Concentration

Cuba, 1896-97, via latinamericanstudies.

In 1896 General Valeriano Weyler, leading Spanish imperial forces against a Cuban guerilla insurgency, decided like many imperial commanders from Napoleon to Westmoreland that it's a problem when your enemy consists of irregular forces blended into the general population, and came up with a novel method of separating them out: he'd take the non-militant members of communities off their land and "reconcentrate" them in central locations where he could stop them from helping the guerillas with food and shelter and keep them out of harm's way, in what he called, with a military bureaucrat's gift for dulling a concept with neuter phrasing, campos de concentración. The policy was, effectively, race-based, as was the war:

'"...del millón seicientos mil habitantes que aproximadamente había en Cuba cuando empezó esta guerra, unos doscientas mil eran españoles, quinientos mil negros o mulatos, unos ochocientos mil blancos cubanos o criollos y un número no determinado de chinos, jamaicanos, haitianos y otros. Los españoles, con alguna notable excepción en especial dentro del clero, se mantenían fieles a España y en contra de la revolución de los cubanos. Los negros, salvo conductas puntuales, estaban entusiásticamente unidos para apoyar a los rebeldes bajo promesa de abolición de la esclavitud, y por que intuían que al final triunfaría la rebelión contra España...Esperaban que bajo el nuevo régimen tendrían condiciones muy similares a las de la vecina república de Haití... soñaban con una Cuba libre ..." 

[Out of the approximately 1.6 million inhabitants of Cuba about 200,000 were Spanish, 500,000 Negroes and mulattos, 800,000 white Cubans and Creoles, and an undetermined number of Chinese, Jamaicans, Haitians, and others. The Spaniards, with some notable exceptions in particular among the Catholic clergy, remained faithful to Spain and opposed to the Cuban revolution. The Negroes, except for particular cases, were enthusiastically united in support of the rebels under a promise that slavery would be abolished, and because they had an intuitive sense that the rebellion would win... They hoped that under the new regime conditions like those in the nearby republic of Haiti could be created, and dreamed of a free Cuba...]

So it was inevitably black people that ended up getting "concentrated", and they weren't very attentively treated, in the sense that hygiene was poor, with no washing sinks or beds, and liquid and solid wastes getting into the water supply, and plagues of enteritis and dysentery followed, hitting children especially severely. Brought into cities, they were forbidden to grow corn and plantain and sugar cane, so that people were squatting in warehouses and abandoned houses, on patios and in doorways, and there was never enough to eat. By the end of 1897 there were between 300,000 and 400,000 people held in the camps, and nobody has been able to make a firm estimate of how many died, but the latest research puts the number at around 170,000 or 10% of the population. Weyler's terrible plan is often thought to be one reason it was so easy for the Americans to drive the Spaniards out a year later.

Those were the first places to be called "concentration camps", though not the first to do it—I'd back the view that the first true concentration camps were in the United States, in the genocidal Native American reservation system, where the First Peoples were "reconcentrated" as the whites took over land for farming.

Some concentration camps have been even worse run, such as the ones created by Lord Kitchener in South Africa for the Boer (45 camps) and black African (64 camps) populations while the land was put out of cultivation under the "Scorched Earth" policy during the Second Boer war in 1900-1902, with the same problems of neglect, poor hygiene, and inadequate food, and the same intolerable death rates especially affecting children; or still more the explicitly genocidal concentration camps run by Germans in Southwest Africa to concentrate the Herero and Namaqua peoples early in the century.

Others have been done quite a bit better. The internment camps in the Western US for Japanese Americans in the Second World War were among the emotionally cruelest things my country has done, but the physical hardships weren't so bad. The "New Villages" the British created mostly for ethnic Chinese suspected of Communism in British Malaya during the Emergency of 1948-60 may have really helped win the war (though I think what really won was the British agreement to Merdeka and getting the hell out); that was very poorly imitated a few years later by the Americans in Vietnamese "strategic hamlets", which didn't work at all.

Nazi German had concentration camps (Konzentrationslager) too, but possibly not what you think; they weren't for Jews when they started up in 1933, but active resisters of the regime, Communists and Socialists and trade union activists, and "deviant" communities like Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals. The first racial community to be targeted were the Roma people, though Jews and Serbs, Russians, and Poles followed after the SS took over the management in 1934-35, along with the disabled and the clergy (like Pastor Niemöller, who'd been silent, as he said, when they came for the trade unionists and the socialists and the Jews, but then they came for him in 1937 and kept him in Sachsenhausen and Dachau till the end of the war). These were terrible, brutal places, where many died, and worse after the beginning of the war in 1939 when they became labor camps, and only those who could work inhuman hours could survive.

But the camps we think of when we think of the Holocaust were Vernichtungslager, or "extermination camps" (I'd translate "annihilation camps"), set up mostly east of Germany after 1942 as places for pure killing, with a state-of-the-art technology of death, used not just for the annihilation of Jews but dedicated to that end, to the Endlösung, "final solution", of the "Jewish question". When you want to say there was something uniquely evil in the Nazi regime, that's what you're talking about, the fanatical dedication of it. It's the suppression of emotion, the German meticulousness of it, the way they were able to reduce it to an engineering problem that is so inexpressibly shocking. Not the concentration camps, which were, sadly, far from unprecedented, genocidal in their own right at times but in a sloppy, sentimental way.

I'm running through all this because of the crazed response to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Córtez (D-NY) when she said that the United States is now running concentration camps on the Mexican border:

And for the shrieking Republicans who don’t know the difference: concentration camps are not the same as death camps.

Concentration camps are considered by experts as “the mass detention of civilians without trial.”

And that’s exactly what this administration is doing.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 18, 2019

Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this. https://t.co/NX5KPPb2Hl

— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) June 18, 2019

AOC is simply correct. They're not death camps, but they are concentration camps. Nobody is insulting the memory of the Holocaust victims except the WASP bitch goddess Cheney (like Meghan McCain before her, but worse, given her family connection with torture and other war crimes) assuming she's entitled to speak on behalf of the Jews.

Central American migrants up until 2017 used to melt into the general population under the "catch and release" policy that sent them to be cared for by relatives and friends, even in the unaccompanied-minors crisis of 2014, when the enormous numbers of kids arriving without parents broke the Obama administration's ability to handle it according to the principles laid down in the Flores Agreement for some months. The "released" migrants didn't in fact disappear into the population, as the Trumpists want you to believe (and may actually be happening in the incompetence of the current chaotic misrule); they almost always make their court dates, and the rate could easily be pushed close to 100% with the use of ankle-bracelet monitors.

But what the Trump administration is trying to do is concentrate them in a single location, with the purpose of "deterrence", as Sessions and the others have consistently explained, that is of showing people in Central America that in spite of US and international law on asylum, if you seek asylum in Trump's US the law will not apply and you will be punished. To keep them under constant surveillance, unable to work, study, have babies or choose not to have babies, friend separated from friend, sister from brother, child from parents, just pulled out of society and reduced to nothing but scrambling for food and shelter, and dreadful deprivation—if you haven't read this thread yet please do—

I wish, for the first time, I had lots of followers, so they would see this incredibly important thread. If you do see it, retweet it, please! https://t.co/ymP8jbchnX

— Mary Ellen Sandahl (@blueeyedgrass) June 16, 2019

They aren't death camps, though people have started dying, kids first as you'd expect. They're not purposeful enough for that, or organized. That doesn't mean we shouldn't stop doing them. They're definitely bad enough to stop.