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Forgotten Password? Lost your password? Back to Login. Holocaust deniers, for instance, or people who seek to downplay the severity of colonial massacres, often try to muddy these distinctions. When theory becomes dogma, it can also limit our understanding of the present. Agamben is hardly the only person to have underestimated the threat posed by the coronavirus in recent months. As more governments pass emergency laws to deal with the pandemic, in some cases including draconian surveillance measures and the establishment of segregated quarantine camps , it is right to ask where these might lead, and whether states will be willing to give up their new powers once the immediate danger to public health has passed.
C oncentration camps are uniquely dangerous spaces. Their effects may vary considerably, from the horror of Auschwitz to the more mundane misery that Arendt experienced in Gurs, but the people caught up in them almost always end up being treated as less than human. And if the political and technological innovations of the late 19th century made them possible, does the 21st century make them any more likely?
The following year, researchers who trawled through Chinese government procurement documents and satellite imagery pointed to the existence of a vast, newly constructed complex of internment camps, which they estimated had the capacity to hold anywhere between several hundred thousand and 1.
This is just one example of how globalisation and technology have added a new dimension to an old problem. But the latest crackdown has new features. What else could tempt states to open camps? In her book Expulsions, the sociologist Saskia Sassen argues that the particular form of globalisation the world has experienced in recent decades — driven by a new form of laissez-faire economics — has unleashed a dangerous new dynamic that excludes large numbers of people from economic and social life.
In poorer parts of the world, this means mass displacement and the warehousing of migrants as they try to move elsewhere. One result of these global pressures has been the rise of political movements that promise to shore up national, religious or ethnic identities.
But identities are ambiguous, and when governments start using the tools of state power to reinforce the line between insider and outsider, there are always large numbers of people who get caught in between. In India, the government of Narendra Modi has been trying to reshape the country along Hindu nationalist lines, undermining the secular and pluralist principles that have held sway since independence.
The emerging camps in Assam, a north-eastern state on the border with Bangladesh, are a result: they target thousands of mainly Muslim residents who may have lived in India for decades, but because they originally came from across the border in Bangladesh — a legacy of partition — have never been registered as citizens.
The understandable response when confronted with injustice is to look for someone to blame. But particularly in liberal democracies, the chains of responsibility can be complex.
Who, for instance, is responsible for the arbitrary imprisonment, torture and slave-labour conditions that migrants and refugees in Libya are subjected to? The immediate answer seems fairly simple: the state officials and local militias, some linked to trafficking networks, who run the detention centres. Thousands of people, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, are imprisoned in a network of these centres where they are regularly subjected to starvation, disease, torture, rape, and forced labour.
But the reason those detention centres exist is because a range of European governments have been trying to get Libya to act as a block on unwanted migration across the Mediterranean for almost 20 years.
The system was built with European support, both from national governments and at EU level — first through agreements with the government of Muammar Gaddafi, then, as the country collapsed after he was overthrown by a Nato-backed uprising , a patchwork of arrangements with state officials and local militias. There is no shortage of information about what happens in Libyan detention centres — and European governments frequently profess their horror at the atrocities committed there.
The political consensus in most European countries, including the UK, is that limiting unwanted migration is a reasonable and desirable aim, and large numbers of their citizens have voted in support of it. By , a system for quickly gathering and storing important data was also emerging.
The systems had preprogrammed crisis scenarios, each of which had clearly delineated steps and notified each stakeholder in turn as their role became critical; for the time, it was very advanced networking technology, containing early versions of what later generations would recognize as email, bulletin boards, and chat functionality. OEP and its successor, FEMA, carefully collected data, including latitude and longitude, on more than more 2 million structures across the country that it planned to monitor in the event of a nuclear attack—everything from 10, grain silos to 8, hospitals, not to mention the mines and caves it had scouted over the preceding decades that could be used to house industrial manufacturing and processes in the wake of a nuclear war.
If there were a nuclear war, FEMA would be the first to know. And it had a chillingly rational plan for responding. Through the Cold War, its watch center in Olney, Maryland, ran daily drills of its radio and telephone systems at pm and at pm.
The authentication codewords for the system were distributed in a red envelope every three months to all the users of the emergency broadcast system; codewords were generally two- or three-syllable words, two for every day of the year—one for the activation of a warning, one for the termination of a warning.
This is the National Warning Center. This is an Attack Warning. The FEMA watch officers would also activate a separate system to announce the attack to the national media, radio, and television broadcast networks—breaking into national programming with the alert. They work closely with a special team of Air Force helicopter pilots who practice in the skies over Washington daily, ready to drop onto helipads, well-groomed lawns, the National Mall, and even sports fields if necessary, to ensure the survival of those chosen few.
When such gatherings seemed imminent, FEMA was to notify the White House and the assistant to the president for national security affairs would recommend to the president which successor should skip the event and serve as the designated survivor.
The Central Locator System tracked the whereabouts of the successors daily, and once a month, after the fact, audited a single day to determine whether it had correctly known where each Cabinet member was. Project saw FBI agents, working effectively undercover for FEMA, detailing large warehouses, automobile facilities, Masonic temples, Elks lodges, casinos, camp sites, Coca-Cola bottling plants, Indian bingo halls, country inns, furniture stores, and other potential relocation facilities.
Lengthy addendums to the contracts outlined required utility and infrastructure upgrades needed to support crisis operations, the costs of which were fully paid by the government, as were separate telephone lines installed at each facility. During an emergency, the FBI would also pay a daily fee for each day it occupied the facility.
Copies of the film were distributed in advance to civil defense officials and some television stations, and 15 prewritten newspaper articles distributed by FEMA covered much of the same ground. The low-tech film featured only illustrations and animations of stick figures—no live action—because by the s civil defense planners had grown tired of retaping propaganda films every time fashion or car styles changed.
So why not just give up, lie down, and die? That idea could bring senseless and useless death to many, for protection is possible. And your own chances of survival will be much greater if you remember these facts about Protection in the Nuclear Age.
Then would come detailed evacuation instructions: FEMA would distribute millions of preprinted brochures, perhaps going door to door or perhaps by distributing it with local newspapers. They also took out ads in local telephone books.
Together, FEMA estimated the multimedia campaign would boost survival rates by 8 to 12 percent. Even the evacuation of major cities like New York City were carefully planned.
However impractical in reality, there was no faulting the level of detail of the page plan for evacuating New York, which included both a primary plan and 11 alternatives. Each of the five boroughs would rely on different transit modes to evacuate over the course of precisely 3. The per-hour capacity of each road out of New York had been carefully calculated; prepositioned bulldozers would help ensure smooth travel, quickly removing disabled automobiles.
More than 4. Some 75, Manhattan residents would travel up the Hudson to Saratoga using three round-trips of five requisitioned Staten Island ferries. Your primary educational resource for the camp industry. Find a Job. Let ACA help you find seasonal, summer and year-round jobs. Start Looking. Volunteer with ACA. Interested in becoming a volunteer with ACA?
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