Concentration camps reveal the nature of the modern state
aeon.co
aeon.co
Consider the Mongol empire. While the Mongol empire had some things in common with a modern state, squeamishness about killing was not one of them. There are cases where they decided a city needed to be destroyed and they took great pains to make sure that destruction was total. Every man, woman, and child they could find was put to the sword (or axe). Depopulating an entire city was a difficult task before carpet bombing became an option. Mongol soldiers were given quotas and expected to produce enough ears to show that they had met that quota. Punishments for not meeting that quota were harsh. Ears were put into sacks and carted off in wagons to be counted. Even dogs, cats and chickens were killed in some cases. There are recorded instances of Mongol armies leaving towns after doing this and then deliberately returning a week or two later, just to make sure they got anyone who had managed to hide in a basement or who was out of town when they were first there.
Consider the Romans. After the third Punic war Carthage's population was sold into slavery en masse and the city burned for 17 days. The earth was salted. There was no fourth Punic war because there were no Carthaginians left alive and free. Let's not even talk about the Assyrians!
Many states throughout history have committed genocide against enemies and many others have persecuted populations within their own borders. Concentration camps are only necessary now because most people won't stand for such atrocities, and states therefore feel compelled to carry them out in relative secrecy. Modern human society is gentler now than at any point in our past, although perhaps navel-gazing and self-accusatory articles like this are part of the reason why, no matter how uninformed they might be.
And regarding Mongols, most of what you learn from history is greatly exaggerated. Mongols fought to conquer and the cheapest way to conquer is to intimidate the enemy. It was in their interest to spread terror through stories of murder and brutality and it was in the interest of their victims to spread the same stories to elicit sympathy.
Their actions severely depressed to population of the area for centuries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carthage_(c._149_BC)
[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/269786?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...
We know that salt was an extremely precious commodity in the ancient world.
It seems like an extreme waste of wealth to ruin fields for the future generations of people you have already killed.
PS: Salt was expensive because of transaction and transpiration issues plus the need for a lot of land as water only evaporates at ~1/8th inch of water per day. So at 3.5% concentration that's ~4/1,000th of an inch of salt per day. But, having soil absorb sea water would likely work just as well.
Well, there's a difference between exterminating a foreign and/or conquered city-state, and isolating/quarantining undesirable sub-groups from within a larger civilization (often for reasons that are more ideological than political). What the Mongols, Romans, Assyrians, etc., did was less like isolating an ethnic sub-group and more like inflicting punishment upon a city-state for not paying tribute. (Also, I think the Assyrians would also export the population of a city-state and resettle them elsewhere, to remove their national identity, just as often as they would kill and/or skin-alive everyone in a targeted city-state.)
It's probably worth noting that what happened recently to the Yazidis in North Iraq was closer to what used to happen in antiquity.
Methodical killing of any type at scale is very rare in the modern world. It's even rarer for it to to be conducted through camps; to my knowledge, only the Nazis ever did it (and their allies, the Croatian fascist Ustaše regime). Most mass killing simply consists of taking groups of people somewhere remote and shooting them. Concentration camps are what you do when you don't want to do that and are basically a cheap form of prison. Even in the Soviet Gulag, where the harsh conditions and threat of death were part of the punishment, the majority of prisoners survived.
Even where death is tacitly the expected outcome of a camp (rare), it's mostly done by slow starvation and overwork. I think that's interesting, given how inefficient that is. It provides a kind of mental "plausible deniability".
What separated the Nazi mass killings was mostly the massive population they could pull from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-occupied_Europe
But not from concentration camps.
I agree with this even more than you do. If my understanding of history is correct, the Nazis, whom you single out as an exception, weren't so from the beginning. This:
> Most mass killing simply consists of taking groups of people somewhere remote and shooting them.
was what they did with their 'undesireables' for a long time, too; and, as you point out:
> Concentration camps are what you do when you don't want to do that and are basically a cheap form of prison.
I think that they originally intended their concentration camps as a marshalling point for future deportation, and (later?) a source of slave labour. It was only at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, I think, that they decided to turn some concentration camps into extermination camps. (Indeed, one could make the point that your statement is true by definition; a camp intended for killing ceases to be, or just to be, a concentration camp. However, probably this sort of semantic quibble is not what you meant.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_VII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%C5%82%C5%BCec_extermination...
> [the Nazi concentration camps] became part of the genocide of the Jews only late in the war; for most of the period of the Third Reich, the camp system was separate from the ‘war against the Jews’ and the extermination camps were not part of the regular concentration camp system.
Is this a wrong statement that conflicts with what you are saying, or a right statement, carefully worded (initially, extermination camps were separate from concentration camps), that I overgeneralised to a wrong conclusion (initially, there were no extermination camps for Jews)?
As horrifying as it is, I can't seem to read enough on the fascinating but ghoulish history of this period. The linked article cites Wachsmann's KL, which I have not yet read. Do you think that is a good reference, and/or do you know of any (other) good reference?
What do you have in mind about "the Assyrians"? Control of Mesopotamia flipped back and forth many times until it was eventually conquered from the east by Persia. The Assyrians neither destroyed any land nor were they destroyed by any enemies.
It was common for conquered populations to be deported elsewhere in a Mesopotamian empire, and for conquered cities to be burned (particularly the local palace) -- that's why we have so many contemporary records. But there was no ethos of killing the people or salting the earth, and those things just didn't happen.
There is a myth that the late Assyrian capital of Nineveh was sacked, destroyed, and completely abandoned, but this is contradicted by a wealth of archaeological evidence showing that it was sacked, recovered, and sustained its population continuously for several hundred more years.
The mongols were just as "squeamish" about killing as any other empire - british, spanish, american, etc. Hell, by any measure, the mongols were a far less "brutal" empire than the british, spanish, american.
> There are cases where they decided a city needed to be destroyed and they took great pains to make sure that destruction was total.
Yes. It's called "sacking" a city. It has happened throughout history. The mongols weren't special. You are just perpetuating stereotypes and myth. The US, british, soviets annihilated cities far worse than anything mongols ever did.
It's absurd that you have to resort to silly myths. If you want to see pure evil, go look at what the british empire did to the natives and aborigines. Go look at what we did in hiroshima or nagasaki. You don't have to push racist myth about the mongols.
> Ears were put into sacks and carted off in wagons to be counted
If you think that was horrific, go read about what we did to the japanese in ww2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanes...
> Many states throughout history have committed genocide against enemies and many others have persecuted populations within their own borders.
No they didn't. Genocides, as we see define them, are relatively new european concept based on racist ideology.
You brought up the mongols. Try and find out anyone the mongols "exterminated". You won't find anything other than perhaps mongols tribes that they "merged" into larger mongol tribes.
> Modern human society is gentler now than at any point in our past
It really isn't. You misunderstood why concentration camps were created initially. They were created for slave labor. When the germans realized they were losing, they decided to exterminate the people in concentration camps.
You say modern society has gotten "gentler" but there hasn't been a more evil and callous action in human history than the dropping of nukes on cities.
Humans haven't "evolved". We are just more sated and nukes make it harder for serious war. That's it. But sooner or later, it's inevitable we will get a serious war. And then you'll see how much "gentler" we are.
And for me at least, the main take-away from the image of the concentration camp is clear: elections have consequences, so take your vote seriously. Form a functional coalition with others to elect the least terrible person you can. If you don't, you may end up handing the machinery of the state - capable of harm on a massive scale - over to the unsavory or the insane. That's the lesson of the concentration camps and the lesson of recent history.
So I think the distinction between the nature of the state and the nature of its citizens is important for effective democratic participation. If you are so cynical that you think that 'concentration camps reveal the nature of the modern state,' why would you participate in such a thing? If we are collectively down on the very concept of the state, there's no way to run a good one.
What can I do, im just a , i have to perform * or else i will loose my *.
Thats where the evil is and was.
I think this will get worse because technology allows even tighter control of large organizations.
At least in the U.S. a potent mix of cynicism and tribalism with the two party system makes this extremely difficult. Lots of people take for granted that the system is broken. But when you actually begin to discuss policy they are likely to interpret criticism of their cynically chosen party's position as cynical politically motivated flak and defend accordingly.
In that kind of environment "least terrible" doesn't seem to function anymore.
I've wondered if one attack on this vicious cycle could be flippism. Exercising my right to vote for a randomly chosen candidate may be repulsive enough to most Americans that they may actually prefer to use their critical thinking skills to convince me not to do that. (I.e., I don't think most Americans are as cynical as they claim to be.)
The nature of the Nazi/Soviet/cpc/nk camps provides "air cover" for the widespread and more pervasive networks of camps still in use around the world.
I'm glad to have such a clear opportunity to see the vast difference in quality of results achieved by a professional historian on the one hand, and an armchair historiographer like me on the other. I'm looking forward to reading his book.
Incarceration techniques employed in concentration camps were borrowed in a transnational framework. They aided each state in isolating the unwanted (racial, religious, etc) and controlling the rest of the population through the implied threat of ending up in a camp for not conforming.
This statement was the one I found most intriguing in the entire article, but then the author did not expand on it. Maybe he does so in his book. It was strange to me to consider that this state of the world has not always been the norm.
When I looked into it, I found conflicting sources of information. Anyone with knowledge on the subject feel like expanding on this?
https://ia801609.us.archive.org/21/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.1...
"Nationalism emerged to agitate the world only after the war, and the first visible phenomenon which this intellectual epidemic of our century brought about was xenophobia : morbid dislike of the foreigner, or at least fear of the foreigner. The world was on the defensive against strangers, everywhere they got short shrift. The humiliations which once had been devised with criminals alone in mind now were imposed upon the traveller, before and during every journey. There had to be photographs from right and left, in profile and full face, one’s hair had to be cropped sufficiently to make the ears visible; fingerprints were taken, at first only the thumb but later all ten fingers ; furthermore, certificates of health, of vaccination, police certificates of good standing, had to be shown ; letters of recommendation were required, invitations to visit a country had to be procured ; they asked for the addresses of relatives, for moral and financial guarantees, questionnaires, and forms in triplicate and quadruplicate needed to be filled out, and if only one of this sheaf of papers was missing one was lost.
Petty details, one thinks. And at the first glance it may seem petty in me even to mention them. But our generation has foolishly wasted irretrievable, valuable time on those senseless pettinesses. If I reckon up the many forms I have filled out during these years, declarations on every trip, tax declarations, foreign exchange certificates, border passes, entrance permits, departure permits, registrations on coming and on going ; the many hours I have spent in anterooms of consulates and officials, the many inspectors, friendly and unfriendly, bored and overworked, before whom I have sat, the many examinations and interrogations at frontiers I have been through, then I feel keenly how much human dignity has been lost in this century which, in our youth, we had credulously dreamed of as one of freedom, as of the federation of the world. The loss in creative work, in thought, as a result of those spirit-crushing procedures is incalculable. Have not many of us spent more time studying official rules and regulations than works of the intellect ! The first excursion in a foreign country was no longer to a museum or to a world-renowned view, but to a consulate, to a police office, to get a “permit" When those of us who had once conversed about Baudelaire’s poetry and spiritedly discussed intellectual problems met together, we would catch ourselves talking about affidavits and permits and whether one should apply for an immigration visa or a tourist visa ; acquaintance with a stenographer in a consulate who could cut down one’s waiting- time was more significant to one’s existence than friendship with a Toscanini or a Rolland. Human beings were made to feel that they were objects and not subjects, that nothing was their right but everything merely a favour by official grace. They were codified, registered, numbered, stamped and even today I, as a case-hardened creature of an age of freedom and a citizen of the world-republic of my dreams, count every impression of a rubber-stamp in my passport a stigma, every one of those hearings and searches a humiliation. They are petty trifles, always merely trifles, I am well aware, trifles in a day when human values sink more rapidly than those of currencies. But only if one notes such insignificant symptoms will a later age be able to make a proper clinical record of the mental state and mental disturbances with which our world was seized between the two World Wars.