#bordercrisis #asylum #concentrationcamp
Most of us think of a concentration camp as a place where Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Serbs, and general undesirables, were sent during World War II. We picture (or try not to) the horrendous conditions in which these humans were placed during these trying times. We also tend to think of them as a holding point for what the Nazis referred as the “final solution”.
However, few of us realize those were not the first camps of human concentration mankind created. That award would go to the British at the height of their power, in the beginning of the 20th century. During the second Anglo-Boer war, when the British realized the Boer people sat atop gold mines, a conflict between the two erupted.
After much fighting, the Boer States out-gunned by the most powerful empire of the time, resorted to guerilla tactics that greatly impacted the progress the British had been making. In retaliation, the British government adopted a “scorched earth” strategy and in the process, created the first-ever concentration camps.
It is this new type of camp of concentration that NRP’s Throughline investigated recently. And while the Nazis took the concept to a whole new level, it is important that we do not confuse the atrocities of the Nazis and their use of these camps, as the only and true definition.
Words have meaning, and it’s important that at the very least, we agree on that meaning. And while our Southern Border crisis is not funneling people to a “final solution”, we need to ask ourselves if indeed, people seeking asylum, are being held in camps of concentration. And if they are, is that something by which we want history to remember the U.S.
