Concentration camps reveal the nature of the modern state

Aeon has an interesting article about concentration camps and their relevance in what they tell us about our world now.

Concentration camps reveal the nature of the modern state

In the history of concentration camps, there is one thing that everyone knows: they were invented by the British. The idea of isolating unwanted population groups in purpose-built camps was implemented in South Africa in the context of the Anglo-Boer War, with horrific consequences for the Boer population. Although it would be left to the Nazis to perfect the institution, making it into one of the most recognisable in the modern world, concentration camps are the link between the Boer War and the Holocaust.

This simple narrative hides a far more complex history. Concentration camps are an institution that has changed over time, with techniques of incarceration shared and spread across the world, and of brutal ‘population management’ through terror. Above all, this is not simply a history of colonial atrocity and mad dictators; rather, it is a history that takes us to the heart of the modern state. Concentration camps reveal something about the nature of states that, in an age of heightened uncertainty and rising nationalism, should give us pause for thought.

Concentration camps were initially not set up for genocidal purposes, the article explains.

... reading history backwards and recalling the British camps of the Boer War as precursors of the Nazi camps helps us to understand neither the British nor the Nazi camps. The former were not genocidal, and the latter 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, as Nikolaus Wachsmann writes in KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (2015). Concentration camps are not uniform in all settings and regimes; they have multiple histories.

The article concludes ominously.

Concentration camps are an interesting phenomenon in their own right, but their true relevance lies in what they tell us about our world now. If the 20th century was, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman claimed, the ‘century of camps’, this is because the world of nation states that emerged in the 20th century – and which remains with us today – is a world of fear and paranoia based on mutually exclusive notions of ethnic and national homogeneity and territorial integrity.

‘Security’ in this context breeds suspicion: of fifth columnists, racial and national pollutants and immigrants. Incarceration techniques employed in concentration camps were borrowed in a transnational framework but, more so, they were logical growths wherever the modern state emerged. They aided the 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. Concentration camps, with their centralisation of terror, embody the compressed and condensed values of the state when it feels most threatened. We have not seen the last of them.

Full article here