still really informs a lot of what I’m doing now.

KH: There is such a constant barrage of injustice, indignity, atrocity, and absurdity under this administration that getting our bearings is really a daily task. I’m grateful for analysis that helps people make sense of what’s happening, and translate that clarity into action. That’s definitely how I experience your writing around the subject of concentration camps.

In your work, you describe how societies move toward mass detention and concentration-camp systems, drawing on global historical examples. Can you walk us through that process, and why you believe the United States is becoming a concentration-camp regime?

AP: So one of the things that I learned researching this history of concentration camps was that looking at all these different places that had had this kind of detention, and by “this kind of detention,” I mean the mass detention of civilians, so not prisoners of war, but the mass detention of civilians without due process or trial on the basis of identity, and that could be political affiliation, ethnicity, religion, race, it can be a number of factors, but it’s something about who the detainees are rather than really specific treatment of individual things that they have done, and the patterns that I found were kind of extraordinary.

And I see the U.S. has its own history with regard to this, and the ways in which it’s changing now are very much in line with the places that became concentration camp regimes. And that all sounds kind of muddy, so just to clarify, concentration camps rise when you’re doing an end run around the law. So in all these different countries over more than a hundred years, they had really different legal systems, they had really different political systems, but these kinds of mass detention of people was always something that happened outside the existing normal body of law. And it was often dependent on how the law had been used before and sort of what you could get away with making quasi-legal or sort of shepherding in. But in each case, there was this sense of what was the existing legal structure and then some need to get around it in order to target particular groups of people.

And in the U.S., we’ve had so many different kinds of detention that touched a little bit on this, and maybe we can talk about those later in the conversation, but what I saw is this weaponization of it that’s happening now is in the way that our long history with immigrant detention is exploding and mushrooming into a vast network of massive detention facilities, mostly for non-”criminals” and for very little regard of whether someone is or isn’t a “criminal,” and criminality is its own whole issue, which I would take issue with. But in terms of how these systems evolve, they tend to draw in a majority of people that have not been labeled criminal in that society before, but which a political actor at the head of a party or at the head of a country in terms of governing, like President Trump and his allies are for us right now, where they want to target particular groups for political benefit to entrench power and to exert control over the country as a whole.

And so some of that has always been happening in the U.S., but the kind of expansion that we saw Congress give funding-wise, the kind of attempts to create this force which existed before — we have Border Patrol, we have ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] — but to be specifically in allegiance to the executive branch, to the president, answerable to his commands, his wishes, and those of his minions. And we are seeing the potential damage, the potential harm that already existed before, but sort of going, as I’ve described it in the book that I wrote, from the A-bomb to the H-bomb.

KH: I appreciate that you paused to problematize the category of “criminal.” Part of what we’re seeing right now is an at-will expansion of criminalization as a tool of dehumanization — an effort to justify violence by redefining whole groups of people as inherently criminal. We’ve heard this administration describe those being rounded up as criminals by default, and we’ve also seen escalating rhetoric labeling ICE observers and rapid-response organizers as domestic terrorists or potential assassins.

Criminalization in the United States has long functioned as a way of producing human disposability — a permission structure for cultural forgetting. And it’s particularly frightening to watch that logic intensify in this moment.

You resist simple equivalencies in your work, but you deliberately use the term “concentration camp.” Some critics argue that we shouldn’t invoke comparisons to foreign regimes, especially when so much of this violence is rooted in U.S. history itself. You’ve argued that we need a broader lens — one that draws on global history alongside the legacies of slavery, Native genocide, Japanese internment, Jim Crow, and criminalization. Why is that expansive historical frame necessary?

AP: Yes. I’m so glad you asked this because what happens is this is an international phenomenon. The concentration camp phenomenon, again, as I mentioned before, with the weaponization of barbed wire and automatic weapons, you begin to be able to hold a very large population with a really small guard force. So it’s literally this technical pivot that allowed what we saw happening in the 20th century — with vast, enormous camps holding thousands and thousands of people — to even become possible, really.

And so there is always that international trend that’s worth following, and I would also say that some of the solutions people have found to try to push back or undo those systems from abroad can be really useful to think about in the U.S. context as well. But in any case, every concentration camp system rises out of that particular society’s weakness. So there’s this international trend, but it’s really this domestic culture that allows camps to rise in that place. And so when we look at what allows camps to rise in the U.S., it is these fissure lines that from the beginning we have seen related to Native genocide, related to the history of chattel slavery, related to immigration for a century or more, and actually more than a century at this point. And in each of those cases, that is where you find, that is where the immoral and amoral leadership in a government finds the fissure points in the culture, finds the wedge issues, finds the way to identify the target population that can be scapegoated, and that can then serve as the conduit through which the police state is firmly entrenched and established. And concentration camps are often sort of the pivot point on which that can be first addressed to that vulnerable population and then extended much more broadly.

And so I think that to even consider this question, you have to look at both those international trends and the ways things develop, but also exactly what’s happening locally. You can’t separate the two. And so I deliberately use the term concentration camp because I think people say, “Well, we’ve always been unkind to immigrants,” or, “Well, we have a long history of targeting Black people.” The police do, for instance. These conversations tend to portray these issues as organic and therefore what we are doing can’t be like those other places. And I think it’s a real failure of imagination to not realize the ways in which this can be made worse, and that the international lens and using that term, concentration camp, can be clarifying to understand the possibilities that are set before us now and the ways that U.S. culture may offer some advantages in fighting this and the ways in which we are really starting out at a deficit. And so it can be a lens through which people will see their society in a way that they haven’t been able to think about it before.

KH: I really agree with you about what this language has the potential to clarify for people. I know there’s been some pushback around using the term “concentration camp” in a U.S. context, and I find those critiques ahistorical. This isn’t language that belongs exclusively to one regime or one country — it’s a term with a broader historical meaning. I wish this phenomenon were an isolated historical occurrence. I understand why people might want to imagine it that way. But of course it’s not — and it wasn’t even isolated during the Second World War. I don’t think many people realize that presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman described the internment camps where Japanese Americans were forcibly incarcerated during World War II as “concentration camps” — and only Truman meant it in a bad way.I also really appreciate your insistence that what we’re facing is both homegrown and globally entangled.

The United States has cultivated and exported enormous harm — sometimes refining tactics abroad before bringing them home. At the same time, contemporary fascists are borrowing from European movements and histories. These currents flow into each other. None of this is contained within a singular nation. We’re in a global struggle against fascism, whether we recognize it or not.

And while reactionaries are sharing strategies across borders, we need an analysis that isn’t siloed. We can’t pretend this is only imported, and we can’t pretend it’s purely domestic. It’s both. These aren’t abstractions — they’re living movements, in motion, adapting and learning from one another.

Listening to you, I’m also thinking about Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” That differentiation isn’t new in the United States. But the scale and the methods of exploitation can intensify. The stakes can escalate. And we have to be honest about when that escalation is happening.

Which brings me to a recent report by Pablo Manríquez about the repurposing of a Department of Defense contract to rapidly expand detention and deportation infrastructure — essentially enabling the construction of tent cities and self-contained facilities across the country. What does that move signal to you?

AP: So this is really grim. I am always also aware of things we can be doing to address it, but this is a grim step because on a practical level, this contract, the way that they have been routing this now through the Navy, it expedites everything and it shortens the window by which we can effectively interfere with the plan. It entrenches things more quickly. It makes it more difficult, whether it’s for elected officials or for individuals like you and me, to be able to step in and intervene. Once we have that funding and once it is routed through the WEXMAC contract, I think that it is a way of........

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