Book Your Concentration Camp Now

'A cheap holiday in other people's misery'

Instagram influencers have been posting happy snaps from Howard Springs quarantine camp in Darwin, Australia, calling it “almost like a vacation.” Quillette has taken to task an American citizen journalist Tim Pool for saying it looks like prison.

You can read Quillette for yourself. It calls Covid “the biggest fight of our lives” but fails to probe the Covid-era innovation of locking down the healthy, and displays a blithe insouciance. The author Matthew Blackwell concludes with a quip: "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." Like, you can’t prove a negative and should presume innocence. The recent past tells us otherwise. [1]

It began when they banned handshakes as unclean and started to salute instead — it’s true. Find out below.

This article explores how history rhymes: how epidemics were spread by quarantining people in ghettos, before they were removed to camps under “prevention” strategies. It tells how the band played on at Terezín — how films and snapshots showed smiling faces. Propaganda films about the camps are nothing new.

We look behind the euphemisms to see how bureaucracy dehumanized and medicine desensitized, until hygiene became something darker. Like Covid, typhus could not be eradicated — so they broadened the definition of a parasite. The compliance of the majority was rewarded with access to theatres, travel, sports and concerts in a state initiative called, Strength Through Joy.

And then came the clearing out of the hospitals, asylums and homes, and the euthanasia of children with learning disabilities under Aktion T4. If you still don’t believe that history rhymes, you haven’t been paying attention.

Influencers report clear skies and a sunny aspect

Dec 2, 2021

In summer of 2019 former professor of history David Perry wrote with foresight an article entitled: Yes, Trump's Detention Centers Are Concentration Camps. In it he argued that “denying as much merely prepares the way for worse atrocities to come.” [2]

He described the arrest and detention of unaccompanied children, most intercepted on the U.S. southern border, in “prison camps.” He looked at confinement, food and medicine and concluded “there is still no such thing as a good concentration camp.”

Words matter but perhaps less than actions: who is doing what to whom on what pretext. The more vague the euphemism, the more someone is veiling their intent — whether it’s a “temporary emergency influx shelter” or a Centre for National Resilience.

Secondly, the longer the chain of bureaucratic command, the more likely it is to dehumanize people. We are rightly worried when children arrested by Border Patrol are handed over by the Department of Homeland Security to Immigration and Customs Enforcement or as Unaccompanied Alien Children to the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Administration for Children and Families, an operational division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Perry quotes journalist Jonathan Katz as noting that international journalists who visited Dachau concentration camp in 1933 deemed it to be a nicely-run facility.

The H word

Conservatives like Representative Liz Cheney hit back at Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2019, criticizing comparisons with the Holocaust. Perry volleyed:

“It’s a bad-faith attack that can easily find fertile ground in the American imagination because of a fundamental, and apparently widespread, misconception that the phrase, concentration camps, somehow belongs solely to the history of the Holocaust.

It's true that the Nazi regime built a particularly substantial network of prison camps and then slowly morphed them into factories for genocide in ways that were, and remain, unique. But concentration camps are disturbingly normal in this modern era... They also have a national history in the U.S. that is indelibly bound up in the formation and modern history of this nation.”

Toilet roll to hygiene role

We all know the Covid pandemic began with a shortage of toilet paper. Television cameras filmed shoppers as they barged into Costco. Now that supply chains are faltering and food shelves spartan, that obsession with tissue looks foolish. We’ll never know if it was real, or whether the media, with one voice, had a mission to minimise our concerns in those first two weeks to flatten the curve.

Could the role of quarantine camps also evolve?