Opinion | It Depends on What You Mean by Fascism

What about the private detention centers for undocumented immigrants, which Ms. Ocasio-Cortez described last month as concentration camps? After the comparison, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum issued a news release denouncing comparisons to the Holocaust. In response, hundreds of historians and other academics working on the Holocaust and genocide responded with a letter defending the importance of these analogies.

Journalists are barred from visiting these centers; they are open only to legal representatives and members of Congress. In early June, the Trump administration canceled educational, recreational and legal aid for migrant children in detention centers, sealing them off further from public view. Reports of the extreme conditions in these centers have flooded the news in recent weeks. These reports have been provided by legal representatives empowered to visit them. What happens now that funding is cut off for such visits?

Even as we are shut off from facts, immigrants will hear the stories from one another. The strategy here is to encourage them to self-deport. This, too, is familiar from history. In the November 1938 pogrom of German Jews, more than 30,000 of them were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, where they were subjected to brutal and inhumane conditions and soon released. In “KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps,” Nikolaus Wachsmann, a professor of European history at the University of London, explains that the release of these prisoners made sense from the regime’s perspective, because “the camps had served their function — forcing many Jews out of Germany.” The regime’s harsh anti-Semitic rhetoric, followed by exposure of its Jewish citizens to the brutality of its camps, led to a large exodus of Jews from Germany (including my grandmother and my father in July 1939). The tactic worked. Should we therefore employ it?

There is an economic reality to this situation as well. We increasingly see connections between powerful business interests and the institutions of state terror. Wall Street gives billions in loans to facilitate the profits of companies who run detention centers; large companies make profits by selling their wares to them, and former high ranking administration officials serve on their boards. On the local level, county jails enjoy newfound profits by housing those detained by ICE’s massively broadened mandate.

A refusal to discuss fascism in the current political context in the United States obscures both the nature of fascism, representing it as an all-or-nothing matter, as well as our own troubling past. The extent to which a society is liberal democratic or fascist can be measured on a continuum. In the struggles with our racist history — against black Americans, Native Americans and immigration from non-Northern European countries — the United States has always had aspects of both. With the development of a police-like force directed specifically to force outsiders into hiding, detention centers sealed off from public view in which to detain them and an economy set up to profit from it all, we move in the wrong direction.

Jason Stanley is a philosophy professor and author, most recently, of “How Fascism Works.”

Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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