A concentration camp (by 1901) is, according to the pre-Trump Oxford dictionary in 2011:
“a camp for detaining political prisoners or persecuted minorities, especially in Nazi Germany.”
In the 1900s they became a common feature of wars, genocides and police states, made possible by the low-cost of barbed wire and machine guns.
Examples: Nazi death camps, the Soviet Gulag, Japanese American internment camps, “fortified hamlets” during the Vietnam War, Angel Island, Guantanamo since the 1990s (under President Clinton it held Haitian and Cuban immigrants).
Unlike a refugee camp, you cannot leave.
Unlike a prison, you can be put there without having broken the law, like Uighurs in China or Central American asylum seekers in the US. (Seeking asylum, contrary to Republican disinformation, is not a crime.)
Telltale signs:
- Demographics: Despised Others fill the camp, like those demonized by the government for their race, religion, or politics.
- Health care: High death rate due to poor health conditions. Does not have to be genocidal like Auschwitz.
- Legal protection: poor to none for inmates. Camps often operate outside of the law or in spite of it. Thus Guantanamo.
- Semantics: Debates on what to call them. Vocational training centres? Tender-age facilities? Detention centres? Concentration camps?
History: In the English-speaking world the term first appeared in 1901 during Britain’s Boer War in South Africa. In 1902, The Review of Reviews in London noted:
“The concentration camp has now definitely taken its place side by side with the Black Hole of Calcutta as one of those names of horror at which humanity will never cease to shudder.”
That did not stop the US from setting them up that same year in its war in the Philippines. Nor Germany from copying them for its genocide of the Nama and Herero (1904-08) and the Jews (1941-45).
Nazi Germany: Dachau (1933-45) was the first Nazi German concentration camp in regular service. It was set up just two months after Hitler took power. That was eight years before the death camps of the Holocaust began to appear.
US: The most famous concentration camps in US history, so far, are those of the Japanese American internment (1942-45). They were upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v United States (1944, overruled in 2018). In 2015 Donald Trump, then running for president, refused to condemn them outright.
Genocide: You can have a genocide without concentration camps (Rwanda) and concentration camps without genocide (Japanese American internment), but the two often go together. Separating a despised people into ghettos, reservations or concentration camps is stage six of the eight stages of a genocide.
Andrea Pitzer, who wrote “One Long Night” (2017), a history of concentration camps, said yesterday:
“… every significant camp system has introduced new horrors of its own, crises that were unforeseen when that system was opened. We have yet to discover what those will be for these American border camps. But they will happen. Every country thinks it can do detention better when it starts these projects. But no good way to conduct mass indefinite detention has yet been devised; the system always degrades.”
– Abagond, 2019.
Sources: Mainly the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (2011); Andrea Pitzer in the New York Review of Books (2019); Online Etymology Dictionary; PxHere (image).
See also:
- The eight stages of genocide
- The four kinds of humans – despised others, etc
- asylum seeker
- China
- Germany
- US
- Philippine-American War
- Angel Island
- The Japanese American internment
- Korematsu v United States
- Vietnam War
- Guantanamo
- Donald Trump
- US border camps
- Is the US still genocidal?
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I recall see a Fox News clip of that hideous gorgon Laura Ingram comparing the detention center where young migrant children had been separated from their parents as Summer Camp. That’s just pure evil.
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Reblogged this on Project ENGAGE.
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Abagond at his worst, playing with definitions: “Genocide: You can have a genocide without concentration camps (Rwanda) and concentration camps without genocide (Japanese American internment), but the two often go together. Separating a despised people into ghettos, reservations or concentration camps is stage six of the eight stages of a genocide.”
No genocide occurred in Rwanda since the Tutsi, the alleged victims are firmly in charge after said ‘genocide’. How did that ‘miracle’ come to about? The Uighurs, another ‘victim’ of incipient ‘genocide’ increased their population by 1,792,742 between 2010 and 2017. Such vigor for a people at stage six on the genocide scale! Or, maybe, the people pushing the ‘genocide’ tales are liars? Maybe a more complex story is required to explain the anomalies in these two stories.
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Maybe Abagond can do a post comparing ethnic cleansing (which can be cultural, linguistic, etc. ) to genocide.
Both aim to eliminate a people, one focuses more on the actual people, one can be a combination of both getting rid of people and forced assimilation of survivors.
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I fully endorse your proposal, HK would be a perfect case study. The Brits did a job on the Chinese people of that territory that has left them feeling more ‘western’ than the ‘west’. How many millions of them will get asylum in Europe and the USA?
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Brazil had some concentration camps during WW2, when we ruled by a fascist dictator:
https://observatorio3setor.org.br/noticias/tempos-obscuros-brasil-tinha-campos-de-concentracao-na-2a-guerra-mundial/
They were used to intern brazilian citizens of japanese, italian and german descent, and captured german soldiers
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A lot of people need to go to jail for a long time because of this. Especially Stephen Miller and Kris Kobach. I believe the majority of those “missing “ children have been trafficked.
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the immigration issue is a true challenge for me morally and ecoonomically, that_s out of scope but with the auschwitz analogy i can behind that plus children though.
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Abagond, you should have looked closer to home for this post.
“Immigrants Say They Were Pressured Into Unneeded Surgeries
By
Mihir Kumar Jha –
September 29, 2020”
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