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Your regular reminder that I'm not on here much these days. But you can find me on Blu*sky with the same handle! Hope to see you all there...
Andrea Pitzer
31.3K posts
Andrea Pitzer
@andreapitzer
Books! Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World. One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. Nabokov bio. Words in WaPo, NYRB, Outside, etc.
- So if you get kidnapped by random people in unmarked vans nowadays, you're supposed to just submit, in case it's actually law enforcement officers doing the abducting?
- He was exactly as bad as so many people said he would be. Never make an excuse for anyone who supported him.
- Replying to @andreapitzerI wrote a book about concentration camps all over the world across the last century, and it turns out that getting to the abducting-political-opponents-in-vans stage is bad sign.
- While writing a history of concentration camps, a key thing I learned about the collapse of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism is that it's critical for citizens not to accept the lesson of learned helplessness that ruling institutions try to instill.
- Please, I beg you, ask yourself if you are really a nuclear-power-plant-on-fire expert before you commit to that tweet.
- Twitter says you have to stop being friends with other guys and answer texts within 5 minutes.
- Your weekly reminder from my concentration camp research on the last 100+ years: when a regime makes a grab for power, legislators are almost always too weak or too corrupt to stop it.
- As a rule, by the time a society establishes concentration camps, a significant minority of the population is not only willing to tolerate the brutality of the camps but also *wants* them and believes them to be necessary. These people are unlikely to revise their opinion.
- Yes, of course they're concentration camps. They aren't the unique subset of death camps that were invented by the Nazis for genocide, or even Arctic Gulag camps built for hard labor. But they're camps created to punish a whole class of civilians via mass detention without trial.@andreapitzer are you weighing in on this?
- To be clear, this is how concentration camps started more than a century ago.
- "Hitler To Appoint German Judges: May Dismiss Them at Any Time for Any Reason He Considers Adequate" (NYT, 4/19/1935)
- When I went into the Rohingya camps in Myanmar in 2015, I also talked to people in town who were happy their former neighbors were in camps. Insisting they weren't racist or bigots, many said all they really wanted was for the government to deport the Rohingya to another country.
- I'm not sure the public understands the detention crisis that's been created and stoked by the US government. Things are going to get worse in so many ways. If history is a guide, we can already guess what some of them will be. Others we can hardly imagine.Start with the fact that these kids—ages 5 to 12—were kidnapped by Trump’s government in the first place. Then they left them in vans overnight in the Texas heat. Folks get arrested for leaving their kids in a car during a job interview. Do the same here. nbcnews.to/2JUhLA9
