Why does it mean so much to you to fight this to the last ditch the way you're doing? Do you imagine that it's not possible both to acknowledge the events of history, and to find modern progressivism distasteful in the extreme? I assure you this is quite possible! I manage it every day.

In the matter under discussion, I achieve it thus: while internment camps for enemy noncombatants have existed throughout history, in the modern era the British Empire bears responsibility for codifying the concept under the name "concentration camp". But the British implementation, however horrible, at least had the excuse of being an effective weapon of war: by inflicting starvation upon the loved ones of Boer guerrillas and scorching the earth which had held their homes, Kitchener very effectively broke the back of the Boer resistance - why go on fighting when everything and everyone you're fighting for has already been destroyed?

From there, the idea made the leap to Soviet Russia, where it was implemented under the general name of "gulag". The specific mechanism by which this transfer occurred I have yet to identify, but considering how much else the Soviets learned from their American progressive sponsors in this era, I find it quite reasonable to suspect that hand at work here as well. Since the Bolsheviks fancied themselves likewise at war with anyone, in the country they stole, who was insufficiently vicious to suit them, they no doubt found it quite reasonable to deal with such people by interning them en masse. Their major innovation here, if it was theirs, was in working their internees to death, rather than waste them by mere torture, rape, and starvation.

After a few decades' fermentation in this rich and fecund environment, the horror made its way to Nazi Germany, a regime which in this fashion, as in so many others, merely mirrored the Soviet excesses against which its leaders touted their movement as the only possible defense. Like the Soviet regime, the Nazis imagined themselves at war with internal elements dedicated to the destruction of the nation and people they claimed to defend; too, in both cases, they regarded the war as one to the knife, with no quarter whatsoever permissible. The Nazi innovation lay solely in systematizing the destruction of internees for ideological reasons; while the inmates of Nazi camps might serve as forced labor for whatever period of time lay between their internment and their extermination, the regime so desired they die that no consideration - not even the possibility that, kept alive a bit longer, they might materially contribute to the regime's chance of victory in the war in which it embroiled itself - was permitted to stand in the way.

Of course, no historiography of internment camps in the modern era is complete without considering those employed by the United States to intern her Japanese citizens during the Second World War, out of fear that some among them might constitute a fifth column. Young though she be, Columbia has known a surfeit of horrors. Indeed, she has herself invented more than a few, such as the eugenic idea - beloved of progressives in the "Progressive Era", whose modern descendants receive it as part of their ideological inheritance however bitterly they protest otherwise - an idea which so readily lends itself to enormities such as those for which the Nazi regime is so rightly excoriated, not to mention such trivialities as twenty thousand or more American citizens forcibly sterilized in its name. (California in particular deserves infamy for this, although only rarely receives it. Depending on whom you ask, the practice of forcible eugenic sterilization ended in that state some time between 1963 and 1997 - and even if we follow Wikipedia in assuming the former year, that the practice continued a full generation after the Nazi horror exposed its monstrosity is itself perhaps instructive.)

Had history gone only very slightly differently from its true course, the American internment camps would be a stench in the nostrils of history every bit the equal of the Nazi ones - no, worse, because America had the leisure, the resources, and the engineering competence to do a much more thoroughly hideous job than the Nazis ever managed. Unlike Russia and Germany at that time, though, America had also the immense good fortune of not having recently suffered a violent overthrow of her government by packs of murderous criminals bent on enforcing their own twisted notions of justice upon whole nations at the gore-sheathed point of a bayonet. By that good fortune alone were we spared an indelible stain upon our national honor.

I hope I haven't abused your patience too grievously in this rather longwinded explanation of how it is indeed quite possible to compose the two concepts I initially mentioned - that the British built concentration camps, and that modern progressivism is a frightful beast and likely only to become more so as it recognizes its power is on the wane - despite the difficulty you seem to have in doing so. As you see, to accomplish this task requires both great nuance of thought and a certain stubborn faith in one's own ability to analyze and draw conclusions - not that you should imagine yourself infallible in so doing, of course, but neither need you take at face value the hegemonic narrative in which to understand history is solely the province of professional academics who, by virtue of their various certifications, are uniquely capable of developing a true narrative which the rest of us may only absorb without criticism or dissent.

Above all, cultivate nuance! It is precisely that which those who seek to dictate your thoughts, and thus obtain power over your actions, would most punitively forbid. Does this statement arouse your defiance? Your spite? Good! Defiance and spite are precisely appropriate in response to such arrogant overreach, and you may well find great value in thinking and acting accordingly.

It's easy if you try: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Mau_Uprising#Human_rights_...