Alligator Alcatraz: American history from the dark side

[marmar]

Alligator Alcatraz: American history from the dark side
Yeah, it's a concentration camp. It's also a meme, a troll and an especially ugly distillation of American history

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published July 6, 2025 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) Nearly everything that has gone badly, deeply, terribly wrong in America’s present — if you’re reading this, you probably don’t need a list — can be found in America’s past. Your favorite truism about the power of history may apply here; mine comes courtesy of Salon contributor Mike Lofgren: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat famous quotations.”

I don’t mean that we are trapped in an inflexible pattern of endlessly repeating historical cycles, as in the more esoteric propositions of Vico and Nietzsche. (“Time is a flat circle,” as some lowlife says in the first season of “True Detective,” moments before getting murdered by cops.) But too many of us, including a large proportion of liberals who ought to know better, are indeed trapped in the delusional one-way narrative of progress known as American exceptionalism, leading us to announce in horrified tones, with every new outrage of the Trump administration, that this is “not who we are.”

So it is with the Florida concentration camp for migrant detainees known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” which was at first a gleeful MAGAsphere nickname and is now what this jury-rigged assemblage of cages under tents is actually called. To describe this evil little zone of exclusion as sadistic, despicable and insulting, or as a symptom of incipient or actual fascism, is accurate enough. But it’s most definitely who “we” are in 2025. If we claim that such a thing is “un-American,” then we’re the ones who haven’t paid attention to history — and as profoundly ignorant about everything as Donald Trump and his supporters may be, they know that much.

....(snip)....

Alligator Alcatraz, like nearly everything else about the second Trump regime, is a deliberate, overt mockery of the liberal narrative of progress. It’s a manifestation of “owning the libs” in physical, tangible and almost literal form. (So far, MAGA’s secret police have not specifically targeted the regime’s domestic opponents, but the threats get more explicit every day.) Terrorizing, incarcerating and deporting immigrants is an important regime goal in its own terms, of course, but the real target of terrorism — state terrorism included — is always the broader public. Liberal outrage, to some significant degree, is the point, as are a mounting sense of powerlessness and increasing anxiety about the rule of law and the constitutional order. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/07/06/alligator-alcatraz-american-history-from-the-dark-side/