Andrea Pitzer is a journalist and author of three books, including One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, which follows the modern development of irregular prisons beginning in the 1890s, when the Spanish Empire first tried to corral Cuban revolutionaries using new technology that included factory-produced barbed wire. We talk about Hitler, as well as Stalin, and I ask her to grade the United States’ new plan for warehouse-style “detention camps” on a historical curve.

Her assessment isn’t good.

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Resources:

One Long Night, by Andrea Pitzer

Andrea’s website

Sweetness and Blood, by Michael Scott Moore — nominally about surfing, but it has a section on Indonesia’s detention camps and an interview with the novelist Pramodya Ananta Toer

“Somali pirates gave me toothpast and soap,” the viral tweet

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