Concentration camps emerged from colonial management, not just Nazism

Evidence

In pointing out that the slave plantation was a space of exception, Paul Gilroy reminds us not to overlook ‘how colonial societies and conflicts provided the context in which concentration camps emerged as a political administration, population management, warfare, and coerced labor.’ It is the idea of a modern civilization encountering a pre-modern one that produced the colonial world as ‘a permanent, tropical exception from common law applicable in Europe,’ Hansen and Stepputat note. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 49 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

For instance, in 1941, Hitler remarked, “Concentration camps were not invented in Germany. It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations.” He was speaking for propaganda purposes, but with an element of truth. Concentration camps had, in fact, been used in many colonial contexts—by the Spanish in Cuba; by German colonists in Southwest Africa, against the Herero and Nama people; by the British in what is now South Africa, during the Anglo-Boer War, with tens of thousands of captives dying in the disease-ridden enclosures. Before Hitler began casting the mass murder of genetic “inferiors” as an act of health care for the race, the British Royal Navy commander Bedford Pim explained to the Anthropological Society of London in 1866 that, when it comes to killing Indigenous peoples, there was “mercy in a massacre.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 881 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

In this sense, the wartime Nazi empire was, indeed, a very different type of empire, not interested in managing cultural or ethnic difference but in destroying it. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 50 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Concentration camps emerged from colonial administration, not just European totalitarianism. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 49; Concentration camps originated in colonial empires, not Nazi Germany — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 881; Concentration camps originated in colonial Boer War, not totalitarianism — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 985 (+11 more)

Broader Connections

• Concentration camps emerged from colonial administration, not just European totalitarianism. #corroborates (0.98) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 49
• Concentration camps originated in colonial empires, not Nazi Germany #corroborates (0.97) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 881
• Nazi empire differed from colonial empires by destroying difference rather than managing it #complicates (0.78) — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 50