Alligator Auschwitz
Without due process it's a concentration camp, not a prison
The GOP are now Nazis. Or, more precisely, postmodernist Nazis displaying their cruelty and disregard for individual human rights instead of trying to hide it.
They have thrown up a concentration camp in Florida that currently has 5,000 beds. (It flooded immediately upon opening.) It has been designed to contain not people who have committed crimes, despite the rhetoric, but people whose race, national origin or religion are deemed somehow “wrong.”
This Florida concentration camp makes all the prisoners visible as you can see above. It is a Florida swamp version of French philosopher, teacher and activist, Michel Foucault’s use of a theoretical prison called the Panopticon in his powerful work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
The Panopticon, theorized by philosopher Jeremy Bentham, was designed to have all prisoners visible to a guard, but the inmates could not see the guard. They were, or were not, under constant surveillance. They didn’t know so they internalized the surveillance.
Foucault sought to explain how modern culture seeks to exert power and control over the individual. He was a key figure in the postmodernist movement critiquing knowledge, power and discourse as constructed in the “modern” age.
These cages in Florida allow for no privacy. And they are designed, I believe, like the Panopticon, to get inside your head and mine.
There is no better illustration of how this concentration camp in Florida is designed to get into our heads than its being immediately labeled “Alligator Alcatraz” and t-shirts being printed and sold to glorify this cruelty and make it seem like a joke.
Trump originally seemed to want to send immigrants to Alcatraz because it was, I believe, a scary prison whose name he knew. What he didn’t know, apparently, is that Alcatraz, formerly a military prison and federal penitentiary, is now a tourist destination. Turning it back into a prison would take millions and likely be impossible.
So his advisors on how to advance maximum cruelty and its acceptance in this country seem to have come up with the idea of putting immigrants in a prison in the middle of a Florida swamp surrounded by alligators and snakes and promoting it as “Alligator Alcatraz.”
T-shirts immediately appeared (I won’t show that here) being sold at Amazon and Florida GOP websites. Like we needed yet another reason to boycott Amazon.
There is a long racist history of white fascination with alligators eating black babies who had been used as “bait.”
This Alligator Alcatraz publicity campaign, and that is what it is, draws on the well of racism and xenophobia in this country that is barely below the surface. Bringing that racism to the surface and making it an object of ridicule deadens the conscience and allows cruelty to be turned into humor.
The prisoners are on display to the guards and to us through these t-shirts.
I refuse to have concentration camps built all over this country. And you know that is what they are planning.
Cruelty, “and you can even get the tee shirt.” So penetrating Mary.
I’d say less immune, Jeff, in the sense that it is now in our subconscious. You’re really right about corporations.