The Brits invented Concentration Camps, Didn't They?

Hitler's Irish Movies Originally uploaded by iomhanna.

Katie Holmquist -- an earnest liberal of the type that only the Irish Times can produce -- wrote a good piece on the Hidden History documentary called Hitler's Irish Movies. The documentary covered a number of anti-British movies that Goebbels produced in the first few years of the Second World War. These romantic melodramas depicted heroic Irish rebels fighting against perfidious English imperialists. Well, that's no variation on the movie scripts produced by Hollywood or the British left. But Holmquist got a bit hot under the collar at the Nazi assertion, in a film of the same genre about the Boer War, that the British invented concentration camps. "The Germans, who invented concentration camps, created the fiction that it was actually a British invention during the Boer War," she wrote. It's a measure of the respect I have for the Irish Times, its columnists and sub-editors, that one of the pillars of my nationalist credo began to wobble. Didn't the Brits invent them, to pen up disaffected Boer civilians? Or was it another nationalist myth that -- with time, maturity and the historical reassessment required for peace, progress and prosperity -- we can safely let go? But then I thought of the time when I worked in a London office, with an Afrikaaner by the name of John Roth. A middle-Englander by the name of Fred was reading the international section of the paper and blamed some atrocity in India on the pernicious effects of religion. "That's all religion's fault that is," said Fred. "No it's not religion's fault," howled Roth. "It's England's fault."

He then told everybody how the villainous Brits had tossed his God-fearing (Boer) law-abiding grandmother into a concentration camp, to facilitate their imperial ambitions. I would have weighed in, but for the fact that an IRA bomb had just gone off down the street, in a bin outside John Lewis's, only twenty minutes previously. Plus, I needed to keep my jobs, whereas John Roth was staff and could say whatever he darn well liked. I also kind of felt sorry for Fred, who was only trying to disrupt the pregnant ominous silence that fell in the office after the bomb went off. It's not that people were looking at me, it was more that they were not looking at me, if you get my drift. So anyway. That recollection made me think that yes, in fact, the British did invent concentration camps. They didn't introduce them in Ireland, although they did intern people without trial, shoot them on the slightest pretext and burn down towns to teach the locals a lesson. And then -- shades of US policy in Iraq -- they held an election and asked people to vote for them. Too weird. But this letter to the Irish Times today straightened things out for me, for good and all.

During the Boer War, in what is modern South Africa, Britain's General Kitchener used "concentration camps" to contain hostile civilians. These were mainly Boers, whites of Dutch origin. Blacks were also subjected to this treatment. Some 28,000 whites and 14,000 blacks died in Kitchener's camps. The tactic played a major part in winning the war for the empire ... For those "concentrated": their mortality rates rose sharply due to being confined in large numbers in ill-prepared quarters. Even within the past year there have been a number of instances in the British broadsheet press where commentators or editorial writers have referred to the concentration camp as being invented by the British during the Boer war.

The Brits did invent concentration camps. They didn't invent extermination camps, or gulags, but they did implement the penal systems that the rulers of any great power require for the purposes of subjugating their fellow man. If you get a chance to watch the documentary then I'd definitely recommend it. The most interesting thing is the fact that the films were made as propaganda for a German audience, so the Irish are very Teutonic. As one German put it, "if the Germans saw red-faced people in the film, drinking beer all of the time, then they wouldn't have identified with it." So ... what are you suggesting?