Concentration Camps Are Back, So Let's Talk About Their History

It’s possible the general idea of ‘building camps to hold people who’ve done nothing wrong’ goes back many thousands of years. In Episode 9, Robert is joined by Jacquis Neal (Culture Kings Podcast) and they dive into the history of concentration camps. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hello, friends and or loved ones. I am Robert Evans,
and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we
tell you everything you don't know about the very worst
people in all of history. With me this week is
my guest Jakis Neil, host of Culture, King's comedian actor, Uh,
Golden Gloves boxer. No, I did that one last time. Um, hey,

(00:24):
it's it's good to have Kis. So this is a
show where I read a story about someone terrible or
that explains something behind someone terrible to a guest who's
coming in cold. Normally we do like a Gallexadam Hussein
or Hitler or something too special for that. No, today
we've got a different one. Um, based a little bit
on some stuff that's in the news. Obviously, Uh, there

(00:44):
are some camps with children concentrating some children who have
been separated from their families on the border. So I
felt like now might be a good time to do
Behind the Bastards that delves into the history of concentration
camps because it's a weird and fascinating history, and uh,
it gets behind several bastards. We will be talking about
the guy who invented concentration camps. Really oh yeah, oh ship,

(01:06):
there's a deep dive. But he's he's kind of the
ultimate bast Yeah, he's one of the king bastards. There's
there's so many terrible people, murderers, murderers. Didn't invent murder No, well,
well yeah, but we don't know who that is. Yeah, yeah,
but the person who invented the concentration calps, he is

(01:28):
in a special realm of his own. He is and nobody,
nobody's heard about this guy except for concentration camp nerds,
like everyone on this podcast is about to be yeah,
so yeah, I'll get into it all right. So archaeologist
studying Hadrian's Wall in England suggested that he may have
found evidence of the first concentration camps and all of history,
built for captives from tribes on the other side of

(01:50):
the wall and held as a guarantee of good behavior.
Other archaeologists suggests these were early refugee camps operated by
the Romans to protect people fleeing from a societal breakdown
north of the wall. We'll never know for sure. It
is possible that various cultures have instituted ideas that kind
of were concentration camps for thousands of years. There's no
tracing it all the way back, but we can trace

(02:11):
the roots of our modern conception of a concentration camp.
And they start with Andrew Jackson. What. Yeah, well he
didn't invent the concentration camp. But it's important to know
this history to understand what comes next. Uh. Sondrew Jackson
was born in seventeen sixty seven, seventh President of the
United States. His father died in a logging accident. He
grew up really poor and really mean. When he was

(02:31):
a kid, he got stabbed in the face in the
hand by a British officer because he wouldn't clean the
guy's boots. Um, he was a salty dude. Uh. Good
reason to be salty though. Yeah. Yeah, he did have
good reason to be as he was like starving for
a long time. His dad died when he was real young. Uh.
He got shot a bunch when he was inaugurated as president.
There was a bullet in his lung. That was that

(02:52):
was there his whole life. He he was he was
just coughing up blood his whole life because he just
always had bullets inside of him. He was a tough guy.
This should be a great origin story. It is a story.
And he probably killed more human beings personally than any
other president. Like, he shot a lot of people personally,
not like ordering people to do it. He almost beat
a guy to death with a cane. He was a

(03:13):
tough dude, is what we're saying. Uh, we'll probably wind
up doing the whole episode on just him at some point,
but right now we're going to talk about his relationship
to the Native Americans and how that contributed to the
development of concentration camps. So in eighteen twelve, Jackson was
elected major general in the Tennessee Militia because we used
to vote on generals back in the day. Uh, as
you might guess from the year the War of eighteen

(03:34):
twelve was on. By this point, our history books tend
to reduce that to just you know, the White House
got burned. Yeah, it was a lot more than that.
And there were actually a couple of other wars that
were grouped into the War of eighteen twelve, and one
of them was the Red Stick War. Have you heard
of the Red Stick War? Uh? No, it sounds fun,
doesn't Yeah. It sounds like sounds like cute, It sounds

(03:56):
like the beginnings of baseball. Yeah, We're seen each other
for years, and then we realized, yeah, well okay, no,
it's actually it was a a civil war within the
Creek Nation, the Creeker and Indigenous people uh to sort
of like the East Dish United States area, like southeast
of the US, like almost all the way down from

(04:18):
like parts of like Virginia down to like Florida. So
the Creek Nation was a pretty sizeable like Native nation
at this point in time. UM and the Red Sticks
were one faction within the Creek and their name came
from the fact that they carried red war clubs that
they would beat people to death with UM because they
were pretty tough dudes, and they believed that the best
way to defend their land from the encroaching Americans was

(04:39):
to murder them. Uh. They were encouraged in this thinking
by British agents who wanted to do anything they could
to funk with the Americans during the War of eighteen twelves.
They would give the Red Creek food and money and
stuff and try to get them to work with Americans.
So a band of these Red Sticks winds up murdering
two families of American settlers near Nashville. They were executed
by the rest of their tribe who didn't want any

(04:59):
trouble with the Americans. But this wind up provoking a
civil war within the Creek nation. So Jackson and his
militia wind up on the side of the Creek who
didn't like killing settlers. Right, they fight a war with
the Red Sticks. So it's like Jackson and most of
the Creek on one side and the Redness Sticks on
the other side. Yeah, and this winds up coming to
an end in like eighteen fourteen. So Jackson does so

(05:21):
well in the war that he becomes a major general
in the army. He gets put in charge of Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi,
and the Creek Nation. This meant that he was in
charge when it became trying to negotiate a peace treaty
at the end of the Red Stick War. The Madison
administration wanted us to be nice to the Creek because
they met James Madison didn't want to sunk with him.
But Jackson was like, fun these guys because he was

(05:41):
a monster. Yeah, So he decides to punish the Red
Sticks and the Creek who had fought alongside his forces
like all the same. So he just takes half of
the land of the Creek nation, Like, so he decided
he fought yeah, yeah, yeah, he foxed them over to
he takes twenty three million acres away from the guys
who've just been fighting with him. Three million acres. I

(06:01):
can't fathom. Yeah, how back in the day one man
could have all they were This is like a Kanye lyric.
How could one man have all that power? It's it's
weird just because he didn't die, Like that's a big
part of it is, like, yeah, if you survived to
be old enough, yeah, and then you just that's like
man like, if that's the case, fifty cent ship on

(06:23):
half of America. If nine times and not die, fifty
cent could have been a president in the eighteen hundreds,
he would have been fucking hard as ship. Ye he was.
That was the main qualification, was not dying and have
a couple of bullets in you. Yeah. So the Creek
nicknamed Jackson sharp Knife because he was a he was
a dick. Yeah, and Andrew Jackson, you know, gets into

(06:45):
politics after he becomes a general. H he became a
strident advocate for fucking over Native Americans. In eighteen twenty nine,
he was looked at president. In eighteen thirty, he championed
the Indian Removal Act, which is one of the more
sinisterly named eighteen thirty. Yeah, and he delivered this message
to Congress quote, we now propose to acquire the countries

(07:05):
occupied by the Red Men of the South and West
by a fair exchange, and at the expense of the
United States, to send them to land where their existence
may be prolonged and perhaps made perpetual. Doubtless, it will
be painful to leave the graves of their fathers, But
what do they more than our ancestors did or than
our children are doing. Now, that's like him being nice
about He was mean but eloquent. Yeah, yeah, he's And

(07:27):
he said that this policy was not only liberal, but
generous to the to the what he called them the
Redman because it was the most racist time that's ever
been e thirties us. That's like, that's is that before
the emancipation too? Oh yeah, that's like the slaves And yeah,
it's a it's a dark time in American history. Jackson

(07:50):
three years later would deliver another speech where he was
even less nice to the Native Americans and basically said
that they weren't intelligent enough to have any land in
an America, and so it was they must necessarily yield
to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear like
like they're they're destined to be screwed because we're screwing
them so much. Yeah, this is a dude. And yeah,

(08:12):
it's so crazy. It's so crazy. How I know we
will eventually get to this, But how parallel some of
these thoughts ye are to our current person in power?
Or it is is insane? Yeah? Yeah, well, and you
know it's It's worth noting that when President Trump met

(08:33):
with the remaining Indian code talkers from World War Two,
he met them in front of a picture of Andrew Jackson,
which I didn't know. I heard that was a thing. Yeah,
and because I'm lazy, I didn't read why it was
a thing. But now I know. This is why what
a dick. So Andrew Jackson's any removal policy winds up
leading to, uh, the eviction of natives from the land

(08:55):
that he had sort of said that they had to leave.
So his idea was like, we have to push them
all into reservations. That was the evolution of this policy.
As we kicked them off the lane that we want
to take, but we'll give them motherland. Um. So this
is not quite a concentration camp, but there are aspects
of the process that look a lot like stuff you'll
see in you know, the twentieth century. So the most

(09:16):
clear example of that is in the U. S. Army
was sent to a victim bunch of Cherokee who refused
to move from the land that they were told to vacate.
So the army took seventeen thousand Cherokee and two thousands
of their black slaves because nobody's entirely a good guy
in the eighteen thirties over um and forced them onto camps.
Uh So, three hundred or some of them died in

(09:36):
the camps and then they get marched into Oklahoma, which
is basically one big reservation at that point in time.
Four thousand Cherokee die on the march to Oklahoma. This
is march. That is a long march. I don't know
if you've ever walked from like Tennessee to Oklahoma, but don't. Yeah, man,
I set out to do it, and I was like,
at they're a block awful. So, yeah, when the Cherokee

(10:00):
arriving Oklahoma, they're placed on reservations, which is a type
of camp designed to concentrate Native Americans into a small
area so they can't carry out guerrilla wars against the state.
This policy continued until eighteen eighties seven, when the government
decided that Native Americans had been pretty well beaten and
enacted the DAWs Act, which split reservation land up in
individual allotments that Natives could then sell to white people,
which was basically a way of being like, we'll give

(10:22):
you a little bit of cash for your land, and
then you don't have land anymore. Um. And then also,
did you say that they had already been well beaten?
I mean, yeah, it's just that's a crazy Well, I
guess we've beat you enough. It worked, is what I'm saying.
Is like the resistance, if you're looking at and this
is important to understand what comes next. If you're associate

(10:43):
path looking at the US policy against the Native Americans,
it worked. You know, in the early eighteen hundreds, they
were a real threat to white people's ability to take
over North America, and this strategy broke them. If you
don't care about human rights or dignity or anything like that,
it functioned. Uh So, it's terrible, but other people in

(11:04):
history would pay attention to the example that the Americans
set in our policy towards Native Americans. Now we're going
to veer off of North America and were to uh Spain.
The same year as the Trail of Tears, eighteen thirty
eight also saw the birth of a guy named Don
Valeriano Whaler in Nicolau. Uh. He was born on the
island of Mayorca. Yeah, it is a good name. A

(11:25):
lot of names for people in those days. Yeah, not
just two or three. Um. So he was born in
my Orca, which is a part of Spain. He grew
up with dreams of military glory, but Alas was only
four ft ten when he turned fifteen. Uh. He listed
in the Toledo Military Academy. He was below the Spanish
military's minimum height requirements, but they let him join anyway
because they just finished having a bunch of civil and

(11:46):
colonial wars and they didn't have enough soldiers. They were like, oh,
it's okay if you're tiny. Uh yeah, maybe he won't
get shot shot. Um. He went up actually being really
good at army stuff. Here in the nicknames Skipio from
his fellow students, who was Skipio Africanus, was a famous
Roman general who was really tough, and Whaler had a
reputation of being really tough, which in those days meant

(12:08):
you just didn't get sick and die easily, because like
that was just fucking Europeans. Whenever they would go to
the like half of them would die from the fever.
So if you survive that, you're tough. Yeah, so yeah.
Valariano Whaler wound up sent to Cuba in eighteen sixty three,
where he developed a reputation for being the only colonial
officer who wouldn't drink alcohol. U Spanish officers in this

(12:31):
time had a habit of drinking nothing but enormous quantities
of cold champagne uh instead of water because they thought
it kept them safe from malaria, kept them safe. But
so he drank water and he was Yeah, he was,
which made him popular with the soldiers because they didn't
get champagne and it also he was probably the only
sober Spanish guy on the islands. That's why he was

(12:52):
so good. That everybody out there fighting wars drunk, it's
a it's a lobar. He figured it out. Like those days,
sober and I'm going to kill not blacked out the
whole time. So Cuba was a pretty chill place in
eighteen sixty three. From the Spanish point of view, there
wasn't any resistance to their rule at that point, or

(13:12):
at least not effectively. Whaler's time there started well because
he won the Spanish national lottery and became super rich,
which is great. Then he caught the yellow fever, which
tried to kill him but didn't quite uh and in
fact just made him stronger. Um so that would be
a benefit for the rest of his life is that
he wouldn't get yellow fever again. That fall, as he
was recovering from the fever, a war broke out in

(13:33):
the nearby Dominican Republic, which was also owned by Spain.
The Dominicans had just been invaded by Haiti, and pretty
much as soon as the Spanish through Haiti back, the
Dominicans were like, well, okay, now we want to be
an independent nation and we want Spain gone too. So
Whyler got sent over to the Dominican Republic to fight
an insurgency against Spanish rule. He became a staff officer
and eventually earned a promotion to lieutenant colonel. And a

(13:53):
bunch of awards for his gallantry. The conflict went great
for him because he got a bunch of awards, but
Spain wound up losing control of the Dominican Republic in
eighteen sixty five. So Whyler gets transferred over to a
Spanish embassy in Washington, d C. Where he caught the
tale into the Civil War and picked up some really
cool ideas from America. Uh. Which yeah, now this is
a might not be the idea you're expecting. This is

(14:16):
a quote from the book British Concentration Camps, which was
a major source for this podcast and will have the
length to all the other sources up on the website
behind the Bastards dot com. So anyway, Whaler winds up
in the d C embassy, uh, and he starts reading
about the tactics and hearing about the tactics being used
by a general named WILLIAMS. Sherman. Uh. In the south quote.
Not only with Sherman an exponent of brittle warfare, burning

(14:38):
entire towns to terrify the enemy into submission, he also
waged a campaign which some thought amounted to genocide against
the Indians, using this as slogan. The only good Indian
is a dead one. Sherman harry the Indians mercilessly, seeing
that they were pinned up in camps where they died
from starvation and illness. Sherman's activities both against the Confederacy
and the Indians made a great lasting impression upon the
young soldier, who went on to govern several Spanish colonies.

(15:01):
So Whaler gets sent over to the US and it's
like these guys, they're good at suppressing people. Yeah, yeah,
So Whaler gets transferred back to Spain for a little while.
But then in eighteen sixty eight, the Cubans decide they're
not happy with Spanish rule and they have a revolution. Uh.
So Whaler gets sent over to Cuba uh and fights

(15:21):
in what's called the Ten Years War, which is a
war from six sixty eight seventy eight against the Spanish government.
By all accounts, it was a pretty badass conflict. I'm
gonna quote here from a book called The War with
Spain by Charles Morris. That's about the Cuban armies in
this time they were fighting in Spain. The strength of
the insurgents lay largely in their horses. They were admirable horsemen.
Riding like cossacks or cowboys, and far superior in this

(15:42):
respect to the Spanish cavalry, a few of whom were
trained to the saddle. Many stories are told of the
women who wrote in their ranks and wielded the machete
even more fiercely than the men, and there is little
doubt that these stories have some foundation in truth. The
favorite mode of fighting by the insurgents was to harass
the Spanish troops with skirmish fire, in which they sought
to pick off the officers by sharp shooting. Then, if
the opportunity presented, they would dash forward in a wild

(16:03):
cavalry charge, machete in hand, and seek to wreak havoc
on the ranks of the foe. Pretty badass. A bunch
of ladies with machetes kind of horses, yeah, or just
in general, I just yeah on horses and yeah, yeah,
it's like wonder woman are the Amazon? Yeah? I feel
like Danny Trejoe could make that into a movie. Let's
get a production company. Yeah you hear that, Danny. Yeah,

(16:25):
there's a bunch of ladies on horses of machetes cutting
up Spanish soldiers. Man make it happen. So Whaler was
put in command of a six man unit, which he
quickly turned into the deadliest unit in the Spanish army.
There were no rules at the time in the Spanish
military for how to fight insurgeon, so Whaler made up
rules of his own, the most important of which was
that there were no rules. His troops were ordered to
give no quarter to the enemy. The enemy was to

(16:46):
find as anyone near a combat area, including civilians. He
became famous for his brutality, and was at one point asked,
is it true that your men returned from battle holding
the severed heads of their enemies by the hair? Whaler replied,
what do you think war is? And war men have
mean one job to kill? Yeah, you predicted that, didn't
call that? Yeah, you know, you're get to feel for
this guy. Get the field the great minds. Yeah. So,

(17:09):
part way through the war, Whaler gets recalled to Spain
because there's a monarchist uprising in Spain. The whole eighteen
hundred Spanish is civil war after fucking civil war. Yeah,
I mean they'd lost so many territories. Yeah time too,
it's not a great time. Yeah. Uh so, Yeah, Spain's
having like a monarchist uprising, so Whaler goes back to
help fight it. He has some fighting outside of Valencia,
which doesn't go well, but then the general fighting him

(17:31):
dies and that guy's army sort of falls apart, so
Whaler kind of wins, and then the government sends him
next to Catalonia where there's like kind of a leftist
workers uprising, and he promptly just murders everyone he suspects
of being connected to the rebels. Spanish citizens didn't like
seeing the tactics they cheered him to use in Cuba
being used on them at home, so General Whaler was
reprimanded and removed from that particularly. This is still four

(17:53):
ft I think he's about four ft eleven. He grew
a little bit more, not all that much. Yeah, grew
in all the blood he's drawn, just standing on it.
Tiny little man just bathing in blood. Yeah. Yeah, he's
he's a monster. So his career for the next few
years is kind of up and down. He served as
the military governor in the Philippines from eight to eighteen

(18:15):
ninety one. He bounce around so much in just well
because they're like, we can't have him in Spain because
he's too brutal and people don't like seeing what we
do to our colonial possessions being done in Spain. But
we need a guy to put down insurgencies, and he's
fucking good at good at it's just saying he's good
at it. Charge here, come on over, yeah, yeah, go
crush these insurgents now. So he winds up in the

(18:36):
Philippines fighting insurgents. One four month campaign. He succeeded in
wiping out rebels on the island of Mendano through the
use of something called trocha, which were fortified military lines
built to isolated insurgents. So General Wayler invented a new tactic,
which is basically he would fortify towns and villages and
then he would force civilians in rural areas to leave
their farms and congregate in those walled rural villages that

(18:59):
he built UM, and then he would build these like
fortified lines around areas he knew the rebels were in
to kind of isolate them so you can pin them
into smaller and smaller areas exactly forced them to fight UM.
This worked out very well, and in November eight Whaler
returned to Spain as a newly elected senator. He didn't
get to spend much time on the job because the
revolutionary workers movement in Catalonia again started threatening to act

(19:20):
against the state. Whaler arrested hundreds of them. Uh and
became very popular among Spaniards who weren't angry working class people.
Multiple towns declared him their adopted son. He was made
a senator for life and credited with saving civilization from
the barbaric workers. Uh So now now they so this

(19:40):
is where we are in eighteen nine when another revolution
breaks out in Cuba, and we're going to get into
that revolution and the birth of the first concentration camps
after the break, but before we do that. If you're
anything like me Jakis, talking about concentration camps makes you
really want to purchase products and services. Meant to buy

(20:04):
some stuff right I'm on Amazon right now. Well, let's
let's see what things you can buy that are supporting
the show. Let's do it. We are back. We're talking
about General Valeriana Whyler uh for foot tage in case
you In case you say you know what, I'm coming
to listen to the podcast, but I'm starting that minute

(20:26):
twenty one. Yeah, And if I want to add, if
you're coming in to listen to the podcast and you
are a representative of the Derritos corporation. Let me just
say we are trying to get sponsorship from Derritos. I
get eternally sad when I walk into this office and
there's no cluel ranch der Rito's. I took the whole bag.
And we're talking about revolutionary movements a lot right now

(20:48):
colonialism and nothing says fighting colonialism like the taste of
extreme nacho flavor. I feel like if the Cuban rebels
were about to talk about had had more nacho flavor
in their lives, maybe be their revolution would have gone better.
This is the next crash. The Super Bowl commercial that
Doritos does just said it said it with General Whaler,

(21:11):
please stop killing us, sir, Look what do you have? Does?
And then they live in harmony. I think you've Yeah,
that's a solid Super Bowl commercials. The deep cut, deep cuts,
deep cut. Speaking of deep cuts, all right, so yeah.
In when General Valeriana Whaler was fifty six, Cuban revolutionaries

(21:32):
again declared their independence from Spain. The Spanish military leader
in terms of Cuba proved unable to contain them in
the government begged Whaler to step in which he was
happy to do, providing the government gave him a free
hand to do whatever he wanted in order to suppress
the revolution. So in January six he meets with the
Spanish government and he tells them how he thinks that
they can win this war. The key would be to
relocate the population. Civilians would be forced into camps inside

(21:55):
of fortified cities and towns to deny insurgents aid and comfort.
He put together a team that included several men who
had served under him in the Philippines and promised them
that quote, what we became in the Philippines will serve
us well in Cuba. Ah. Then he promised the press
that he'd have the situation handled in two years. General
Whaler arrived in Cuba in eight and at this point
the insurgents are like at the gates of the last

(22:17):
city I think was Havana that the Spanish still controlled,
So the revolution has gone really well up to this point.
He immediately issues the order all the inhabitants of the
country now outside the line of fortifications of the towns, shall,
within the period of eight days, concentrate themselves in the
town so occupied by the troops. Farmers were not allowed
to farm their land, and their homes were often burnt
behind them. The camps were poorly built and most of

(22:39):
the houses had no roofs. No provision was made defeat
or take care of the captives who were being forced
into these walled camps. Whaler had also picked close to
the worst locations possible for the camps, usually low lying
swampy ground that was a perfect breeding area for disease.
Whaler called this the reconcentration policy. He named the camps reconcentrados.

(22:59):
So so that's the start. So that's the start. These
are the first official concentration camps in human history where
it's like the you know, they're known by that name,
and it's the same function. The idea is we're taking
people haven't committed any crime, they're not prisoners of war,
their civilians, and we're forcing them into camps for some
sort of political purpose because they do uprise up well,

(23:23):
and just because also we're worried we know that someone
is supporting the insurgents, and so since we don't know
which individual farms are supporting the insurgents, we're going to
force all of the farmers into these camps. Just so
that there's nobody left. So by one third of all
Cubans had been moved into concentration camps, between two and
four thousand of them would die there. Uh, most accurate

(23:46):
numbers probably three twenty thousand. Here is a picture of
a man looking at a mountain of Cuban bones while
wearing a Victorian era suit. We'll have that up on
the site. It's it's stale. Yeah, that's a real picture
of a mountain of Cuban bones. It looks like Charlie Chaplin. Yeah,
it looks like Charlie Chaplin sitting on a pile of
the size of a house. Um. Yeah, it's it's messed up.

(24:09):
Um yeah, yeah, yeah, he looks great. Yeah, he looks
like he's on his way to Hollywood. Yeah. So this
was a bunch of Americans started visiting these camps, including
like American senators and politicians and like starting an outrage
about it, being like this is really fund up, what's
going on? Yeah, this winds up kind of being later
on one of the reasons we get involved in a

(24:30):
war with Spain, Like the sinking of the main was
a bigger factor. Like outside of Cuba, this battleship of
ours explodes, and we blame it on the Spanish. But
the main is there in the first case, and people
are already angry at the Spanish for what they're doing
in Cuba. Yeah. So one witness to the camps, an
American senator, described them this way. Uh, it is not peace,
nor is it war. It is desolation and distress, misery

(24:53):
and starvation. Every town and village is surrounded by a
trocha trench, a sort of rifle pit, but constructed on
a plan new to me, the dirt being thrown up
on the inside and a barbed wire fence on the
outer side of the trench. These trokas have at every
corner and at frequent intervals along the sides what are
called forts, but what are really small block houses, many
of them more like a large sentry box loophold with

(25:14):
from musketry and with a guarda from two to ten
soldiers each. The purpose of these trokas is to keep
reconcentratos in as well as to keep the insurgents out
from all of the surrounding country. That people have been
driven into these fortified towns and held there to subsist
as they can. They're virtually prison yards and not unlike
one in general appearance, except that the walls are not
so high and strong, but they suffice where every point

(25:35):
is in range of a soldier's rifle to keep in
the poor reconcentrato women and children. So what does that
sound like to you? Sounds like barbed wire fences, guards
on the outside, concentration. Yeah, yeah, it sounds very familiar
with like our modern concept of a concertration camp. Yeah,
which is yeah, this is where it started. So Whyler's

(25:55):
forces in country managed to drive back the insurgents, but
the brutality and death of the camps obviously causing in
a national outcry. Whaler winds up getting recalled to Spain,
and of course, during the Spanish American War, Spain loses
control of Cuba. General Whaler uh wound up living on
though he continued to fight. He fought in a couple
more Spanish civil wars. He had a long career. He
died in nineteen thirty two. One of his last recorded

(26:18):
sentences that he ever spoke is reported by a Time
magazine interview was quote the good Die Young who he
wanted to be? What was it dude from Ghostbusters? Oh, Vigo. Yeah,
he fucking was man like. At least he knew what
he was. Like, can you imagine? Can you imagine being

(26:39):
ninety two? I'm too young ago, So I think he
was saying I'm ninety two because I'm a piece of ship,
like lited a long time as a monster. I thought
he was saying like I'm too young. No, I think
he was saying like, I'm fucking old as dirt because
I'm the worst person who's ever lived. He on his deathbed,

(27:01):
he was, He knew he was. That's that's what happens
when you raised hell all your life. Then you're about
to die and you're like, man, I want to get
into heaven. All right, I'm save now. Probably didn't have
killed four people. Yeah, yeah, that was a strategic misstep.
I look, man, i'mde a mistake, a mistake, you know, God,

(27:21):
if you just pay attention to the last twenty years
and ignoring those skull mountains, I did pretty good. I
did pretty good. Pretty good. But he who has not
built a mountain of bones cast the first bones in hell.
Yeah okay, yeah, So the first reconcentration camps were a
political disaster, but they were a military success. Uh, you know,

(27:42):
he he beat the insurgency almost by the time he
got recalled. So uh yeah, the first concentration camps work
out militarily, not so much politically, but you know that's
the history. So in when the British government found themselves
fighting a brutal war with the Boers in South Africa,
they looked at what Wayler had done in Cuba, and
they looked at the American reservation system and they were like,

(28:07):
what if we give these things to try? Um. So,
the Bower people in South Africa were descendants of the
original Dutch colonizers who first had stolen South Africa from
the actual people who lived there before Dutch people wound
up there. Uh. In eighteen o six, the British Empire
had taken control of a Dutch South African colony, and
the Bowers didn't like this. They fled and formed two
independent nations, the Republic of the trans of All and

(28:28):
the Orange Free State. They called themselves Burgers, which meant
citizens and makes reading about them sound delicious. Um. The
Boers didn't like the British coming in and britishizing their home,
which was understandable. Nobody enjoyed that They also hated the
fact that the British wouldn't let them keep slaves, which
is less understandable. Again, nobody's a good guy when you
go back to these Outba conflicts. Everybody's a piece. And

(28:49):
wait here did we become good? Did we do that?
Eighty's and then we lost it in two thousand sixty.
We had a good though for a couple of y Yeah,
we were really making some strides man. So yeah. The
two Bower republics in the British South African Colony managed

(29:10):
to coexist kind of well until eighteen sixties seven, when
gold and diamond mines were discovered in the Republic of
the Transfall. Winston Churchill, who was at this time a journalist,
felt this discovery made war between the Bowers and the
British inevitable quote sooner or later, in a just cause
or a picked quarrel, for the sake of our empire,
for the sake of the race, we must fight the Bowers.

(29:31):
So war broke out in eight nine, and it went
pretty well at first for the Bowers. They beat back
some British armies and they laid siege to some of
the British hilariously named cities like Lady Smith, which is
this is a great band name. Yeah yeah, well it's
I think they're from South Africa. Lady Smith Black Mambazo.
Oh that is a yeah, that is a band. Yeah yeah, yeah,

(29:53):
what's this? What's that? What's the most popular song that?
I don't know? I know their name because it's amazing. Yeah,
well they got that's what they got. Yeah, they got that.
So listen to the Lady Smith Black Mambazo. I will
be doing that too after the Black Horse, not acessarily
like is that it? I don't know. I don't know
either anyway, hopefully unprepared to joke about Lady Smith, but

(30:16):
it is a fun name for a town. Uh so. Yeah.
The British Empire obviously was the British Empire, and they
eventually beat these two small Boer armies and by nine
hundred the British head conquered all their cities and annexed
all Bower territory. Now, the normal war became a guerrilla
war because the Bowers didn't stop fighting just because they
lost their cities. They became insurgents. The British commander at

(30:37):
this point was a famous guy named Lord Kitchener, who
had replaced a general named Roberts, who had replaced a
general named red Verse Buller because the class was a
silly place. It was under Kitchener's command that the first
Boer concentration camps were established. So Lord Kitchener decided that
camps would be quote the most effective method of limiting
the endurance of the guerrillas, because they're all these little
Boer farms, and were the wives and the kids of

(30:58):
these soldiers fighting the British arming the field lived and
so they would fight the British during the day, and
then you just go home at night and get a
cooked meal and sleep in their bed and then get
back out into the field. So Kitchener ordered that the
women and children should be divided into two categories. One
category would be refugees, which was people that they took
off their farms that the British didn't know had a
relative fighting in the field. And others were the families

(31:20):
of Boer soldiers who were commandos. And his idea was
to treat the families who didn't have soldiers fighting the
British better, but in practice they all get lumped into
the same concentration camps. The Boer camps worked exactly as
well as the Cuban ones, by which I mean they
became stinking diseased helpits where thousands died. There wasn't enough food,
there was no sanitation, and because the British had burnt

(31:41):
all of the farms in South Africa, they couldn't really
afford descend in any food either. So between June of
nineteen o one and May of nineteen o two, some
twenty eight thousand of the hundred and fifteen thousand in
turned people died in the camps. It was about ten
percent of all the Boers. Yeah, twenty two thousand of
them were children. Um, ten percent of like the Bower population,

(32:01):
gets killed in these camps. Uh. There were also separate
concentration camps the British established for black people cut fighting
with the Boers. A two thousand one Guardian article I
used as a source notes about twenty black people also
died in other camps and says nothing else about them.
So I definitely, yeah, why wouldn't. That's clearly they got slavery,

(32:22):
They got enough tap about them. As a general rule,
the deaths of black people in British concentration camps during
the Boer war are treated as an afterthought, Like, so
knowledge of what was happening in the Bower War of
these camps was brought over by like a couple of
British ladies who were like Red Cross volunteers who saw
the camps and went back to England and we're like,
what we're doing is fucked up. But they would always
talk about the concentration camps for the Boers and then

(32:43):
like say, I also hear there's camps for black people,
but I didn't go visit any of them, but they're
probably not nice either. Um you imagine can you imagine
this time where all this terrible ship is going on
and people are still so racist that they don't even
It's amazing because you read about how because the Bower
concentration camps were awful, and then you're like, but it

(33:05):
was even worse for the black people, Like, how could
you make it worse? Yeah, well there's a quote from
the book British Concentration Camps that explains how it could
be made worse. By July nineteen o one, some thirty
eight thousand blacks were being held in special camps, over
thirty thousand of them being women and children, thousands of
black men were taken into the service of the army,
where others were sent to work the gold mines. The

(33:26):
white camps were provided with tents, however leaky and drafty
these may have been. Nothing of the sort was thought
necessary for the blacks, who were expected to build their
own dwellings. So you've got about a hundred and fifteen
thousand bowers in camps, who of whom twenty eight thousand die,
and you've got about thirty eight thousand black people in camps,
about twenty thousand of whom die on the upside. Eventually,

(33:48):
word of the nightmarish conditions in the concentration camps did
escape South Africa and caused a wave of condemnation. The
British put a guy named Lord Milner in charge of
cleaning it up and trying to save the people who'd
been put into cam amps. His notes about this period
of time wound up getting found just a couple of
years ago, and they give you a real insight into
like the British imperial mentality over their own war crimes.

(34:11):
I'm going to read this in a British voice, okay,
so that'll make it more fun. It is impossible not
to see, however blameless we may be in the matter,
we shall not be able to make anybody think so.
And I cannot avoid an uncomfortable feeling that there must
be some way to make the thing a little less
awfully bad, if one could only think of it. All right,
I just love the idea, like, there must be some

(34:32):
way to make this a little less bad, if we
can only think of it. Don't put people in camps,
don't put bad concentration. That's the way. Don't burn their farms. Yeah,
it's very simple, actually, yeah, like people yeah uh, he
noted that, you know, when he first got there in
like nineteen o two, they'd hope that like all the
weak kids had died first, so people would stop dying.

(34:52):
But they didn't stop dying. And yeah, anyway, So the
board concentration camps were horrible pr just as General Whaler's
camps and Cube had been, but they were effective from
a military standpoint. The British beat the Boers. This led
the idea of concentration camps to spread like wildfire across
the empires of the twentieth century. So in nineteen fifteen
and sixteen, during World War One, the Ottoman Turks got

(35:14):
up to a little bit of genocide against the Armenians.
They killed probably around a one point five to two
million of them in total. The Turkish government still claims
this didn't happen. The US does not officially recognize it
as a genocide because we need our military bases in Turkey.
But it definitely happened. There's one point one point five millions, yeah,

(35:36):
something like that. Generally, one point five is sort of
the accepted middle ground. It might have been higher, it
might have been at lower, but some somewhere around a
million and a half people um, and there was a
mix of ways. A lot of them were killed through
mass executions, a lot of them were killed through starving,
in forced marches. Most of them died in what was
essentially a reverse trail of tears Suman with a trail
of tears. They started in a concentration camp and they

(35:57):
got marched to a reservation, and most people died during
the march. Um They flipped that, so they marched people
down to a desert around a town called deer Azor,
and most of the people died marching towards the desert.
Like something like a million people died on the March
just from executions. They weren't given food, they weren't given water.
It's like the Syrian desert. And then when they arrived

(36:20):
at de Arezor they were put into a gigantic open
air concentration camp near the town. Uh. They were forbidden
food or water and had to bribe their guards to
get anything. Uh. Roughly four thousand people died in this
open air concentration camp. It was so many people died
that a visitor to the area in two thousand two
noted I was shown a piece of land that keeps subsiding.

(36:40):
It is called the place of the Armenians. So many
thousands of bodies were buried there that the ground has
been sinking for the last eighty years. Human thigh bones
and ribs come to the surface. Um. Yeah, it's bad,
real bad. A monument. This is our world. Yeah, this
is the birth of the modern world. This is about
a century ago. Um, and uh, very important for what

(37:03):
comes next, because people were paying again, like the figures
of the twentieth century, we're paying attention to all of this.
They were paying attention to America's policy with the Native Americans.
They paid attention to Cuba, to the Boer War and
to what happened with the Armenians. Um. So a monument
was built for the Armenian genocide and diraz or isis
destroyed in two thousand and fourteen. Um. Hopefully it will
be rebuilt at some point um. The main architect of

(37:25):
the Armenian genocide was a guy named Talat Pasha. He
was one of the young Turks who had risen to
power in Turkey during the nineteen thirteen Kup. After World
War One, he fled to Germany to escape prosecution for
his war crimes. He was shot dead in Berlin and
nineteen twenty one by Sgoman, Tillirian and Armenian, who lost
his extended family in the genocide. Sogoman's trial brought knowledge
of Turkish war crimes and German complicity in them into

(37:46):
the public eye. He was acquitted the German courts at
the time we're like, well, of course you shot that guy.
He fucking he was terrible, and he was like carried
out of the courtroom on people's shoulders. Which is the
only happy story we're gonna have on the podcast today.
Savor this for he's a jolly good fellow. So if
you want you can kind of view, and I think

(38:08):
it's often interesting to look at ideas as sort of
like a virus, because you can kind of trace their
spread around empire stare at history. And if you view
the idea of concentration camps as a virus, you can
watch it spreading, you know, from the germs of the
idea to Cuba and then to the Bowers and then
to the Armenian genocide and then tell it. Pasha brings
it to Germany in the nineteen twenties just for World

(38:31):
War Two. So you know what goes great with podcast
about sad things? Uh? What? Happy things? Like the wonderful
people who support this show. Oh yeah, let's listen. All right,
we are back and we are talking about concentration camps.

(38:54):
Trying to think of a cute name for that, but uh,
focus camps, focus camps, even worse, imagination imagination camps. That's
actually scarily close to it. We're actually calling the ones
that we built for those kids tender age camps. Yeah well,
uh yeah, really we probably don't have the flower. We'll

(39:16):
get there eventually. We're in ninety one minute. So, as
I just said, the guy who orchestrated the mass open
air concentration camp in the desert that killed all the
Armenians gets shot in Berlin in nine uh and the
virus is passed on to the next nation that will
lose it. I'm not going to go into an in
depth history of Nazi concentration camps here. I'm going to

(39:37):
hope most of you know that. If not, it really
deserves its own focus thing. But I will read a
couple of quotes that point out just how because I
think one of the mistakes that a lot of education
on concentration camps makes is that it over emphasizes how
exceptional they are historically, which is important to due to
some extent because no one has ever killed so many

(39:58):
people so quickly as the Germans did in as camps.
But they're part of an intellectual tradition that we've been
tracing throughout the length of this podcast, and it's important
to understand that at the time, the Germans justified what
they were doing to themselves into the world by the
fact that all of their enemies in these conflicts had
also done it exactly. It's almost like, well, you can't

(40:20):
tell me I can't do it, only you get to
have concentration. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So here's a quote from
Adolf Hitler, The Definitive Biography by Pulitzer Prize winner John Totland,
which is a fantastic book if you're wanting to read
about Hitler. Um quote. Hitler's concept of concentration camps, as
well as the practicality of genocide, owed much so, he

(40:41):
claimed to his studies of English and United States history.
He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa
and for the Indians in the Wild West, and often
praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination
by starvation and uneven combat of the Red savages who
could not be tamed by captivity. So the German guff
written the pre war years would generally use the Boer

(41:02):
Wars camps as an excuse for their own camps. Here
is a quote from the book British Concentration Camps. In
February nineteen thirty nine, for example, Sir Nevil Henderson, British
Ambassador to Germany, had a meeting with Herman Gerring. In
the course of their encounter in Berlin, Henderson denounced the
loathsome and detestable brutalities taking place in the concentration camps
such as Dachau and Buchenwald. For answer, Garring went to

(41:24):
a bookshelf and took down the volume of a German
encyclopedia covering the letter K, and showed the ambassador the
entry for Concentrachenslager, which began first used by the British
in the South African War. Throughout the nineteen thirties, Minister
for Propaganda Joseph Goebbels had also fostered the notion that
concentration camps were British invention. Postcards purporting to show the

(41:46):
grim conditions of the camps run by the British during
the Boer Wars were circulated. A film om Paul was
subsidized by the German government. This historical drama about the
Boer War suggested that the British army had devised and
operated the first concentration camps, which we know wasn't entirely true.
The Cubans had, but this is how the Germans are
justifying them. Yes, war and with the Americans did it. Yeah,

(42:08):
everyone else has done it. Hitler is also known to
have stated during his run up to the invasion of Poland,
when they were talking about getting rid of the Polish Jews,
and people brought up like this is going to cause
it an international outcry. A sentence he famously is credited
to have said, is who now speaks today of the Armenians?
So say that the who now speaks to the day
of the Armenians. So people were like, what if we

(42:28):
try to get rid of all the Jews in Poland,
people are gonna be angry at us. And Hitler was like,
why do you think anyone's gonna get piste off. Do
you hear anyone yelling about the Armenians. Nobody. Nobody's angry
at Turkey for what they did. Nobody won't care about
that until to exist in seventeen when they have their
parade in Los Angeles, like yeah, so sad, yeah, and
it causes international outrage, which like you can't you Still

(42:50):
to this day it's very difficult to film a documentary
about the Armenian genocide. There was a famous book that
came out, I think of the thirties or forties about
there's this one group of Armenians who like hold up
on top of a mountain and fought off the Ottoman
Army until like a French warship rescued them, and it
is this crazy story that people have tried to make
into a movie a couple of times, and every time

(43:11):
the Turkish government will come in and say, like, we
won't take any movies from America period. No one will
be able to run movies in our country. No Hollywood
studio if you make this movie. Yeah, so it's amazing,
how cowardly. Yeah we all uh yeah, yeah, I mean
even Barack Obama, before he was elected president, talked about

(43:31):
the Armenian genocide and acknowledge it as a genocide. And
then as president he continued the U S line of
denying it ever happened, not denying it ever happened. But
we won't call it a genocide because we need those bases,
because we can't bomb the Middle East without our basis
and Insertla, which is where we have our bases in Turkey.
So from the Hitler point of view, I think it's
important just to understand while the German concentration camps, and

(43:54):
particularly the deaf camps, because they weren't all they weren't
all the same kind of thing. They were different types
of camps. Because people died in all of the camps
but some of the camps, their purpose was not to
kill people. People just died there because the Germans didn't
give him a ship. And then like Auschwitz had concentration
camps in it where people the point wasn't execution. The
point was a labor camp. It also had extermination camps

(44:16):
in it, but it was a gigantic facility. This is
the when I because you, like you said, people know
about that, but I was one of the people who
lumped it all in and I'm just thinking, oh, it's
just a place where they killed a whole bunch of people.
And the movie that made me actually challenge that was
X Men The Last or the First Class. In the
beginning of the movie, when Magnetos's mom got taken away

(44:39):
from him and they were supposed to be in concentration camps,
We're not mistaken. I was like, they all don't look
like they're there to die, uh and you know, and
but they were taken her away to go to the
death camp. Yea, to the death camp. And so that
made me look into it, like, oh wow, there were
multiple camps. Well that's good. So thank you x men. Yeah,

(45:00):
thank you x Men for helping to spread some good
history there, I guess, yeah, that's that's what made me
look into it. Yeah, And it's important to understand like
it is important because I used to before I dropped
out of school. The last two years was spent on
like Holocaust studies, Like that was the thing that I
did in college. And it's very important, particularly to Jewish
scholars of the Holocaust, to emphasize how unique the Holocaust

(45:23):
Wasn't that is important because nothing quite like it has
ever happened. But it's also I think important to understand
that it's the middle of a long intellectual tradition. Like
the Germans were pointing to other examples in history when
they carried out they got it from somewhere. They didn't
come out of nowhere. Um, And I think that's important.
They looked at it was like we'll make it bigger. Yeah, yeah. Um.

(45:49):
It's also important to understand that the Germans were not
the only people using concentration camps in World War Two.
The Japaneese internment camps in America were a type of
concentration to Wright in Griffith Park right in Griffith Park. Um.
They were not as brutal, obviously as the Nazi camps.
But eighteen hundred and sixty two people are known to
have died in our Japanese concentration camps. UH some of
them from disease, some more old people from heart attacks,

(46:11):
but some people were shot by American soldiers. UM we
tend to use the intern internment camp now, and that
appears to be the result of a successful propaganda campaign
to separate what we did to the Japanese Americans from
what the Nazis did to Jewish Germans. At the time,
though that the camps were proposed, FDR used the term
concentration camp to describe what we were doing in In
nineteen forty six, Harold Ike, former Secretary of the Interior,

(46:33):
said this, As a member of President Roosevelt administration, I
saw the United States Army give way to mass hysteria
over the Japanese crowded into cars like cattle. These hapless
people were hurried away to hastily constructed and thoroughly inadequate
concentration camps with soldiers with nervous muskets on guard in
the Great American Desert. We gave the fancy name of
relocation centers to these dust bols, but they were concentration camps. Nonetheless,

(46:56):
this was not America's last flirtation with concentration camps. And no,
I'm not talking about the camps we've built for immigrant
children in the desert. We're not even there yet. The
USA actually tried out the whole concentration camp idea again
before that point. In nineteen sixty one and sixty two,
the US government began to execute what was called the
Strategic Hamlet program in Vietnam, which sounds nice like hamlet. Hamlet.

(47:19):
That's a cute word. Hamlets. Yeah, STRATEGI king, Yeah, it's cute.
The basic idea was to fortify certain towns, to wall
them off, and to make them defensible in order to
isolate communist guerrillas from local support. Locals who lived outside
these towns would be relocated inside the walls. Does that

(47:39):
sound familiar at all? Sounds like something Cuba was getting
up to. Um exactly, yeah, exactly. It was not as
that bad, but it was pretty awful. Large numbers of
peasants were forced from their homes. Many watched as their
houses were burnt behind them. Some peasants were executed by
South Vietnamese forces, although we have no death toll for
this program, as we do for the other camps. Here

(47:59):
is quote from a US military report on one of
these strahugic hamlets. Unfortunately, the government was able to talk
only seventy families into relocating into the new hamlet. Another
hundred and thirty five families were forced out of their
homes and into the new settlement. Some came with meager belongings.
Many had only the clothes on their backs. Their old
homes were burned behind them to preclude their sneaking back. Uh,

(48:21):
it didn't work. I don't know, this might be a
spoiler alert, but Vietnam did not end well for US
or South Vietnam, and this was a big factor. So
number one, it convinced a lot of Vietnamese people to
join the viet Cong because we just can burnt my
house down like I don't I don't like you. Um.
And it was also like what started the escalation in

(48:43):
the fighting because the nineteen sixty one, when the Strategic
Hamlet program started, the North Vietnamese wouldn't attack American military
basis um. They were considered no go zones because they
didn't want to escalate ship with US a large military.
We're terrifying Uh, they awaited attacking Americans for the most part,
but that ended in nineteen sixty five after a few
years of this policy. Um. Now, that Defense Department report

(49:07):
that I read stated the inspiration for the Strategic Hamlet
program came largely from the British responses to the Malayan emergency. Uh,
from nineteen forty eight to nineteen sixty Have you ever
heard of the Malayan Emergency? You've heard of the British
colony in Malaya? I have that. Yeah. I hadn't even
heard of that when I started this. So you're you're
ahead of me in that in school? Okay, Yeah, well

(49:28):
you're good school because I didn't even know they'd fucking
been in in what's modern day Malaysia at that point. So, UM,
the Malayan Emergency is interesting because it might be the
one case, it's the only case I've read about where
concentration camps actually worked out really well for everybody, including
the people inside of them. It's a weird case study,
but it's important to cover. So Malaya was a British colony.

(49:49):
Bad economic programs brought on by bad British policies post
World War Two led to a communist up rising. UH.
It's called the Malayan Emergency and not the Malayan Civil War. Uh,
due to lobbying from British business owners in Malaya because
their insurance wouldn't cover war. So that's why it's the
Malayan emergency because like, yeah, which is wacky. Um So

(50:13):
the British called the people fighting them communists terrorists. Uh.
There were groups of Chinese people living in Malaya who
had been trained and armed by the British and World
War two to fight the Japanese um and who then
turned their guns on the British when you know World
War two ended, which just doesn't sound like anything that's
ever happened again, Yeah, that was the last time Western

(50:34):
power would have that happened to them. Um. So the
emergency kicked off when a group of communists executed three
British farmers. This prompted the colonial government to suspend all
civil liberties and arrest suspects for up to two years
prior to charging them. Despite their harsh methods, the emergency
did not go great for the British at first. Their
main opponent was a guy named Chin Peng, who was
a twenty six year old bicycle shop owner and apparently

(50:55):
bicycle shop. Owning and running an insurgency are two trains,
and yeah, worked really well together. You can qualify, you
can fix a tire, you can bomb a military convoy
um and then get away on your bikey. So for
a while the Chinese insurgents were winning, but in nineteen fifty,
Lieutenant General Harold Briggs came up with a plan to

(51:16):
eliminate the insurgency. So the communist forces during this emergency
were largely Chinese, and they received most of their support
from ethnic Chinese squatters who lived in slums outside the
main Malayan cities. Now, these people, the squatters, had no
title to their land, so they didn't own anything, and
they had no sense of investment in the cities around
them or in Malaya as a as a community because

(51:37):
they were just considered squatters. So Briggs's plan was to
build Walden fortified villages and move some four thousand squatters
into them. Based on everything I've talked about today, you
might have expected to end in disaster, but it didn't.
The camps they built were like large, they were made
out of concrete, They had electricity, clean drinking water, schools
and clinics, and the British government gave the people brought

(51:59):
their title to the land. So it made all four
thousands these people landowners. Uh and it worked. So yeah,
so it's only it's only that by name, man, I
mean it's a concentration camp. It is the same thing.
But it's the most humane execution. Yeah, and many people
did did you say that? Did I miss that? There

(52:20):
were definitely some people who died, but there's no like
there's no evidence of like large scale starvation and disease.
But yeah, like the British did execute people in the
course of the war. I'm not going to claim that
like they were blameless in this. There was at least
one case where they kill like twenty something civilians. But
it's compared to everything else on this list, it's by
far the most humane execution of the plan. Um. Yeah,

(52:43):
and it it did. A lot of Malayans were made
angry because they didn't like the Chinese squatters or whatever.
But the insurgency eventually stopped, and a lot of the
people who were put into these what were called new
villages seemed to think it was a positive step because
now they owned land and they had electricity and clean
water and stuff. Um. So if the British got concentration
camps right in Malaya. If that is fair to say,

(53:05):
it's probably because they had more practice than any other
people on the planet at running concentration camps. Um. You've
heard the expression that if you've got a hammer, everything
looks like a nail. Well, if you've got the British Empire,
every problem looks like it needs a concentration can't built
around it. Um. The British used concentration camps, like I said,
more than anyone else, probably in history, more than I

(53:27):
had ever heard before I started researching this. Um, you
don't even that's not something that you even fathom. You
don't connect your concentration camp. You think Germans for sure,
And you know what I mean. Yeah, some people know
about the ones that popped up in other countries and
thing lack. I know about the one here in America.
I heard about one in Spain, but not to the

(53:48):
scale that this was, you know, like the World Cup,
and it just happened every four years or some ship.
The British put them everywhere, including on their own soil.
So during World War One, the British built concentration camps
for German citizens who had been captured on boats or
who had just happened to be in England when the
war started. Many of these people were forced to labor

(54:10):
in British fields. The book British Concentration Camps points to
an article in The Guardian from December fourth, nineteen fourteen,
titled disorder at Lancaster Concentration Camp. Here's a quote from
the book. The disorder at Lancaster Concentration Camp was dealt
with by a bayonet charge against unarmed civilians. On nineteenth
November that same year, protested another concentration camp on the
Isle of Man resulted in troops firing volleys of shots

(54:33):
at the inmates, killing six of them. Among the dead
were two men who had until three months earlier been
working as waiters and hotels. Later in the war, the
British established the Frogoch concentration camp and an abandoned factory.
More than two thousand irishmen were held there. In nineteen forty,
with fears of a German invasion stoking panic, Winston Churchill
had every German and Austrian in the country arrested and

(54:54):
sent to concentration camps. Here's another quote from that book.
To those who reminded him that many of these people
were Jewish refugees. He responded briefly and memorably, caller the lot.
Of course, no one wanted to call these new institutions
concentration camps, so they renamed them internment camps to differentiate
them from the Nazis practice. So the British were keeping

(55:15):
concentration camps that included Jewish refugees on British soil and
forcing them to labor in British fields the entirety of
World War Two. There were also Polish concentration camps that
existed in Poland prior to the German invasion, and when
the Germans conquered Poland, a bunch of Polish soldiers, like
twenty thousand of them in the Polish government were exiled

(55:36):
to the United Kingdom. The UK gave them a bunch
of land in Scotland, which was essentially treated as sovereign
territory for the government exile, and the Poles built concentration
camps in Scotland the house political dissidents, including Jewish political dissidents. Yeah,
multiple Jewish prisoners were executed in Polish concentration camps in
Scotland during World War two, more than three thousand people

(56:00):
were imprisoned and forced to farm in England up until nine.
While Nazi concentration camp guards were on trial in Nuremberg,
the British were using forced civilian labor housed in concentration
camps to harvest their crops. This modern day slavery, Monday slavery.
And I could go on there just we may do

(56:24):
a whole podcast someday on just British concentration camps. That
the champions of the world. Yeah, they are the World
Cup winners of putting people in camps, lord man. Yeah,
And there are hundreds of examples from other countries. I
didn't even get into the French regroupment camps in Algeria,
into which more than a million Muslim villagers were forced
to move. There were Spanish concentration camps in the Canary Islands.

(56:48):
The twentieth century was the century of concentration camps. And
now it looks like the one might wind up being
one too. Yeah. That's that's the sad part is you know.
So here here's the thing that's crazy to me, especially
a lot of the stuff we were talking about earlier,

(57:08):
where you have where you know, a lot of these
generals and a lot of these people by name, like
General Whaler, they were just here, not heroes, but they
were like champions of what they did right. And how
that's kind of changed today, Like you don't know a
single person's name when they're fighting, and you don't know
one person's name from the Iraqi War or something like that.

(57:31):
Maybe you do, but nothing like a General Whaler who
was on the battlefield fighting and ship like that. And
it's just so much more diffuse now. Like you'll notice
that when it started out, when we start talking about
the reservations, their individual people like Andrew Jackson can talk
about the role they played. We can talk about General Whaler,
we can talk about Tolt Pasha. But the more camps
there are that we stopped hearing names just because it's

(57:53):
just any one guy's idea way of culture. It's what
you do exactly culture. It's part of Western culture is
putting people into camps. And that's the sad part. Yeah,
except now is becoming a name again. Yeah, and now
we have some concentration camps in South Texas. Uh. These
camps did not start as part of a war, but
they did come out about as an attempted solution to

(58:15):
a real problem. Some of this may be familiar to
you've been keeping up with the news, but may have
two thousand twelve, less than a thousand people traveling as
families were caught by border patrol, right they may have
two thousand fourteen. That number had increased to twelve th
eight hundred. Uh. The numbers have subsided since then, less
than I think ten thousand last year. But it's still
a big issue. And this is not something that we've

(58:35):
ever like illegal immigration has been a thing that has
happened or forever. Families coming as groups is a new thing,
and you know they're largely coming because of political instability.
You could call them refugees, although we call them asylum seekers.
There's whether or not someone's an asylum seeker refugee depends
on the country of origin. Like it's like a legal
term um. The Obama administration tried holding entire families their

(59:00):
cases were pending, but that's illegal because of a court
case I think from which says that you can't hold
children in immigration attention. You have to release them to
the least restricted means available. The Obama administration did not
want to be seen as cutting families apart, so they
often would just release people. UH. This became politicized and
talked about by Republicans as quote unquote catch and release policy,

(59:20):
and the Trump administration did not want to continue catch
and release policy. The result was that between October one,
two thousand seventeen, and two thousand eighteen, hundred children at
least were separated from their parents. That's roughly an average
of forty five per day. UH. These children were put
in the least restrictive surroundings available to the government in
many cases that wound up being tender aid shelters, which

(59:42):
you've seen on the news and maybe heard the audio of.
H First Lady Laura Bush compared these shelters to the
internment camps for Japanese Americans in World War Two. They are, however,
concentration camps, as where the internment camps the people in
them have committed no crimes and are not prisoners of war.
The Los Angeles Times described one of these facilities on
as Ursula. The kids inside it called La Pereira or

(01:00:02):
dog Kennel, as clean and spare, with bear concrete floors.
The facilities cleaned three times daily in order to avoid
the concentration camp becoming the disease written kind of hellhole
that most concentration kimes in history have become. Um. A
Democratic congressman who visited the site said it was nothing
sort of a prison. Jacob Suberov, journalist who visited, stated,
I was inside the building and there are babies sitting

(01:00:24):
by themselves in a cage with other babies. That's inhumane. Yeah,
it's it's inhumane, And I think, yeah, and I think
what people who are not outraged by this, uh, their
idea is probably what we were saying earlier, how they
think concentration camp only means yeah, death, death camp and

(01:00:45):
putting people in oven and we're clearly not doing that,
and we're clearly not doing that. But you get you
get human beings and kate children. You're ripping them from
their families. They're sleeping on concrete like they're not prisoners
in there being treated yet worse than prisoner they have committed,
not worse crime. Yeah. So, I mean one of the

(01:01:05):
things that is emphasized constantly by the government personnel who
are taking care of these places when journalists will go
on tours of them so far, is how clean they are,
how often they're cleaned, that their medical personnel and whatnot,
and that is true. Like, I can't imagine there's not
gonna be a typhoid outbreaking one of these places. It's
not gonna be tuberculosis. But one thing that is consistent

(01:01:25):
among all the concentration camps pretty much that we've covered today,
is that they are breeding grounds for disease. And while
these camps that we're building in Texas, that we put
these kids in, they're not going to be breeding grounds
for physical diseases, there's a lot of evidence that they
will be breeding grounds for mental and emotional diseases. So
you're fucking these people, Yes, you are irrevocably messing these

(01:01:49):
children's minds. Shane O'Mara is a neuroscientist in Dublin. He's
conducted studies on how things like torture affect the human brain.
I interviewed him once back in the day for an
article I was writing, and I follow him on Twitter. Now,
when the stories about these child concentration camps broke, he
posted a thread summarizing all of the research into how
separating young children from their parents and putting them in
institutions damages kids. I'll have a link to the Twitter

(01:02:11):
threat on our website. He cites a lot of different sources.
I'm only going to talk about one of those right now,
which it was a Scientific American article about the largest
study ever performed on a group of institutionalized children who
had been separated from their parents. Um. This came from
back in night the late nineteen sixties. The Romanian dictator
Nikolai Chachesku decided his country and needed more of what
he called human capital, which is people. UM. So he

(01:02:35):
banned birth control and abortion and created a celibacy tax
for families with less than five children. Government minstrel police
examined women to make sure they were putting out enough babies.
It was a huge success in terms of the amount
of babies increased in Romania, but Romanians didn't have enough
money to support their multiple football teams worth of children.
So by nineteen eighty nine, more than a hundred and
seventy thousand kids had been handed over to government institutions

(01:02:57):
and separated by their parents. Uh. This is terrible, but
studying those children provided researchers an opportunity to learn what's
separating kids from their families and putting them in an
institution does to developing minds. I'm going to quote from
a Harvard summary of the actual study. The study found
that institutionalized children were severely impaired in i Q and
manifested a variety of social and emotional disorders, as well

(01:03:19):
as changes in brain development. However, the earlier and institutionalized
child was placed into foster care, the better the recovery. Now,
the presidents recently promised to put an into his policy
of separating families. It's a known how this is going
to work, since there's a bunch of problems with the
idea of keeping whole families in detention. That's what the
Obama administration ran into. Uh so we don't really know
what's going to happen. Um, hopefully no more kids will

(01:03:40):
be separated from their families, but there's also the case
of the children who have been We don't know how
many of those are going to be put back in
touch with their families. When he signed that law, yeah,
everybody got it excited, but it was not too It
doesn't solve children, and in most cases it really wasn't
for anything. Yeah, and it's it's uh, I mean, the

(01:04:02):
broader problem is that we continue to have like none
of these people that were putting in camps, because we're
putting adults in detention centers too, and the adults are
not criminals, they're asylum seekers. There are people who are
fleeing war, and in a lot of cases, like the
people coming from Guatemala and El Salvador, those are civil
wars that exist in part because the United States funded

(01:04:22):
and supported the civil war beginning. Uh, there's a genocide
that's been going on off and on in Guatemala for
decades that we funded and supported, and we executed the
president who led to the creation of the civil war
because we killed that guy, and like that's a big
part of this history. So like there's whether or not
the kids continue to be kept in separate camps. We

(01:04:44):
will continue to be putting families in concentration camps um.
And I think it's worth noting that very rarely in
my research did I come across a case where concentration
camps were used by a country who won the conflict
that those camps were built in order to establish. The
British Malayan camps worked out all right, but the British
lost control of Malaya and they lost the rest of

(01:05:05):
their empire. The Spanish lost Cuba, the Germans lost everything. Uh.
Concentration camps achieved their short, short term goals. They rarely
work out in the long run, with the exception of
the United States. Wow. So yeah, I mean maybe that
that that beacon on the hill. We're number one, yea

(01:05:26):
or number one? Is I'm putting people in camps and
getting away with it. Yeah, that's what power does, man,
That's what the power and money and having a big
as military toes well in an ocean in between you
and everybody else except for like Canada. Yeah, yeah, I
mean this is I mean, this is depressing. Uh no joking,

(01:05:53):
it's depressing, man, because you know, I think this is
something that a lot of people our age or in
our generation, we've we've put this out of our history.
Uh not out of our history, but it's not something
that we think about. We only hear about one kind
of concentration camp, and that's Germany. That's toxic Germany. It's

(01:06:15):
isolated in time. There were four bad years and then
it didn't happen again or before, and it's you know,
it's a little sad that people don't know that has
happened before. And to hear that it's still happening because
you think we've gotten better. Yeah, we haven't. And I mean,
I get it. You obviously nothing that anyone has done

(01:06:36):
since has been as bad as the Nazi death camps.
But that's a low bar to say, because we're not
exterminating people. It's a very low bar. Yeah, man, I don't,
I don't. I don't understand, you know, I I access
question before our people inherently good? Are they inherently bad?

(01:06:58):
And you hear ship like this, and you're just like,
I mean, I think the answer is people aren't inherently
good or inherently bad. People are inherently the products of
their culture. And if your culture is one that allows,
for example, slavery, then people who today might be good
people would think slavery is fine because they grew up

(01:07:19):
in eighteen forties America. And most people you know who
lived in America in the eighteen forties weren't abolitionists. Um
or how we redefine what these things mean? Yeah, these
things don't go away. Slavery hasn't gone away. Yeah, we're
not in change and being whipped and sold and you
know all that ship, but uh, there are people out

(01:07:40):
there still trying to figure out ways to keep people
enslaved in different ways, more palatable ways, more palatable ways.
It's like, we have them work in prisons as opposed
to plantations, and that's not gross to people. Because they
did something, we could say they did a thing, they
did a bad thing, just like, well, it's not wrong

(01:08:01):
that we're putting these asylum seekers in camps because they
broke the law imaginary border, which is like, well, I
mean if you were holding a Jewish family in Amsterdam
in nineteen forty three and hiding them from the Germans,
you were breaking the law. Breaking the law is more
often a right thing than a wrong thing historically, like

(01:08:23):
or at least it's fifty fifty. I mean, you know,
I said this on Culture Kings. I think we could well,
I don't know when this is going to drop, but
I said this on one episode. Um that without ethics,
laws mean nothing because just because it's a law fifty
sixty years ago, it was against the law for me
to date my girlfriend. You know, it was against Jesus law.

(01:08:47):
But you know that I don't want to hear these
laws bullshit because without ethics, laws mean nothing and that's
something I try to remember, like you say, fifty sixty
years ago. And the way I like to think about
it is I walked past someone on the street today
who can remember when it would have been illegal for
you today. Your like that, Yeah, I mean like, yeah,

(01:09:09):
are are there many survivors still left? Not many, there's
a few, But people don't understand the connection is still there.
Even if my grandmother doesn't remember slavery, for instance, somebody
very close to her immediate family does. Yeah, they're passed away,
but that connection is still there. Her mom had a

(01:09:29):
mom who was a slavey, or somebody who was in
those death camps, had somebody connected to their generation or
connected to their family who was in there. And the
fact that we don't learn from that ship and we
don't try to change, and we aren't uproaris we should

(01:09:50):
like that. I don't even I can't even really put
it into words, how saiding it is. And I think
there's a mistake. I think when people fight against this stuff,
which any kind of thing you're trying to do to
fight against this fucking policy border is good, but I
think people focus too much on changing the laws, which
it doesn't. It's the culture that has and it's that's
why I think the people who are doing stuff like

(01:10:12):
up in Portland blockading the ICE headquarters and stopping the
ICE employees from leaving at night to see their families,
or chasing down the Department of Health and Human Services
secretary at a Mexican restaurant, or finding Stephen Miller when
he's eating and like screaming at them and calling them
like that almost does more good than fighting. Like, obviously

(01:10:33):
it's important to fight in the courts and stuff, but
making it clear that as a culture we're not fucking
cool with this, that's the most important thing. Because everything
spawns from the culture. And when we elected Trump, it
was assigned to certain elements within our culture that things
are going to roll back. And if we don't want
things to roll back to fifty sixty years ago, like

(01:10:55):
we have to fucking like it starts with shame and
screaming and being really angry. Yeah, yeah, Do you know
in your research, did you ever see if there was
have there ever been any more concentration camps in Germany? Um,
not that I'm aware. I mean, well, okay, so there
were camps operated by the Soviet Union in parts of Germany,

(01:11:17):
like Saxenhausen, which is a camp outside of Berlin that
was a concentration camp for primarily Jewish people and political
prisoners in some POWs during World War Two that the
Nazis operated. When the Russians liberated it, they just filled
it up with their prisoners. Um, and I didn't. I
didn't talk about the Russian gulags, which you could you
might argue, should be on a concentration camp podcast. The

(01:11:39):
people who were put in the gulags had all been
convicted of a crime, and those crimes were usually bullshit,
because the Soviet Union was just throwing everybody who they
defined as an enemy out of the camps. But it
was different than just we're going to lock up all
these women and children who have actually who have not.
We're not even saying they've committed a crime. We just
need to put them in a camp. Which is why
I've separated the two. Which is not to say we

(01:12:00):
won't cover goologs at some point, But yeah, there there
were camps that you could call a concentration camp that
we're in Germany post towards not really deaf camps though,
nothing to that extreme. And you don't hear about them much. Yeah,
and it's I mean, there's not as much because like
we're only starting to understand in the last ten or
fifteen years getting a good idea of how the Goologs

(01:12:21):
and Russia really worked, because you know, it's very recently
that those archives got open to the world. So yeah,
here's the thing. I, as a black man, can't say
there's something changing, and I can feel it because people
have been asking for this change for decades, you know,

(01:12:41):
the change and the way people think and how you
treat people and stuff like that. What I can say
is the generation we're in where everything is loud and
visible is helping. Yeah, because people have an outlet too
instantly tell you how they feel about something, and they

(01:13:05):
have an outlet to instantly show you what's wrong. And
even though we live in like a twenty four hour
news cycle, I do think that the fact that things
are just so in our face and so instant, and
we see them coming back to back to back to back,
that something hopefully will change to the point that are

(01:13:26):
hopefully our kids and their kids I don't have to
deal with this ship like anymore. I think that there's
there's a different story running through you know the podcast
they just delivered the story of the concentration camp. There
is a more uplifting story, which is the story of
you look back at when we were putting Indians on
reservations in marching and and exit and carrying out, you know,

(01:13:46):
genocidal acts. There wasn't it wasn't a single genocide against
the Native Americans. There was a bunch of different genocidal
acts against specific tribes. But you listen to how Andrew
Jackson talked about them, and he didn't talk about them
like they were human beings. And I don't think you
go back to the eighteen hundreds, the early eighteen hundreds
and you go to a person in England or a
person in France, and you say like, hey, this guy

(01:14:07):
over in China, this guy over in Africa, this guy,
are they all human beings? Most people would say no.
Most people would say they're different, They're not the same,
They're not as human as I am, right, And that's
why you can justify stuff like slavery and stuff like
the slaughter and the congo. But throughout this story where
you've got all these concentration camps, you also have people
getting outraged about them, and that growing. You know, it

(01:14:28):
starts with the outrage against Cuba, and then they're outrage
at the boers, and then it hits a fucking fever
pitch at the outrage over the German concentration camps, which
is why everyone starts finding new names for these things
after that, and why they stopped killing so many people
in them. Um. And so the uplifting story in this
dark story of concentration camps is that now we're at
a point where you go anywhere in the world. You

(01:14:49):
go to China, you go to the British England, you
go to Zaire, whatever, you talk to an average person
on the street and you say, hey, this guy half
a world awaite, is he a human being the same
as you? Now, I think most people say yeah, yeah,
And that's like, yeah, that's the uplifting part. And I
think that's kind of what I was trying to allude to,
is there's been outrage yeah before, it's just our outrage

(01:15:12):
is growing because we can connect our outrage to somebody
across the world almost instantly. Yeah. Um, So we don't
need to just be in the same room to say, hey,
are you outraged? Yeah, I'm outraged too. Now we can see,
oh man, there are people all around this world who
are outraged about this. We're gonna do something about it. Uh.

(01:15:32):
And we're emboldened to do something about it. Unfortunately, the
other side is also emboldened. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, and that's yeah.
But let's end on the uplifting note of be emboldened.
Do something about it. Go join a protest, your local
ICE headquarters, do something. Yeah, don't listen. This is a

(01:15:53):
This is a great service that you have done with
just bringing a lot of this stuff to light, because
I know there's going to be a lot of people
who listen to this right now who're like, damn, I
didn't know. I didn't know that. I didn't know the
British that we're putting people in camps while they were
fighting the Germans. Yeah, and and and they won't look
at this as just a senior moment in history, but

(01:16:13):
instead a part of our culture. Yeah, and realize that
this is a part of our culture that needs to change. Yeah.
So this is the first step. If you don't know
about this, this is the first step. Now you know,
I'll do something, Yeah, do something about it? All right. Yeah,
that's a good note. Uh, you want to plug your

(01:16:34):
uh plug my plug doubles. Oh man, that sounds bad. Yeah,
uh yeah, yeah yeah. I mean look Culture Kings me
Edgar who's also been on your pod. Uh, we co
hosted right here on the House Stuff Works Network. Uh,
listen to it. We're we're not as smart, but we'll

(01:16:58):
make you laugh. I'm not I just I just steal
quotes from smart people's books. Hey man, we're not even
smart enough to do that. We get a lot of
shit wrong. But yeah, listen to it. We like to
make you laugh and we like to have some thought
provoking uh conversations hopefully to get you thinking about stuff.
And also I'm in the streets. I'm out here performing
all around l A. So you can catch me on

(01:17:21):
a number of stages doing some comedy. That's that's what
it is at Jackie's Nail on Twitter. Well, thank you
Jackie's Neil for joining us today. Thank you you've been wonderful. Um.
You can find Behind the Bastards online and Behind the
Bastards dot com. We'll have there were a lot of
sources for this podcast, so you will list them all there, um,
and you can do research on your own, which I
encourage especially the book British Concentration Camps. It's a really

(01:17:43):
important book. You can find me on Twitter at I right, okay.
You can also find the podcast on Twitter at at
Bastards pod. So if I've gotten something wrong, or if
you have additional questions or you know things you want
to ask about, drop us a line. We love talking
to you. Um. I'm gonna do something a little weird
at the end of this because I assume anyone who's
still listening is a real big fan of the show
or me. So I'm just gonna suggest something for you

(01:18:05):
to check out that I like. There's a great band.
You can find his video, Courtney on YouTube. He's called
The Narcissist Cookbook. You can also find him on Spotify
and on Patreon. He's a British guy. Some of the
best music I've heard recently. Uh. Doesn't seem to have
a very right reach yet, so please check him out.
That's my recommendation this week. Um I'll be back Tuesday

(01:18:25):
with another story, probably of a specific terrible person rather
than a specific terrible trend in history. UM. So yeah,
thank you for listening, and please check us out.