The British invented concentration camps

 

Jeffrey St. Clair: 

+ Cheered on by the likes of Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill, the British set up the first system of concentration camps during the Boer War (aka, the South African War), another resource grab by gunpoint, this time for the control of gold and diamond mines. As British troops torched Boer farms, killed their livestock and poisoned their wells, the farm-workers (mostly African), women, children and elderly were detained and sent to guarded camps enclosed by barbed in the broiling desert of South Africa. Often the children were separated from their mothers, setting yet another ghastly precedent for the future. Eventually, more than 100,000 were imprisoned in such harsh conditions that 27,000 had died by the end of the war–a death toll that was twice as high as the number of Boers killed in combat. When he returned to London from Johannesburg, one the designers of this gulag, Alfred Milner, was knighted for his services to the empire by the new King, Edward VII.

+ After perfecting the design and lethal operation of concentration camps in South Africa during the Boer War, the architects of these prisons, Alfred Milner and Thomas French, pushed to have them deployed in Ireland after the Easter Rising to suppress the Irish revolutionaries. In 1920, under French’s supervision as Viceroy of Ireland, Ballykinlar Internment Camp was set up and soon filled with more than 2000 Irish men, who’d been rounded up for suspected ties to the IRA. Eventually just about every country wanted its own version, from Kolyma to Tule Lake to Dachau.