Desecration at Auschwitz

The winners always write the history

@pete wrote:

The winners always write the history

What a remarkably thick-headed response. You claimed the British ‘certainly’ invented concentration camps during the Boer War and I provided examples of other nations using them in earlier conflicts. Are you suggesting that the British winning the Second Boer War allowed them to invent these earlier instances in some way that you can expand upon? Or is it, as I suspect, that you are the sort of person that just doesn’t like being proven wrong and will spout any old rubbish to try and avoid having to admit it? Is it a sort of ‘I’m the king of these here boards’ face-saving operation? Will you modify your views when the subject arises away from the boards in future or will you keep to the same line in the face of the facts because it fits some sort of cod philosophy that you hold to?

Oh, and there’s no need to remind me that you know where I live and how tough and scary you are. I remember from last time.

Notwithstanding your New Year’s rant pikey, I suspect that Pete makes a good point. In reality, the winner(s) of a conflict are usually the ones whose view get recorded in history as the so-called ‘truth’.

However, the main thrust of my argument still stands. All this constant harping back to what the Nasis did or didn’t do is so last Century. Time to move on eh?

@forumhostpb wrote:

Notwithstanding your New Year’s rant pikey, I suspect that Pete makes a good point. In reality, the winner(s) of a conflict are usually the ones whose view get recorded in history as the so-called ‘truth’.

Generally, they are able to minimise (or even airbrush out) any of their shortcomings and maintain focus on their righteousness etc. Nobody pays much, if any, attention to the loser’s point of view.

The prime example of this is when the Tudor’s fought the Plantagenets and took over the English throne. They were a murderous lot, but history has been re-written … mostly during the time of Elizabeth I, and Shakespeare was guilty of doing most though not all of the rewriting. Henry 7th murdered the princes in the tower and married their older sister to secure the throne. Richard III was written into history as the villain of the piece, when in fact he was a gentle, kind and a very well thought of intelligent man. A bit of demonising and he becomes an evil hunchback who murdered small boys.

As for the topic of this thread, the English have a very chequered and bloody past. They could not have formed an empire without being ruthless. Concentration camps are a relatively modern concept. Prior to that, people were just killed.

No. These arguments don’t stand, I’m afraid. There are some logical aberrations to account for. Let’s examine them point by point:

The idea that history is written by the winners of any given conflict. It’s certainly common wisdom. A sort of pub-level approach to reasoning. Taking Minim’s example of the Tudors and the Plantagenets, how is it that, if history was rewritten, that we know the other side of the coin? Surely, if it were so, there would be no example to give. We would only know the hunchback who murdered small boys and nothing of the gentle, kind, well thought of, intelligent Richard. How would we know of Britain’s betrayal of the Cossacks at the close of the Second World War? How come we know about Dresden? We won that war, didn’t we? The facts of the matter are that we get to know all about all sorts of nasty things that winners have done down through the centuries.

Secondly, Pete’s idea that the invention of a descriptive term for something is equivalent to the invention of the thing itself.

@pete wrote:

The term “concentration camp” was first used by the British military and administration to refer to the camps set up to house non-combatants in South Africa

If this were true it would mean that homosexuals were invented around the dawn of the twentieth century. Just because something was called something else previously, it doesn’t mean the thing didn’t exist. Silliness.

Now, Pete does make one good point. He comes up with a definition for concentration camps that we can work with: a place set up to house [pesky] non-combatants in times of conflict. Britain’s concentration camps were set up to deal with [pesky] Boer families who were aiding Boer fighters during the Second Boer War, which ran from late 1899 through to early summer 1902. It follows, if we can show that other nations used similar tictacs at an earlier time than this, we can effectively show that Britain did not and could not have invented concentration camps – let alone extermination camps, which was the original bone-headed thesis, given that the thread was originally about Auschwitz.

So, how does 1838 sound? That would pre-date Britain’s use of the camps by at least sixty years. The offending nation, though I think not the true inventors themselves – just the first example that comes to mind, was the United States of America during the forced relocation of the Cherokee nation. They rounded up about thirteen thousand Cherokees into concentration camps and kept them there for four months while they burned and looted their lands. Then they forced the Indians, men, women and children to march a thousand odd miles to their new reservation. Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, died, both in the camps from murder and disease and on the forced march. Altogether a story tragically remiscent ofthe Boers’.

Any casual googling will show you that modern historians are happy to call these camps concentration camps. Most of the dead, because their deaths were caused by disease, exhaustion and malnutrition, were the old, the infirm, women and children. Non-combatatants to use the modern parlance.

So, how is it that Britain invented the concentration camp, then?

And I told you, Pete, there’s no need for your snidey threats.