Concentration camps originated in colonial Boer War, not totalitarianism
Evidence
Many things that nowadays have become the specialty of totalitarian government are only too well known from the study of history. There have almost always been wars of aggression; the massacre of hostile populations after a victory went unchecked until the Romans mitigated it by introducing the parcere subjectis; through centuries the extermination of native peoples went hand in hand with the colonization of the Americas, Australia and Africa; slavery is one of the oldest institutions of mankind and all empires of antiquity were based on the labor of state-owned slaves who erected their public buildings. Not even concentration camps are an invention of totalitarian movements. They emerge for the first time during the Boer War, at the beginning of the century, and continued to be used in South Africa as well as India for “undesirable elements”; here, too, we first find the term “protective custody” which was later adopted by the Third Reich. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 985
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the scaffolding module on genealogical method — Arendt traces the concentration camp’s pre-totalitarian lineage. — connects to: British concentration camps in the South African War killed almost thirty thousand civilians.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 985