Alligator Alcatraz: American history from the dark side

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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.
Just as America's penchant for religious mania and moral panic goes clear back to the Puritan settlers and the small-town schism of the Salem witch trials, the punitive, paranoid spirit behind Alligator Alcatraz — the desire to divide those who 'belong' to the imagined national community from those who do not — has deep roots in this nation's history. At the same time, the concentration camp is a modern global phenomenon with its own ironic history, which long precedes the Nazi death camps. It was a product of the industrial age, colonialism and newly racialized ideas of citizenship. If anything, Alligator Alcatraz is a classic example of the form, right down to its ugliness and cheapness, not to mention its explicit aim as a showcase for humiliation, suffering and dehumanization, but not quite for deliberate murder.
The delusional narrative of progress mentioned above, in which democracy keeps on expanding, human rights gradually extend to everyone everywhere, and America draws ever closer to forging the 'more perfect union' promised by the Constitution, is understandably alluring, and almost irresistible. For many of us who grew up in the tumultuous decades between the civil rights movement and the Patriot Act, it served as a kind of civic religion: The 'arc of the moral universe' was bending in our direction, and all that.
But that was always a subjective perception of history, not a universal law. It was widely shared by educated middle-class people infused with Enlightenment values, although not by all of them. It was true, of course, that the dizzying historical and technological changes of the 20th century had brought dramatic social progress. But it was a grievous historical error to assume that the gains made through passionate and painful struggle by racial justice movements, feminism, LGBTQ+ Pride, environmental crusaders and so on were natural, inevitable and universally accepted, or that no one beyond a handful of left-behind troglodytes seriously wanted to reverse them.
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.
In that sense, Alligator Alcatraz is also a postmodern phenomenon — a hamfisted ironic commentary on the failure of liberal democracy, and on how easy it was to undermine — as well as a site for the actual torment of actual human beings. As Andrea Pitzer, the author of 'One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,' observes in an MSNBC commentary, American history offers many pre-echoes of the Trumpian anti-immigrant crusade: Centuries of genocide and forcible removal against Native people 'set the stage for abuse of those not counted as citizens,' and slavery laws enabled human trafficking and created categories of human beings with no legal rights.
Those historical crimes paved the way for a more recent example, the infamous concentration camps of the 1940s in which 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them native-born U.S. citizens, were interned for years after being dispossessed of their homes, their livelihoods and most of their property. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, among many neighbors and classmates whose parents and grandparents had survived those camps, and I don't remember the subject ever being mentioned. I'm not sure I knew internment had happened, or understood its scale, before I reached adulthood.
The overt racism and grotesque unfairness of Japanese-American internment eventually provoked some degree of societal reckoning, if only years later. Historians have recently begun to pay attention to the less well-known internment of German Americans a few decades earlier, during World War I. Conditions in those camps were not especially harsh, and only a few thousand U.S. citizens were incarcerated. But anti-German propaganda campaigns, along with outlandish claims that hundreds of thousands of disloyal German Americans might rise up in revolt, left a lasting impact.
German culture and the German language were virtually erased from American society almost overnight — sauerkraut was rebranded as 'Liberty cabbage,' seriously — and as historian Matthew Stibbe writes, the 'enemy alien hysteria' of the war years fed right into the Red Scare immediately afterward:
[Q]uestioning the loyalty of individual citizens and non-citizens from particular ethnic backgrounds became standard practice for American agencies involved in domestic security after 1918 and the association of German- as well as Russian-born émigrés with left-wing subversion continued through to the late 1940s and beyond.
There's no mistaking the bizarre historical irony at work here: German immigrants and their children faced systematic persecution and discrimination in the U.S. barely 15 years before Hitler took power in the Fatherland — and the long-tail effects included a decades-long crusade against socialists, anarchists and labor activists. If you want to go even deeper into WTF, consider this: Historian Caroline Elkins argues that the first systematic use of concentration camps against a civilian population came during the Boer War around 1900, when British authorities rounded up and interned thousands of Dutch-speaking settlers in South Africa — in other words, the people known to us today as Afrikaners.
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Exactly how those events rebounded in later history is a complicated question, not a straightforward equation of cause and effect. Every self-defined human community winds up with a sense of historical grievance along the way, whether or not it makes sense to outsiders. That's one way of understanding where we are today, with a startlingly high proportion of white Americans — most of them descended from immigrants who faced hardship or persecution at some point — having forged a group identity of permanent resentment, pursuing an incoherent campaign of retribution against those they believe have cheated them, lied to them or tried to replace them.
Alligator Alcatraz is the symbol of their crusade, and it could hardly be more American. It channels this country's long history of paranoia, xenophobia and systematic exclusion through the grotesque 20th-century innovation of the concentration camp, all of that repackaged as an aggressively stupid meme complete with AI-slop images, Etsy insta-merch and an almost lifelike salesbot in Kristi Noem.
Most important of all, it inverts the liberal narrative of history, in which the misdeeds of the past offer us important lessons, mistakes to be confronted, repented and transcended on the path to something better. The intended lesson of Alligator Alcatraz is that there are no lessons in the past: There are no mistakes to correct, nothing to apologize for and nothing better to reach toward. There is only power and domination, and they should be celebrated. Plenty of Americans have believed that all along.
The post Alligator Alcatraz: American history from the dark side appeared first on Salon.com.