Speaker 1: Hello, friends and or loved ones. I am Robert Evans,
Speaker 1: and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we
Speaker 1: tell you everything you don't know about the very worst
Speaker 1: people in all of history. With me this week is
Speaker 1: my guest Jakis Neil, host of Culture, King's comedian actor, Uh,
Speaker 1: Golden Gloves boxer. No, I did that one last time. Um, hey,
Speaker 1: it's it's good to have Kis. So this is a
Speaker 1: show where I read a story about someone terrible or
Speaker 1: that explains something behind someone terrible to a guest who's
Speaker 1: coming in cold. Normally we do like a Gallexadam Hussein
Speaker 1: or Hitler or something too special for that. No, today
Speaker 1: we've got a different one. Um, based a little bit
Speaker 1: on some stuff that's in the news. Obviously, Uh, there
Speaker 1: are some camps with children concentrating some children who have
Speaker 1: been separated from their families on the border. So I
Speaker 1: felt like now might be a good time to do
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards that delves into the history of concentration
Speaker 1: camps because it's a weird and fascinating history, and uh,
Speaker 1: it gets behind several bastards. We will be talking about
Speaker 1: the guy who invented concentration camps. Really oh yeah, oh ship,
Speaker 1: there's a deep dive. But he's he's kind of the
Speaker 1: ultimate bast Yeah, he's one of the king bastards. There's
Speaker 1: there's so many terrible people, murderers, murderers. Didn't invent murder No, well,
Speaker 1: well yeah, but we don't know who that is. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but the person who invented the concentration calps, he is
Speaker 1: in a special realm of his own. He is and nobody,
Speaker 1: nobody's heard about this guy except for concentration camp nerds,
Speaker 1: like everyone on this podcast is about to be yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, I'll get into it all right. So archaeologist
Speaker 1: studying Hadrian's Wall in England suggested that he may have
Speaker 1: found evidence of the first concentration camps and all of history,
Speaker 1: built for captives from tribes on the other side of
Speaker 1: the wall and held as a guarantee of good behavior.
Speaker 1: Other archaeologists suggests these were early refugee camps operated by
Speaker 1: the Romans to protect people fleeing from a societal breakdown
Speaker 1: north of the wall. We'll never know for sure. It
Speaker 1: is possible that various cultures have instituted ideas that kind
Speaker 1: of were concentration camps for thousands of years. There's no
Speaker 1: tracing it all the way back, but we can trace
Speaker 1: the roots of our modern conception of a concentration camp.
Speaker 1: And they start with Andrew Jackson. What. Yeah, well he
Speaker 1: didn't invent the concentration camp. But it's important to know
Speaker 1: this history to understand what comes next. Uh. Sondrew Jackson
Speaker 1: was born in seventeen sixty seven, seventh President of the
Speaker 1: United States. His father died in a logging accident. He
Speaker 1: grew up really poor and really mean. When he was
Speaker 1: a kid, he got stabbed in the face in the
Speaker 1: hand by a British officer because he wouldn't clean the
Speaker 1: guy's boots. Um, he was a salty dude. Uh. Good
Speaker 1: reason to be salty though. Yeah. Yeah, he did have
Speaker 1: good reason to be as he was like starving for
Speaker 1: a long time. His dad died when he was real young. Uh.
Speaker 1: He got shot a bunch when he was inaugurated as president.
Speaker 1: There was a bullet in his lung. That was that
Speaker 1: was there his whole life. He he was he was
Speaker 1: just coughing up blood his whole life because he just
Speaker 1: always had bullets inside of him. He was a tough guy.
Speaker 1: This should be a great origin story. It is a story.
Speaker 1: And he probably killed more human beings personally than any
Speaker 1: other president. Like, he shot a lot of people personally,
Speaker 1: not like ordering people to do it. He almost beat
Speaker 1: a guy to death with a cane. He was a
Speaker 1: tough dude, is what we're saying. Uh, we'll probably wind
Speaker 1: up doing the whole episode on just him at some point,
Speaker 1: but right now we're going to talk about his relationship
Speaker 1: to the Native Americans and how that contributed to the
Speaker 1: development of concentration camps. So in eighteen twelve, Jackson was
Speaker 1: elected major general in the Tennessee Militia because we used
Speaker 1: to vote on generals back in the day. Uh, as
Speaker 1: you might guess from the year the War of eighteen
Speaker 1: twelve was on. By this point, our history books tend
Speaker 1: to reduce that to just you know, the White House
Speaker 1: got burned. Yeah, it was a lot more than that.
Speaker 1: And there were actually a couple of other wars that
Speaker 1: were grouped into the War of eighteen twelve, and one
Speaker 1: of them was the Red Stick War. Have you heard
Speaker 1: of the Red Stick War? Uh? No, it sounds fun,
Speaker 1: doesn't Yeah. It sounds like sounds like cute, It sounds
Speaker 1: like the beginnings of baseball. Yeah, We're seen each other
Speaker 1: for years, and then we realized, yeah, well okay, no,
Speaker 1: it's actually it was a a civil war within the
Speaker 1: Creek Nation, the Creeker and Indigenous people uh to sort
Speaker 1: of like the East Dish United States area, like southeast
Speaker 1: of the US, like almost all the way down from
Speaker 1: like parts of like Virginia down to like Florida. So
Speaker 1: the Creek Nation was a pretty sizeable like Native nation
Speaker 1: at this point in time. UM and the Red Sticks
Speaker 1: were one faction within the Creek and their name came
Speaker 1: from the fact that they carried red war clubs that
Speaker 1: they would beat people to death with UM because they
Speaker 1: were pretty tough dudes, and they believed that the best
Speaker 1: way to defend their land from the encroaching Americans was
Speaker 1: to murder them. Uh. They were encouraged in this thinking
Speaker 1: by British agents who wanted to do anything they could
Speaker 1: to funk with the Americans during the War of eighteen twelves.
Speaker 1: They would give the Red Creek food and money and
Speaker 1: stuff and try to get them to work with Americans.
Speaker 1: So a band of these Red Sticks winds up murdering
Speaker 1: two families of American settlers near Nashville. They were executed
Speaker 1: by the rest of their tribe who didn't want any
Speaker 1: trouble with the Americans. But this wind up provoking a
Speaker 1: civil war within the Creek nation. So Jackson and his
Speaker 1: militia wind up on the side of the Creek who
Speaker 1: didn't like killing settlers. Right, they fight a war with
Speaker 1: the Red Sticks. So it's like Jackson and most of
Speaker 1: the Creek on one side and the Redness Sticks on
Speaker 1: the other side. Yeah, and this winds up coming to
Speaker 1: an end in like eighteen fourteen. So Jackson does so
Speaker 1: well in the war that he becomes a major general
Speaker 1: in the army. He gets put in charge of Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi,
Speaker 1: and the Creek Nation. This meant that he was in
Speaker 1: charge when it became trying to negotiate a peace treaty
Speaker 1: at the end of the Red Stick War. The Madison
Speaker 1: administration wanted us to be nice to the Creek because
Speaker 1: they met James Madison didn't want to sunk with him.
Speaker 1: But Jackson was like, fun these guys because he was
Speaker 1: a monster. Yeah, So he decides to punish the Red
Speaker 1: Sticks and the Creek who had fought alongside his forces
Speaker 1: like all the same. So he just takes half of
Speaker 1: the land of the Creek nation, Like, so he decided
Speaker 1: he fought yeah, yeah, yeah, he foxed them over to
Speaker 1: he takes twenty three million acres away from the guys
Speaker 1: who've just been fighting with him. Three million acres. I
Speaker 1: can't fathom. Yeah, how back in the day one man
Speaker 1: could have all they were This is like a Kanye lyric.
Speaker 1: How could one man have all that power? It's it's
Speaker 1: weird just because he didn't die, Like that's a big
Speaker 1: part of it is, like, yeah, if you survived to
Speaker 1: be old enough, yeah, and then you just that's like
Speaker 1: man like, if that's the case, fifty cent ship on
Speaker 1: half of America. If nine times and not die, fifty
Speaker 1: cent could have been a president in the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: he would have been fucking hard as ship. Ye he was.
Speaker 1: That was the main qualification, was not dying and have
Speaker 1: a couple of bullets in you. Yeah. So the Creek
Speaker 1: nicknamed Jackson sharp Knife because he was a he was
Speaker 1: a dick. Yeah, and Andrew Jackson, you know, gets into
Speaker 1: politics after he becomes a general. H he became a
Speaker 1: strident advocate for fucking over Native Americans. In eighteen twenty nine,
Speaker 1: he was looked at president. In eighteen thirty, he championed
Speaker 1: the Indian Removal Act, which is one of the more
Speaker 1: sinisterly named eighteen thirty. Yeah, and he delivered this message
Speaker 1: to Congress quote, we now propose to acquire the countries
Speaker 1: occupied by the Red Men of the South and West
Speaker 1: by a fair exchange, and at the expense of the
Speaker 1: United States, to send them to land where their existence
Speaker 1: may be prolonged and perhaps made perpetual. Doubtless, it will
Speaker 1: be painful to leave the graves of their fathers, But
Speaker 1: what do they more than our ancestors did or than
Speaker 1: our children are doing. Now, that's like him being nice
Speaker 1: about He was mean but eloquent. Yeah, yeah, he's And
Speaker 1: he said that this policy was not only liberal, but
Speaker 1: generous to the to the what he called them the
Speaker 1: Redman because it was the most racist time that's ever
Speaker 1: been e thirties us. That's like, that's is that before
Speaker 1: the emancipation too? Oh yeah, that's like the slaves And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a dark time in American history. Jackson
Speaker 1: three years later would deliver another speech where he was
Speaker 1: even less nice to the Native Americans and basically said
Speaker 1: that they weren't intelligent enough to have any land in
Speaker 1: an America, and so it was they must necessarily yield
Speaker 1: to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear like
Speaker 1: like they're they're destined to be screwed because we're screwing
Speaker 1: them so much. Yeah, this is a dude. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's so crazy. It's so crazy. How I know we
Speaker 1: will eventually get to this, But how parallel some of
Speaker 1: these thoughts ye are to our current person in power?
Speaker 1: Or it is is insane? Yeah? Yeah, well, and you
Speaker 1: know it's It's worth noting that when President Trump met
Speaker 1: with the remaining Indian code talkers from World War Two,
Speaker 1: he met them in front of a picture of Andrew Jackson,
Speaker 1: which I didn't know. I heard that was a thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and because I'm lazy, I didn't read why it was
Speaker 1: a thing. But now I know. This is why what
Speaker 1: a dick. So Andrew Jackson's any removal policy winds up
Speaker 1: leading to, uh, the eviction of natives from the land
Speaker 1: that he had sort of said that they had to leave.
Speaker 1: So his idea was like, we have to push them
Speaker 1: all into reservations. That was the evolution of this policy.
Speaker 1: As we kicked them off the lane that we want
Speaker 1: to take, but we'll give them motherland. Um. So this
Speaker 1: is not quite a concentration camp, but there are aspects
Speaker 1: of the process that look a lot like stuff you'll
Speaker 1: see in you know, the twentieth century. So the most
Speaker 1: clear example of that is in the U. S. Army
Speaker 1: was sent to a victim bunch of Cherokee who refused
Speaker 1: to move from the land that they were told to vacate.
Speaker 1: So the army took seventeen thousand Cherokee and two thousands
Speaker 1: of their black slaves because nobody's entirely a good guy
Speaker 1: in the eighteen thirties over um and forced them onto camps.
Speaker 1: Uh So, three hundred or some of them died in
Speaker 1: the camps and then they get marched into Oklahoma, which
Speaker 1: is basically one big reservation at that point in time.
Speaker 1: Four thousand Cherokee die on the march to Oklahoma. This
Speaker 1: is march. That is a long march. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you've ever walked from like Tennessee to Oklahoma, but don't. Yeah, man,
Speaker 1: I set out to do it, and I was like,
Speaker 1: at they're a block awful. So, yeah, when the Cherokee
Speaker 1: arriving Oklahoma, they're placed on reservations, which is a type
Speaker 1: of camp designed to concentrate Native Americans into a small
Speaker 1: area so they can't carry out guerrilla wars against the state.
Speaker 1: This policy continued until eighteen eighties seven, when the government
Speaker 1: decided that Native Americans had been pretty well beaten and
Speaker 1: enacted the DAWs Act, which split reservation land up in
Speaker 1: individual allotments that Natives could then sell to white people,
Speaker 1: which was basically a way of being like, we'll give
Speaker 1: you a little bit of cash for your land, and
Speaker 1: then you don't have land anymore. Um. And then also,
Speaker 1: did you say that they had already been well beaten?
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, it's just that's a crazy Well, I
Speaker 1: guess we've beat you enough. It worked, is what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Is like the resistance, if you're looking at and this
Speaker 1: is important to understand what comes next. If you're associate
Speaker 1: path looking at the US policy against the Native Americans,
Speaker 1: it worked. You know, in the early eighteen hundreds, they
Speaker 1: were a real threat to white people's ability to take
Speaker 1: over North America, and this strategy broke them. If you
Speaker 1: don't care about human rights or dignity or anything like that,
Speaker 1: it functioned. Uh So, it's terrible, but other people in
Speaker 1: history would pay attention to the example that the Americans
Speaker 1: set in our policy towards Native Americans. Now we're going
Speaker 1: to veer off of North America and were to uh Spain.
Speaker 1: The same year as the Trail of Tears, eighteen thirty
Speaker 1: eight also saw the birth of a guy named Don
Speaker 1: Valeriano Whaler in Nicolau. Uh. He was born on the
Speaker 1: island of Mayorca. Yeah, it is a good name. A
Speaker 1: lot of names for people in those days. Yeah, not
Speaker 1: just two or three. Um. So he was born in
Speaker 1: my Orca, which is a part of Spain. He grew
Speaker 1: up with dreams of military glory, but Alas was only
Speaker 1: four ft ten when he turned fifteen. Uh. He listed
Speaker 1: in the Toledo Military Academy. He was below the Spanish
Speaker 1: military's minimum height requirements, but they let him join anyway
Speaker 1: because they just finished having a bunch of civil and
Speaker 1: colonial wars and they didn't have enough soldiers. They were like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's okay if you're tiny. Uh yeah, maybe he won't
Speaker 1: get shot shot. Um. He went up actually being really
Speaker 1: good at army stuff. Here in the nicknames Skipio from
Speaker 1: his fellow students, who was Skipio Africanus, was a famous
Speaker 1: Roman general who was really tough, and Whaler had a
Speaker 1: reputation of being really tough, which in those days meant
Speaker 1: you just didn't get sick and die easily, because like
Speaker 1: that was just fucking Europeans. Whenever they would go to
Speaker 1: the like half of them would die from the fever.
Speaker 1: So if you survive that, you're tough. Yeah, so yeah.
Speaker 1: Valariano Whaler wound up sent to Cuba in eighteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: where he developed a reputation for being the only colonial
Speaker 1: officer who wouldn't drink alcohol. U Spanish officers in this
Speaker 1: time had a habit of drinking nothing but enormous quantities
Speaker 1: of cold champagne uh instead of water because they thought
Speaker 1: it kept them safe from malaria, kept them safe. But
Speaker 1: so he drank water and he was Yeah, he was,
Speaker 1: which made him popular with the soldiers because they didn't
Speaker 1: get champagne and it also he was probably the only
Speaker 1: sober Spanish guy on the islands. That's why he was
Speaker 1: so good. That everybody out there fighting wars drunk, it's
Speaker 1: a it's a lobar. He figured it out. Like those days,
Speaker 1: sober and I'm going to kill not blacked out the
Speaker 1: whole time. So Cuba was a pretty chill place in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty three. From the Spanish point of view, there
Speaker 1: wasn't any resistance to their rule at that point, or
Speaker 1: at least not effectively. Whaler's time there started well because
Speaker 1: he won the Spanish national lottery and became super rich,
Speaker 1: which is great. Then he caught the yellow fever, which
Speaker 1: tried to kill him but didn't quite uh and in
Speaker 1: fact just made him stronger. Um so that would be
Speaker 1: a benefit for the rest of his life is that
Speaker 1: he wouldn't get yellow fever again. That fall, as he
Speaker 1: was recovering from the fever, a war broke out in
Speaker 1: the nearby Dominican Republic, which was also owned by Spain.
Speaker 1: The Dominicans had just been invaded by Haiti, and pretty
Speaker 1: much as soon as the Spanish through Haiti back, the
Speaker 1: Dominicans were like, well, okay, now we want to be
Speaker 1: an independent nation and we want Spain gone too. So
Speaker 1: Whyler got sent over to the Dominican Republic to fight
Speaker 1: an insurgency against Spanish rule. He became a staff officer
Speaker 1: and eventually earned a promotion to lieutenant colonel. And a
Speaker 1: bunch of awards for his gallantry. The conflict went great
Speaker 1: for him because he got a bunch of awards, but
Speaker 1: Spain wound up losing control of the Dominican Republic in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty five. So Whyler gets transferred over to a
Speaker 1: Spanish embassy in Washington, d C. Where he caught the
Speaker 1: tale into the Civil War and picked up some really
Speaker 1: cool ideas from America. Uh. Which yeah, now this is
Speaker 1: a might not be the idea you're expecting. This is
Speaker 1: a quote from the book British Concentration Camps, which was
Speaker 1: a major source for this podcast and will have the
Speaker 1: length to all the other sources up on the website
Speaker 1: behind the Bastards dot com. So anyway, Whaler winds up
Speaker 1: in the d C embassy, uh, and he starts reading
Speaker 1: about the tactics and hearing about the tactics being used
Speaker 1: by a general named WILLIAMS. Sherman. Uh. In the south quote.
Speaker 1: Not only with Sherman an exponent of brittle warfare, burning
Speaker 1: entire towns to terrify the enemy into submission, he also
Speaker 1: waged a campaign which some thought amounted to genocide against
Speaker 1: the Indians, using this as slogan. The only good Indian
Speaker 1: is a dead one. Sherman harry the Indians mercilessly, seeing
Speaker 1: that they were pinned up in camps where they died
Speaker 1: from starvation and illness. Sherman's activities both against the Confederacy
Speaker 1: and the Indians made a great lasting impression upon the
Speaker 1: young soldier, who went on to govern several Spanish colonies.
Speaker 1: So Whaler gets sent over to the US and it's
Speaker 1: like these guys, they're good at suppressing people. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So Whaler gets transferred back to Spain for a little while.
Speaker 1: But then in eighteen sixty eight, the Cubans decide they're
Speaker 1: not happy with Spanish rule and they have a revolution. Uh.
Speaker 1: So Whaler gets sent over to Cuba uh and fights
Speaker 1: in what's called the Ten Years War, which is a
Speaker 1: war from six sixty eight seventy eight against the Spanish government.
Speaker 1: By all accounts, it was a pretty badass conflict. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote here from a book called The War with
Speaker 1: Spain by Charles Morris. That's about the Cuban armies in
Speaker 1: this time they were fighting in Spain. The strength of
Speaker 1: the insurgents lay largely in their horses. They were admirable horsemen.
Speaker 1: Riding like cossacks or cowboys, and far superior in this
Speaker 1: respect to the Spanish cavalry, a few of whom were
Speaker 1: trained to the saddle. Many stories are told of the
Speaker 1: women who wrote in their ranks and wielded the machete
Speaker 1: even more fiercely than the men, and there is little
Speaker 1: doubt that these stories have some foundation in truth. The
Speaker 1: favorite mode of fighting by the insurgents was to harass
Speaker 1: the Spanish troops with skirmish fire, in which they sought
Speaker 1: to pick off the officers by sharp shooting. Then, if
Speaker 1: the opportunity presented, they would dash forward in a wild
Speaker 1: cavalry charge, machete in hand, and seek to wreak havoc
Speaker 1: on the ranks of the foe. Pretty badass. A bunch
Speaker 1: of ladies with machetes kind of horses, yeah, or just
Speaker 1: in general, I just yeah on horses and yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like wonder woman are the Amazon? Yeah? I feel
Speaker 1: like Danny Trejoe could make that into a movie. Let's
Speaker 1: get a production company. Yeah you hear that, Danny. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of ladies on horses of machetes cutting
Speaker 1: up Spanish soldiers. Man make it happen. So Whaler was
Speaker 1: put in command of a six man unit, which he
Speaker 1: quickly turned into the deadliest unit in the Spanish army.
Speaker 1: There were no rules at the time in the Spanish
Speaker 1: military for how to fight insurgeon, so Whaler made up
Speaker 1: rules of his own, the most important of which was
Speaker 1: that there were no rules. His troops were ordered to
Speaker 1: give no quarter to the enemy. The enemy was to
Speaker 1: find as anyone near a combat area, including civilians. He
Speaker 1: became famous for his brutality, and was at one point asked,
Speaker 1: is it true that your men returned from battle holding
Speaker 1: the severed heads of their enemies by the hair? Whaler replied,
Speaker 1: what do you think war is? And war men have
Speaker 1: mean one job to kill? Yeah, you predicted that, didn't
Speaker 1: call that? Yeah, you know, you're get to feel for
Speaker 1: this guy. Get the field the great minds. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: part way through the war, Whaler gets recalled to Spain
Speaker 1: because there's a monarchist uprising in Spain. The whole eighteen
Speaker 1: hundred Spanish is civil war after fucking civil war. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they'd lost so many territories. Yeah time too,
Speaker 1: it's not a great time. Yeah. Uh so, Yeah, Spain's
Speaker 1: having like a monarchist uprising, so Whaler goes back to
Speaker 1: help fight it. He has some fighting outside of Valencia,
Speaker 1: which doesn't go well, but then the general fighting him
Speaker 1: dies and that guy's army sort of falls apart, so
Speaker 1: Whaler kind of wins, and then the government sends him
Speaker 1: next to Catalonia where there's like kind of a leftist
Speaker 1: workers uprising, and he promptly just murders everyone he suspects
Speaker 1: of being connected to the rebels. Spanish citizens didn't like
Speaker 1: seeing the tactics they cheered him to use in Cuba
Speaker 1: being used on them at home, so General Whaler was
Speaker 1: reprimanded and removed from that particularly. This is still four
Speaker 1: ft I think he's about four ft eleven. He grew
Speaker 1: a little bit more, not all that much. Yeah, grew
Speaker 1: in all the blood he's drawn, just standing on it.
Speaker 1: Tiny little man just bathing in blood. Yeah. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: he's a monster. So his career for the next few
Speaker 1: years is kind of up and down. He served as
Speaker 1: the military governor in the Philippines from eight to eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety one. He bounce around so much in just well
Speaker 1: because they're like, we can't have him in Spain because
Speaker 1: he's too brutal and people don't like seeing what we
Speaker 1: do to our colonial possessions being done in Spain. But
Speaker 1: we need a guy to put down insurgencies, and he's
Speaker 1: fucking good at good at it's just saying he's good
Speaker 1: at it. Charge here, come on over, yeah, yeah, go
Speaker 1: crush these insurgents now. So he winds up in the
Speaker 1: Philippines fighting insurgents. One four month campaign. He succeeded in
Speaker 1: wiping out rebels on the island of Mendano through the
Speaker 1: use of something called trocha, which were fortified military lines
Speaker 1: built to isolated insurgents. So General Wayler invented a new tactic,
Speaker 1: which is basically he would fortify towns and villages and
Speaker 1: then he would force civilians in rural areas to leave
Speaker 1: their farms and congregate in those walled rural villages that
Speaker 1: he built UM, and then he would build these like
Speaker 1: fortified lines around areas he knew the rebels were in
Speaker 1: to kind of isolate them so you can pin them
Speaker 1: into smaller and smaller areas exactly forced them to fight UM.
Speaker 1: This worked out very well, and in November eight Whaler
Speaker 1: returned to Spain as a newly elected senator. He didn't
Speaker 1: get to spend much time on the job because the
Speaker 1: revolutionary workers movement in Catalonia again started threatening to act
Speaker 1: against the state. Whaler arrested hundreds of them. Uh and
Speaker 1: became very popular among Spaniards who weren't angry working class people.
Speaker 1: Multiple towns declared him their adopted son. He was made
Speaker 1: a senator for life and credited with saving civilization from
Speaker 1: the barbaric workers. Uh So now now they so this
Speaker 1: is where we are in eighteen nine when another revolution
Speaker 1: breaks out in Cuba, and we're going to get into
Speaker 1: that revolution and the birth of the first concentration camps
Speaker 1: after the break, but before we do that. If you're
Speaker 1: anything like me Jakis, talking about concentration camps makes you
Speaker 1: really want to purchase products and services. Meant to buy
Speaker 1: some stuff right I'm on Amazon right now. Well, let's
Speaker 1: let's see what things you can buy that are supporting
Speaker 1: the show. Let's do it. We are back. We're talking
Speaker 1: about General Valeriana Whyler uh for foot tage in case
Speaker 1: you In case you say you know what, I'm coming
Speaker 1: to listen to the podcast, but I'm starting that minute
Speaker 1: twenty one. Yeah, And if I want to add, if
Speaker 1: you're coming in to listen to the podcast and you
Speaker 1: are a representative of the Derritos corporation. Let me just
Speaker 1: say we are trying to get sponsorship from Derritos. I
Speaker 1: get eternally sad when I walk into this office and
Speaker 1: there's no cluel ranch der Rito's. I took the whole bag.
Speaker 1: And we're talking about revolutionary movements a lot right now
Speaker 1: colonialism and nothing says fighting colonialism like the taste of
Speaker 1: extreme nacho flavor. I feel like if the Cuban rebels
Speaker 1: were about to talk about had had more nacho flavor
Speaker 1: in their lives, maybe be their revolution would have gone better.
Speaker 1: This is the next crash. The Super Bowl commercial that
Speaker 1: Doritos does just said it said it with General Whaler,
Speaker 1: please stop killing us, sir, Look what do you have? Does?
Speaker 1: And then they live in harmony. I think you've Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a solid Super Bowl commercials. The deep cut, deep cuts,
Speaker 1: deep cut. Speaking of deep cuts, all right, so yeah.
Speaker 1: In when General Valeriana Whaler was fifty six, Cuban revolutionaries
Speaker 1: again declared their independence from Spain. The Spanish military leader
Speaker 1: in terms of Cuba proved unable to contain them in
Speaker 1: the government begged Whaler to step in which he was
Speaker 1: happy to do, providing the government gave him a free
Speaker 1: hand to do whatever he wanted in order to suppress
Speaker 1: the revolution. So in January six he meets with the
Speaker 1: Spanish government and he tells them how he thinks that
Speaker 1: they can win this war. The key would be to
Speaker 1: relocate the population. Civilians would be forced into camps inside
Speaker 1: of fortified cities and towns to deny insurgents aid and comfort.
Speaker 1: He put together a team that included several men who
Speaker 1: had served under him in the Philippines and promised them
Speaker 1: that quote, what we became in the Philippines will serve
Speaker 1: us well in Cuba. Ah. Then he promised the press
Speaker 1: that he'd have the situation handled in two years. General
Speaker 1: Whaler arrived in Cuba in eight and at this point
Speaker 1: the insurgents are like at the gates of the last
Speaker 1: city I think was Havana that the Spanish still controlled,
Speaker 1: So the revolution has gone really well up to this point.
Speaker 1: He immediately issues the order all the inhabitants of the
Speaker 1: country now outside the line of fortifications of the towns, shall,
Speaker 1: within the period of eight days, concentrate themselves in the
Speaker 1: town so occupied by the troops. Farmers were not allowed
Speaker 1: to farm their land, and their homes were often burnt
Speaker 1: behind them. The camps were poorly built and most of
Speaker 1: the houses had no roofs. No provision was made defeat
Speaker 1: or take care of the captives who were being forced
Speaker 1: into these walled camps. Whaler had also picked close to
Speaker 1: the worst locations possible for the camps, usually low lying
Speaker 1: swampy ground that was a perfect breeding area for disease.
Speaker 1: Whaler called this the reconcentration policy. He named the camps reconcentrados.
Speaker 1: So so that's the start. So that's the start. These
Speaker 1: are the first official concentration camps in human history where
Speaker 1: it's like the you know, they're known by that name,
Speaker 1: and it's the same function. The idea is we're taking
Speaker 1: people haven't committed any crime, they're not prisoners of war,
Speaker 1: their civilians, and we're forcing them into camps for some
Speaker 1: sort of political purpose because they do uprise up well,
Speaker 1: and just because also we're worried we know that someone
Speaker 1: is supporting the insurgents, and so since we don't know
Speaker 1: which individual farms are supporting the insurgents, we're going to
Speaker 1: force all of the farmers into these camps. Just so
Speaker 1: that there's nobody left. So by one third of all
Speaker 1: Cubans had been moved into concentration camps, between two and
Speaker 1: four thousand of them would die there. Uh, most accurate
Speaker 1: numbers probably three twenty thousand. Here is a picture of
Speaker 1: a man looking at a mountain of Cuban bones while
Speaker 1: wearing a Victorian era suit. We'll have that up on
Speaker 1: the site. It's it's stale. Yeah, that's a real picture
Speaker 1: of a mountain of Cuban bones. It looks like Charlie Chaplin. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it looks like Charlie Chaplin sitting on a pile of
Speaker 1: the size of a house. Um. Yeah, it's it's messed up.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, yeah, yeah, he looks great. Yeah, he looks
Speaker 1: like he's on his way to Hollywood. Yeah. So this
Speaker 1: was a bunch of Americans started visiting these camps, including
Speaker 1: like American senators and politicians and like starting an outrage
Speaker 1: about it, being like this is really fund up, what's
Speaker 1: going on? Yeah, this winds up kind of being later
Speaker 1: on one of the reasons we get involved in a
Speaker 1: war with Spain, Like the sinking of the main was
Speaker 1: a bigger factor. Like outside of Cuba, this battleship of
Speaker 1: ours explodes, and we blame it on the Spanish. But
Speaker 1: the main is there in the first case, and people
Speaker 1: are already angry at the Spanish for what they're doing
Speaker 1: in Cuba. Yeah. So one witness to the camps, an
Speaker 1: American senator, described them this way. Uh, it is not peace,
Speaker 1: nor is it war. It is desolation and distress, misery
Speaker 1: and starvation. Every town and village is surrounded by a
Speaker 1: trocha trench, a sort of rifle pit, but constructed on
Speaker 1: a plan new to me, the dirt being thrown up
Speaker 1: on the inside and a barbed wire fence on the
Speaker 1: outer side of the trench. These trokas have at every
Speaker 1: corner and at frequent intervals along the sides what are
Speaker 1: called forts, but what are really small block houses, many
Speaker 1: of them more like a large sentry box loophold with
Speaker 1: from musketry and with a guarda from two to ten
Speaker 1: soldiers each. The purpose of these trokas is to keep
Speaker 1: reconcentratos in as well as to keep the insurgents out
Speaker 1: from all of the surrounding country. That people have been
Speaker 1: driven into these fortified towns and held there to subsist
Speaker 1: as they can. They're virtually prison yards and not unlike
Speaker 1: one in general appearance, except that the walls are not
Speaker 1: so high and strong, but they suffice where every point
Speaker 1: is in range of a soldier's rifle to keep in
Speaker 1: the poor reconcentrato women and children. So what does that
Speaker 1: sound like to you? Sounds like barbed wire fences, guards
Speaker 1: on the outside, concentration. Yeah, yeah, it sounds very familiar
Speaker 1: with like our modern concept of a concertration camp. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is yeah, this is where it started. So Whyler's
Speaker 1: forces in country managed to drive back the insurgents, but
Speaker 1: the brutality and death of the camps obviously causing in
Speaker 1: a national outcry. Whaler winds up getting recalled to Spain,
Speaker 1: and of course, during the Spanish American War, Spain loses
Speaker 1: control of Cuba. General Whaler uh wound up living on
Speaker 1: though he continued to fight. He fought in a couple
Speaker 1: more Spanish civil wars. He had a long career. He
Speaker 1: died in nineteen thirty two. One of his last recorded
Speaker 1: sentences that he ever spoke is reported by a Time
Speaker 1: magazine interview was quote the good Die Young who he
Speaker 1: wanted to be? What was it dude from Ghostbusters? Oh, Vigo. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he fucking was man like. At least he knew what
Speaker 1: he was. Like, can you imagine? Can you imagine being
Speaker 1: ninety two? I'm too young ago, So I think he
Speaker 1: was saying I'm ninety two because I'm a piece of ship,
Speaker 1: like lited a long time as a monster. I thought
Speaker 1: he was saying like I'm too young. No, I think
Speaker 1: he was saying like, I'm fucking old as dirt because
Speaker 1: I'm the worst person who's ever lived. He on his deathbed,
Speaker 1: he was, He knew he was. That's that's what happens
Speaker 1: when you raised hell all your life. Then you're about
Speaker 1: to die and you're like, man, I want to get
Speaker 1: into heaven. All right, I'm save now. Probably didn't have
Speaker 1: killed four people. Yeah, yeah, that was a strategic misstep.
Speaker 1: I look, man, i'mde a mistake, a mistake, you know, God,
Speaker 1: if you just pay attention to the last twenty years
Speaker 1: and ignoring those skull mountains, I did pretty good. I
Speaker 1: did pretty good. Pretty good. But he who has not
Speaker 1: built a mountain of bones cast the first bones in hell.
Speaker 1: Yeah okay, yeah, So the first reconcentration camps were a
Speaker 1: political disaster, but they were a military success. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: he he beat the insurgency almost by the time he
Speaker 1: got recalled. So uh yeah, the first concentration camps work
Speaker 1: out militarily, not so much politically, but you know that's
Speaker 1: the history. So in when the British government found themselves
Speaker 1: fighting a brutal war with the Boers in South Africa,
Speaker 1: they looked at what Wayler had done in Cuba, and
Speaker 1: they looked at the American reservation system and they were like,
Speaker 1: what if we give these things to try? Um. So,
Speaker 1: the Bower people in South Africa were descendants of the
Speaker 1: original Dutch colonizers who first had stolen South Africa from
Speaker 1: the actual people who lived there before Dutch people wound
Speaker 1: up there. Uh. In eighteen o six, the British Empire
Speaker 1: had taken control of a Dutch South African colony, and
Speaker 1: the Bowers didn't like this. They fled and formed two
Speaker 1: independent nations, the Republic of the trans of All and
Speaker 1: the Orange Free State. They called themselves Burgers, which meant
Speaker 1: citizens and makes reading about them sound delicious. Um. The
Speaker 1: Boers didn't like the British coming in and britishizing their home,
Speaker 1: which was understandable. Nobody enjoyed that They also hated the
Speaker 1: fact that the British wouldn't let them keep slaves, which
Speaker 1: is less understandable. Again, nobody's a good guy when you
Speaker 1: go back to these Outba conflicts. Everybody's a piece. And
Speaker 1: wait here did we become good? Did we do that?
Speaker 1: Eighty's and then we lost it in two thousand sixty.
Speaker 1: We had a good though for a couple of y Yeah,
Speaker 1: we were really making some strides man. So yeah. The
Speaker 1: two Bower republics in the British South African Colony managed
Speaker 1: to coexist kind of well until eighteen sixties seven, when
Speaker 1: gold and diamond mines were discovered in the Republic of
Speaker 1: the Transfall. Winston Churchill, who was at this time a journalist,
Speaker 1: felt this discovery made war between the Bowers and the
Speaker 1: British inevitable quote sooner or later, in a just cause
Speaker 1: or a picked quarrel, for the sake of our empire,
Speaker 1: for the sake of the race, we must fight the Bowers.
Speaker 1: So war broke out in eight nine, and it went
Speaker 1: pretty well at first for the Bowers. They beat back
Speaker 1: some British armies and they laid siege to some of
Speaker 1: the British hilariously named cities like Lady Smith, which is
Speaker 1: this is a great band name. Yeah yeah, well it's
Speaker 1: I think they're from South Africa. Lady Smith Black Mambazo.
Speaker 1: Oh that is a yeah, that is a band. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: what's this? What's that? What's the most popular song that?
Speaker 1: I don't know? I know their name because it's amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well they got that's what they got. Yeah, they got that.
Speaker 1: So listen to the Lady Smith Black Mambazo. I will
Speaker 1: be doing that too after the Black Horse, not acessarily
Speaker 1: like is that it? I don't know. I don't know
Speaker 1: either anyway, hopefully unprepared to joke about Lady Smith, but
Speaker 1: it is a fun name for a town. Uh so. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The British Empire obviously was the British Empire, and they
Speaker 1: eventually beat these two small Boer armies and by nine
Speaker 1: hundred the British head conquered all their cities and annexed
Speaker 1: all Bower territory. Now, the normal war became a guerrilla
Speaker 1: war because the Bowers didn't stop fighting just because they
Speaker 1: lost their cities. They became insurgents. The British commander at
Speaker 1: this point was a famous guy named Lord Kitchener, who
Speaker 1: had replaced a general named Roberts, who had replaced a
Speaker 1: general named red Verse Buller because the class was a
Speaker 1: silly place. It was under Kitchener's command that the first
Speaker 1: Boer concentration camps were established. So Lord Kitchener decided that
Speaker 1: camps would be quote the most effective method of limiting
Speaker 1: the endurance of the guerrillas, because they're all these little
Speaker 1: Boer farms, and were the wives and the kids of
Speaker 1: these soldiers fighting the British arming the field lived and
Speaker 1: so they would fight the British during the day, and
Speaker 1: then you just go home at night and get a
Speaker 1: cooked meal and sleep in their bed and then get
Speaker 1: back out into the field. So Kitchener ordered that the
Speaker 1: women and children should be divided into two categories. One
Speaker 1: category would be refugees, which was people that they took
Speaker 1: off their farms that the British didn't know had a
Speaker 1: relative fighting in the field. And others were the families
Speaker 1: of Boer soldiers who were commandos. And his idea was
Speaker 1: to treat the families who didn't have soldiers fighting the
Speaker 1: British better, but in practice they all get lumped into
Speaker 1: the same concentration camps. The Boer camps worked exactly as
Speaker 1: well as the Cuban ones, by which I mean they
Speaker 1: became stinking diseased helpits where thousands died. There wasn't enough food,
Speaker 1: there was no sanitation, and because the British had burnt
Speaker 1: all of the farms in South Africa, they couldn't really
Speaker 1: afford descend in any food either. So between June of
Speaker 1: nineteen o one and May of nineteen o two, some
Speaker 1: twenty eight thousand of the hundred and fifteen thousand in
Speaker 1: turned people died in the camps. It was about ten
Speaker 1: percent of all the Boers. Yeah, twenty two thousand of
Speaker 1: them were children. Um, ten percent of like the Bower population,
Speaker 1: gets killed in these camps. Uh. There were also separate
Speaker 1: concentration camps the British established for black people cut fighting
Speaker 1: with the Boers. A two thousand one Guardian article I
Speaker 1: used as a source notes about twenty black people also
Speaker 1: died in other camps and says nothing else about them.
Speaker 1: So I definitely, yeah, why wouldn't. That's clearly they got slavery,
Speaker 1: They got enough tap about them. As a general rule,
Speaker 1: the deaths of black people in British concentration camps during
Speaker 1: the Boer war are treated as an afterthought, Like, so
Speaker 1: knowledge of what was happening in the Bower War of
Speaker 1: these camps was brought over by like a couple of
Speaker 1: British ladies who were like Red Cross volunteers who saw
Speaker 1: the camps and went back to England and we're like,
Speaker 1: what we're doing is fucked up. But they would always
Speaker 1: talk about the concentration camps for the Boers and then
Speaker 1: like say, I also hear there's camps for black people,
Speaker 1: but I didn't go visit any of them, but they're
Speaker 1: probably not nice either. Um you imagine can you imagine
Speaker 1: this time where all this terrible ship is going on
Speaker 1: and people are still so racist that they don't even
Speaker 1: It's amazing because you read about how because the Bower
Speaker 1: concentration camps were awful, and then you're like, but it
Speaker 1: was even worse for the black people, Like, how could
Speaker 1: you make it worse? Yeah, well there's a quote from
Speaker 1: the book British Concentration Camps that explains how it could
Speaker 1: be made worse. By July nineteen o one, some thirty
Speaker 1: eight thousand blacks were being held in special camps, over
Speaker 1: thirty thousand of them being women and children, thousands of
Speaker 1: black men were taken into the service of the army,
Speaker 1: where others were sent to work the gold mines. The
Speaker 1: white camps were provided with tents, however leaky and drafty
Speaker 1: these may have been. Nothing of the sort was thought
Speaker 1: necessary for the blacks, who were expected to build their
Speaker 1: own dwellings. So you've got about a hundred and fifteen
Speaker 1: thousand bowers in camps, who of whom twenty eight thousand die,
Speaker 1: and you've got about thirty eight thousand black people in camps,
Speaker 1: about twenty thousand of whom die on the upside. Eventually,
Speaker 1: word of the nightmarish conditions in the concentration camps did
Speaker 1: escape South Africa and caused a wave of condemnation. The
Speaker 1: British put a guy named Lord Milner in charge of
Speaker 1: cleaning it up and trying to save the people who'd
Speaker 1: been put into cam amps. His notes about this period
Speaker 1: of time wound up getting found just a couple of
Speaker 1: years ago, and they give you a real insight into
Speaker 1: like the British imperial mentality over their own war crimes.
Speaker 1: I'm going to read this in a British voice, okay,
Speaker 1: so that'll make it more fun. It is impossible not
Speaker 1: to see, however blameless we may be in the matter,
Speaker 1: we shall not be able to make anybody think so.
Speaker 1: And I cannot avoid an uncomfortable feeling that there must
Speaker 1: be some way to make the thing a little less
Speaker 1: awfully bad, if one could only think of it. All right,
Speaker 1: I just love the idea, like, there must be some
Speaker 1: way to make this a little less bad, if we
Speaker 1: can only think of it. Don't put people in camps,
Speaker 1: don't put bad concentration. That's the way. Don't burn their farms. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very simple, actually, yeah, like people yeah uh, he
Speaker 1: noted that, you know, when he first got there in
Speaker 1: like nineteen o two, they'd hope that like all the
Speaker 1: weak kids had died first, so people would stop dying.
Speaker 1: But they didn't stop dying. And yeah, anyway, So the
Speaker 1: board concentration camps were horrible pr just as General Whaler's
Speaker 1: camps and Cube had been, but they were effective from
Speaker 1: a military standpoint. The British beat the Boers. This led
Speaker 1: the idea of concentration camps to spread like wildfire across
Speaker 1: the empires of the twentieth century. So in nineteen fifteen
Speaker 1: and sixteen, during World War One, the Ottoman Turks got
Speaker 1: up to a little bit of genocide against the Armenians.
Speaker 1: They killed probably around a one point five to two
Speaker 1: million of them in total. The Turkish government still claims
Speaker 1: this didn't happen. The US does not officially recognize it
Speaker 1: as a genocide because we need our military bases in Turkey.
Speaker 1: But it definitely happened. There's one point one point five millions, yeah,
Speaker 1: something like that. Generally, one point five is sort of
Speaker 1: the accepted middle ground. It might have been higher, it
Speaker 1: might have been at lower, but some somewhere around a
Speaker 1: million and a half people um, and there was a
Speaker 1: mix of ways. A lot of them were killed through
Speaker 1: mass executions, a lot of them were killed through starving,
Speaker 1: in forced marches. Most of them died in what was
Speaker 1: essentially a reverse trail of tears Suman with a trail
Speaker 1: of tears. They started in a concentration camp and they
Speaker 1: got marched to a reservation, and most people died during
Speaker 1: the march. Um They flipped that, so they marched people
Speaker 1: down to a desert around a town called deer Azor,
Speaker 1: and most of the people died marching towards the desert.
Speaker 1: Like something like a million people died on the March
Speaker 1: just from executions. They weren't given food, they weren't given water.
Speaker 1: It's like the Syrian desert. And then when they arrived
Speaker 1: at de Arezor they were put into a gigantic open
Speaker 1: air concentration camp near the town. Uh. They were forbidden
Speaker 1: food or water and had to bribe their guards to
Speaker 1: get anything. Uh. Roughly four thousand people died in this
Speaker 1: open air concentration camp. It was so many people died
Speaker 1: that a visitor to the area in two thousand two
Speaker 1: noted I was shown a piece of land that keeps subsiding.
Speaker 1: It is called the place of the Armenians. So many
Speaker 1: thousands of bodies were buried there that the ground has
Speaker 1: been sinking for the last eighty years. Human thigh bones
Speaker 1: and ribs come to the surface. Um. Yeah, it's bad,
Speaker 1: real bad. A monument. This is our world. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is the birth of the modern world. This is about
Speaker 1: a century ago. Um, and uh, very important for what
Speaker 1: comes next, because people were paying again, like the figures
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century, we're paying attention to all of this.
Speaker 1: They were paying attention to America's policy with the Native Americans.
Speaker 1: They paid attention to Cuba, to the Boer War and
Speaker 1: to what happened with the Armenians. Um. So a monument
Speaker 1: was built for the Armenian genocide and diraz or isis
Speaker 1: destroyed in two thousand and fourteen. Um. Hopefully it will
Speaker 1: be rebuilt at some point um. The main architect of
Speaker 1: the Armenian genocide was a guy named Talat Pasha. He
Speaker 1: was one of the young Turks who had risen to
Speaker 1: power in Turkey during the nineteen thirteen Kup. After World
Speaker 1: War One, he fled to Germany to escape prosecution for
Speaker 1: his war crimes. He was shot dead in Berlin and
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty one by Sgoman, Tillirian and Armenian, who lost
Speaker 1: his extended family in the genocide. Sogoman's trial brought knowledge
Speaker 1: of Turkish war crimes and German complicity in them into
Speaker 1: the public eye. He was acquitted the German courts at
Speaker 1: the time we're like, well, of course you shot that guy.
Speaker 1: He fucking he was terrible, and he was like carried
Speaker 1: out of the courtroom on people's shoulders. Which is the
Speaker 1: only happy story we're gonna have on the podcast today.
Speaker 1: Savor this for he's a jolly good fellow. So if
Speaker 1: you want you can kind of view, and I think
Speaker 1: it's often interesting to look at ideas as sort of
Speaker 1: like a virus, because you can kind of trace their
Speaker 1: spread around empire stare at history. And if you view
Speaker 1: the idea of concentration camps as a virus, you can
Speaker 1: watch it spreading, you know, from the germs of the
Speaker 1: idea to Cuba and then to the Bowers and then
Speaker 1: to the Armenian genocide and then tell it. Pasha brings
Speaker 1: it to Germany in the nineteen twenties just for World
Speaker 1: War Two. So you know what goes great with podcast
Speaker 1: about sad things? Uh? What? Happy things? Like the wonderful
Speaker 1: people who support this show. Oh yeah, let's listen. All right,
Speaker 1: we are back and we are talking about concentration camps.
Speaker 1: Trying to think of a cute name for that, but uh,
Speaker 1: focus camps, focus camps, even worse, imagination imagination camps. That's
Speaker 1: actually scarily close to it. We're actually calling the ones
Speaker 1: that we built for those kids tender age camps. Yeah well,
Speaker 1: uh yeah, really we probably don't have the flower. We'll
Speaker 1: get there eventually. We're in ninety one minute. So, as
Speaker 1: I just said, the guy who orchestrated the mass open
Speaker 1: air concentration camp in the desert that killed all the
Speaker 1: Armenians gets shot in Berlin in nine uh and the
Speaker 1: virus is passed on to the next nation that will
Speaker 1: lose it. I'm not going to go into an in
Speaker 1: depth history of Nazi concentration camps here. I'm going to
Speaker 1: hope most of you know that. If not, it really
Speaker 1: deserves its own focus thing. But I will read a
Speaker 1: couple of quotes that point out just how because I
Speaker 1: think one of the mistakes that a lot of education
Speaker 1: on concentration camps makes is that it over emphasizes how
Speaker 1: exceptional they are historically, which is important to due to
Speaker 1: some extent because no one has ever killed so many
Speaker 1: people so quickly as the Germans did in as camps.
Speaker 1: But they're part of an intellectual tradition that we've been
Speaker 1: tracing throughout the length of this podcast, and it's important
Speaker 1: to understand that at the time, the Germans justified what
Speaker 1: they were doing to themselves into the world by the
Speaker 1: fact that all of their enemies in these conflicts had
Speaker 1: also done it exactly. It's almost like, well, you can't
Speaker 1: tell me I can't do it, only you get to
Speaker 1: have concentration. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So here's a quote from
Speaker 1: Adolf Hitler, The Definitive Biography by Pulitzer Prize winner John Totland,
Speaker 1: which is a fantastic book if you're wanting to read
Speaker 1: about Hitler. Um quote. Hitler's concept of concentration camps, as
Speaker 1: well as the practicality of genocide, owed much so, he
Speaker 1: claimed to his studies of English and United States history.
Speaker 1: He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa
Speaker 1: and for the Indians in the Wild West, and often
Speaker 1: praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination
Speaker 1: by starvation and uneven combat of the Red savages who
Speaker 1: could not be tamed by captivity. So the German guff
Speaker 1: written the pre war years would generally use the Boer
Speaker 1: Wars camps as an excuse for their own camps. Here
Speaker 1: is a quote from the book British Concentration Camps. In
Speaker 1: February nineteen thirty nine, for example, Sir Nevil Henderson, British
Speaker 1: Ambassador to Germany, had a meeting with Herman Gerring. In
Speaker 1: the course of their encounter in Berlin, Henderson denounced the
Speaker 1: loathsome and detestable brutalities taking place in the concentration camps
Speaker 1: such as Dachau and Buchenwald. For answer, Garring went to
Speaker 1: a bookshelf and took down the volume of a German
Speaker 1: encyclopedia covering the letter K, and showed the ambassador the
Speaker 1: entry for Concentrachenslager, which began first used by the British
Speaker 1: in the South African War. Throughout the nineteen thirties, Minister
Speaker 1: for Propaganda Joseph Goebbels had also fostered the notion that
Speaker 1: concentration camps were British invention. Postcards purporting to show the
Speaker 1: grim conditions of the camps run by the British during
Speaker 1: the Boer Wars were circulated. A film om Paul was
Speaker 1: subsidized by the German government. This historical drama about the
Speaker 1: Boer War suggested that the British army had devised and
Speaker 1: operated the first concentration camps, which we know wasn't entirely true.
Speaker 1: The Cubans had, but this is how the Germans are
Speaker 1: justifying them. Yes, war and with the Americans did it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everyone else has done it. Hitler is also known to
Speaker 1: have stated during his run up to the invasion of Poland,
Speaker 1: when they were talking about getting rid of the Polish Jews,
Speaker 1: and people brought up like this is going to cause
Speaker 1: it an international outcry. A sentence he famously is credited
Speaker 1: to have said, is who now speaks today of the Armenians?
Speaker 1: So say that the who now speaks to the day
Speaker 1: of the Armenians. So people were like, what if we
Speaker 1: try to get rid of all the Jews in Poland,
Speaker 1: people are gonna be angry at us. And Hitler was like,
Speaker 1: why do you think anyone's gonna get piste off. Do
Speaker 1: you hear anyone yelling about the Armenians. Nobody. Nobody's angry
Speaker 1: at Turkey for what they did. Nobody won't care about
Speaker 1: that until to exist in seventeen when they have their
Speaker 1: parade in Los Angeles, like yeah, so sad, yeah, and
Speaker 1: it causes international outrage, which like you can't you Still
Speaker 1: to this day it's very difficult to film a documentary
Speaker 1: about the Armenian genocide. There was a famous book that
Speaker 1: came out, I think of the thirties or forties about
Speaker 1: there's this one group of Armenians who like hold up
Speaker 1: on top of a mountain and fought off the Ottoman
Speaker 1: Army until like a French warship rescued them, and it
Speaker 1: is this crazy story that people have tried to make
Speaker 1: into a movie a couple of times, and every time
Speaker 1: the Turkish government will come in and say, like, we
Speaker 1: won't take any movies from America period. No one will
Speaker 1: be able to run movies in our country. No Hollywood
Speaker 1: studio if you make this movie. Yeah, so it's amazing,
Speaker 1: how cowardly. Yeah we all uh yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: even Barack Obama, before he was elected president, talked about
Speaker 1: the Armenian genocide and acknowledge it as a genocide. And
Speaker 1: then as president he continued the U S line of
Speaker 1: denying it ever happened, not denying it ever happened. But
Speaker 1: we won't call it a genocide because we need those bases,
Speaker 1: because we can't bomb the Middle East without our basis
Speaker 1: and Insertla, which is where we have our bases in Turkey.
Speaker 1: So from the Hitler point of view, I think it's
Speaker 1: important just to understand while the German concentration camps, and
Speaker 1: particularly the deaf camps, because they weren't all they weren't
Speaker 1: all the same kind of thing. They were different types
Speaker 1: of camps. Because people died in all of the camps
Speaker 1: but some of the camps, their purpose was not to
Speaker 1: kill people. People just died there because the Germans didn't
Speaker 1: give him a ship. And then like Auschwitz had concentration
Speaker 1: camps in it where people the point wasn't execution. The
Speaker 1: point was a labor camp. It also had extermination camps
Speaker 1: in it, but it was a gigantic facility. This is
Speaker 1: the when I because you, like you said, people know
Speaker 1: about that, but I was one of the people who
Speaker 1: lumped it all in and I'm just thinking, oh, it's
Speaker 1: just a place where they killed a whole bunch of people.
Speaker 1: And the movie that made me actually challenge that was
Speaker 1: X Men The Last or the First Class. In the
Speaker 1: beginning of the movie, when Magnetos's mom got taken away
Speaker 1: from him and they were supposed to be in concentration camps,
Speaker 1: We're not mistaken. I was like, they all don't look
Speaker 1: like they're there to die, uh and you know, and
Speaker 1: but they were taken her away to go to the
Speaker 1: death camp. Yea, to the death camp. And so that
Speaker 1: made me look into it, like, oh wow, there were
Speaker 1: multiple camps. Well that's good. So thank you x men. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you x Men for helping to spread some good
Speaker 1: history there, I guess, yeah, that's that's what made me
Speaker 1: look into it. Yeah, And it's important to understand like
Speaker 1: it is important because I used to before I dropped
Speaker 1: out of school. The last two years was spent on
Speaker 1: like Holocaust studies, Like that was the thing that I
Speaker 1: did in college. And it's very important, particularly to Jewish
Speaker 1: scholars of the Holocaust, to emphasize how unique the Holocaust
Speaker 1: Wasn't that is important because nothing quite like it has
Speaker 1: ever happened. But it's also I think important to understand
Speaker 1: that it's the middle of a long intellectual tradition. Like
Speaker 1: the Germans were pointing to other examples in history when
Speaker 1: they carried out they got it from somewhere. They didn't
Speaker 1: come out of nowhere. Um, And I think that's important.
Speaker 1: They looked at it was like we'll make it bigger. Yeah, yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: It's also important to understand that the Germans were not
Speaker 1: the only people using concentration camps in World War Two.
Speaker 1: The Japaneese internment camps in America were a type of
Speaker 1: concentration to Wright in Griffith Park right in Griffith Park. Um.
Speaker 1: They were not as brutal, obviously as the Nazi camps.
Speaker 1: But eighteen hundred and sixty two people are known to
Speaker 1: have died in our Japanese concentration camps. UH some of
Speaker 1: them from disease, some more old people from heart attacks,
Speaker 1: but some people were shot by American soldiers. UM we
Speaker 1: tend to use the intern internment camp now, and that
Speaker 1: appears to be the result of a successful propaganda campaign
Speaker 1: to separate what we did to the Japanese Americans from
Speaker 1: what the Nazis did to Jewish Germans. At the time,
Speaker 1: though that the camps were proposed, FDR used the term
Speaker 1: concentration camp to describe what we were doing in In
Speaker 1: nineteen forty six, Harold Ike, former Secretary of the Interior,
Speaker 1: said this, As a member of President Roosevelt administration, I
Speaker 1: saw the United States Army give way to mass hysteria
Speaker 1: over the Japanese crowded into cars like cattle. These hapless
Speaker 1: people were hurried away to hastily constructed and thoroughly inadequate
Speaker 1: concentration camps with soldiers with nervous muskets on guard in
Speaker 1: the Great American Desert. We gave the fancy name of
Speaker 1: relocation centers to these dust bols, but they were concentration camps. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: this was not America's last flirtation with concentration camps. And no,
Speaker 1: I'm not talking about the camps we've built for immigrant
Speaker 1: children in the desert. We're not even there yet. The
Speaker 1: USA actually tried out the whole concentration camp idea again
Speaker 1: before that point. In nineteen sixty one and sixty two,
Speaker 1: the US government began to execute what was called the
Speaker 1: Strategic Hamlet program in Vietnam, which sounds nice like hamlet. Hamlet.
Speaker 1: That's a cute word. Hamlets. Yeah, STRATEGI king, Yeah, it's cute.
Speaker 1: The basic idea was to fortify certain towns, to wall
Speaker 1: them off, and to make them defensible in order to
Speaker 1: isolate communist guerrillas from local support. Locals who lived outside
Speaker 1: these towns would be relocated inside the walls. Does that
Speaker 1: sound familiar at all? Sounds like something Cuba was getting
Speaker 1: up to. Um exactly, yeah, exactly. It was not as
Speaker 1: that bad, but it was pretty awful. Large numbers of
Speaker 1: peasants were forced from their homes. Many watched as their
Speaker 1: houses were burnt behind them. Some peasants were executed by
Speaker 1: South Vietnamese forces, although we have no death toll for
Speaker 1: this program, as we do for the other camps. Here
Speaker 1: is quote from a US military report on one of
Speaker 1: these strahugic hamlets. Unfortunately, the government was able to talk
Speaker 1: only seventy families into relocating into the new hamlet. Another
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty five families were forced out of their
Speaker 1: homes and into the new settlement. Some came with meager belongings.
Speaker 1: Many had only the clothes on their backs. Their old
Speaker 1: homes were burned behind them to preclude their sneaking back. Uh,
Speaker 1: it didn't work. I don't know, this might be a
Speaker 1: spoiler alert, but Vietnam did not end well for US
Speaker 1: or South Vietnam, and this was a big factor. So
Speaker 1: number one, it convinced a lot of Vietnamese people to
Speaker 1: join the viet Cong because we just can burnt my
Speaker 1: house down like I don't I don't like you. Um.
Speaker 1: And it was also like what started the escalation in
Speaker 1: the fighting because the nineteen sixty one, when the Strategic
Speaker 1: Hamlet program started, the North Vietnamese wouldn't attack American military
Speaker 1: basis um. They were considered no go zones because they
Speaker 1: didn't want to escalate ship with US a large military.
Speaker 1: We're terrifying Uh, they awaited attacking Americans for the most part,
Speaker 1: but that ended in nineteen sixty five after a few
Speaker 1: years of this policy. Um. Now, that Defense Department report
Speaker 1: that I read stated the inspiration for the Strategic Hamlet
Speaker 1: program came largely from the British responses to the Malayan emergency. Uh,
Speaker 1: from nineteen forty eight to nineteen sixty Have you ever
Speaker 1: heard of the Malayan Emergency? You've heard of the British
Speaker 1: colony in Malaya? I have that. Yeah. I hadn't even
Speaker 1: heard of that when I started this. So you're you're
Speaker 1: ahead of me in that in school? Okay, Yeah, well
Speaker 1: you're good school because I didn't even know they'd fucking
Speaker 1: been in in what's modern day Malaysia at that point. So, UM,
Speaker 1: the Malayan Emergency is interesting because it might be the
Speaker 1: one case, it's the only case I've read about where
Speaker 1: concentration camps actually worked out really well for everybody, including
Speaker 1: the people inside of them. It's a weird case study,
Speaker 1: but it's important to cover. So Malaya was a British colony.
Speaker 1: Bad economic programs brought on by bad British policies post
Speaker 1: World War Two led to a communist up rising. UH.
Speaker 1: It's called the Malayan Emergency and not the Malayan Civil War. Uh,
Speaker 1: due to lobbying from British business owners in Malaya because
Speaker 1: their insurance wouldn't cover war. So that's why it's the
Speaker 1: Malayan emergency because like, yeah, which is wacky. Um So
Speaker 1: the British called the people fighting them communists terrorists. Uh.
Speaker 1: There were groups of Chinese people living in Malaya who
Speaker 1: had been trained and armed by the British and World
Speaker 1: War two to fight the Japanese um and who then
Speaker 1: turned their guns on the British when you know World
Speaker 1: War two ended, which just doesn't sound like anything that's
Speaker 1: ever happened again, Yeah, that was the last time Western
Speaker 1: power would have that happened to them. Um. So the
Speaker 1: emergency kicked off when a group of communists executed three
Speaker 1: British farmers. This prompted the colonial government to suspend all
Speaker 1: civil liberties and arrest suspects for up to two years
Speaker 1: prior to charging them. Despite their harsh methods, the emergency
Speaker 1: did not go great for the British at first. Their
Speaker 1: main opponent was a guy named Chin Peng, who was
Speaker 1: a twenty six year old bicycle shop owner and apparently
Speaker 1: bicycle shop. Owning and running an insurgency are two trains,
Speaker 1: and yeah, worked really well together. You can qualify, you
Speaker 1: can fix a tire, you can bomb a military convoy
Speaker 1: um and then get away on your bikey. So for
Speaker 1: a while the Chinese insurgents were winning, but in nineteen fifty,
Speaker 1: Lieutenant General Harold Briggs came up with a plan to
Speaker 1: eliminate the insurgency. So the communist forces during this emergency
Speaker 1: were largely Chinese, and they received most of their support
Speaker 1: from ethnic Chinese squatters who lived in slums outside the
Speaker 1: main Malayan cities. Now, these people, the squatters, had no
Speaker 1: title to their land, so they didn't own anything, and
Speaker 1: they had no sense of investment in the cities around
Speaker 1: them or in Malaya as a as a community because
Speaker 1: they were just considered squatters. So Briggs's plan was to
Speaker 1: build Walden fortified villages and move some four thousand squatters
Speaker 1: into them. Based on everything I've talked about today, you
Speaker 1: might have expected to end in disaster, but it didn't.
Speaker 1: The camps they built were like large, they were made
Speaker 1: out of concrete, They had electricity, clean drinking water, schools
Speaker 1: and clinics, and the British government gave the people brought
Speaker 1: their title to the land. So it made all four
Speaker 1: thousands these people landowners. Uh and it worked. So yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's only it's only that by name, man, I
Speaker 1: mean it's a concentration camp. It is the same thing.
Speaker 1: But it's the most humane execution. Yeah, and many people
Speaker 1: did did you say that? Did I miss that? There
Speaker 1: were definitely some people who died, but there's no like
Speaker 1: there's no evidence of like large scale starvation and disease.
Speaker 1: But yeah, like the British did execute people in the
Speaker 1: course of the war. I'm not going to claim that
Speaker 1: like they were blameless in this. There was at least
Speaker 1: one case where they kill like twenty something civilians. But
Speaker 1: it's compared to everything else on this list, it's by
Speaker 1: far the most humane execution of the plan. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it it did. A lot of Malayans were made
Speaker 1: angry because they didn't like the Chinese squatters or whatever.
Speaker 1: But the insurgency eventually stopped, and a lot of the
Speaker 1: people who were put into these what were called new
Speaker 1: villages seemed to think it was a positive step because
Speaker 1: now they owned land and they had electricity and clean
Speaker 1: water and stuff. Um. So if the British got concentration
Speaker 1: camps right in Malaya. If that is fair to say,
Speaker 1: it's probably because they had more practice than any other
Speaker 1: people on the planet at running concentration camps. Um. You've
Speaker 1: heard the expression that if you've got a hammer, everything
Speaker 1: looks like a nail. Well, if you've got the British Empire,
Speaker 1: every problem looks like it needs a concentration can't built
Speaker 1: around it. Um. The British used concentration camps, like I said,
Speaker 1: more than anyone else, probably in history, more than I
Speaker 1: had ever heard before I started researching this. Um, you
Speaker 1: don't even that's not something that you even fathom. You
Speaker 1: don't connect your concentration camp. You think Germans for sure,
Speaker 1: And you know what I mean. Yeah, some people know
Speaker 1: about the ones that popped up in other countries and
Speaker 1: thing lack. I know about the one here in America.
Speaker 1: I heard about one in Spain, but not to the
Speaker 1: scale that this was, you know, like the World Cup,
Speaker 1: and it just happened every four years or some ship.
Speaker 1: The British put them everywhere, including on their own soil.
Speaker 1: So during World War One, the British built concentration camps
Speaker 1: for German citizens who had been captured on boats or
Speaker 1: who had just happened to be in England when the
Speaker 1: war started. Many of these people were forced to labor
Speaker 1: in British fields. The book British Concentration Camps points to
Speaker 1: an article in The Guardian from December fourth, nineteen fourteen,
Speaker 1: titled disorder at Lancaster Concentration Camp. Here's a quote from
Speaker 1: the book. The disorder at Lancaster Concentration Camp was dealt
Speaker 1: with by a bayonet charge against unarmed civilians. On nineteenth
Speaker 1: November that same year, protested another concentration camp on the
Speaker 1: Isle of Man resulted in troops firing volleys of shots
Speaker 1: at the inmates, killing six of them. Among the dead
Speaker 1: were two men who had until three months earlier been
Speaker 1: working as waiters and hotels. Later in the war, the
Speaker 1: British established the Frogoch concentration camp and an abandoned factory.
Speaker 1: More than two thousand irishmen were held there. In nineteen forty,
Speaker 1: with fears of a German invasion stoking panic, Winston Churchill
Speaker 1: had every German and Austrian in the country arrested and
Speaker 1: sent to concentration camps. Here's another quote from that book.
Speaker 1: To those who reminded him that many of these people
Speaker 1: were Jewish refugees. He responded briefly and memorably, caller the lot.
Speaker 1: Of course, no one wanted to call these new institutions
Speaker 1: concentration camps, so they renamed them internment camps to differentiate
Speaker 1: them from the Nazis practice. So the British were keeping
Speaker 1: concentration camps that included Jewish refugees on British soil and
Speaker 1: forcing them to labor in British fields the entirety of
Speaker 1: World War Two. There were also Polish concentration camps that
Speaker 1: existed in Poland prior to the German invasion, and when
Speaker 1: the Germans conquered Poland, a bunch of Polish soldiers, like
Speaker 1: twenty thousand of them in the Polish government were exiled
Speaker 1: to the United Kingdom. The UK gave them a bunch
Speaker 1: of land in Scotland, which was essentially treated as sovereign
Speaker 1: territory for the government exile, and the Poles built concentration
Speaker 1: camps in Scotland the house political dissidents, including Jewish political dissidents. Yeah,
Speaker 1: multiple Jewish prisoners were executed in Polish concentration camps in
Speaker 1: Scotland during World War two, more than three thousand people
Speaker 1: were imprisoned and forced to farm in England up until nine.
Speaker 1: While Nazi concentration camp guards were on trial in Nuremberg,
Speaker 1: the British were using forced civilian labor housed in concentration
Speaker 1: camps to harvest their crops. This modern day slavery, Monday slavery.
Speaker 1: And I could go on there just we may do
Speaker 1: a whole podcast someday on just British concentration camps. That
Speaker 1: the champions of the world. Yeah, they are the World
Speaker 1: Cup winners of putting people in camps, lord man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And there are hundreds of examples from other countries. I
Speaker 1: didn't even get into the French regroupment camps in Algeria,
Speaker 1: into which more than a million Muslim villagers were forced
Speaker 1: to move. There were Spanish concentration camps in the Canary Islands.
Speaker 1: The twentieth century was the century of concentration camps. And
Speaker 1: now it looks like the one might wind up being
Speaker 1: one too. Yeah. That's that's the sad part is you know.
Speaker 1: So here here's the thing that's crazy to me, especially
Speaker 1: a lot of the stuff we were talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: where you have where you know, a lot of these
Speaker 1: generals and a lot of these people by name, like
Speaker 1: General Whaler, they were just here, not heroes, but they
Speaker 1: were like champions of what they did right. And how
Speaker 1: that's kind of changed today, Like you don't know a
Speaker 1: single person's name when they're fighting, and you don't know
Speaker 1: one person's name from the Iraqi War or something like that.
Speaker 1: Maybe you do, but nothing like a General Whaler who
Speaker 1: was on the battlefield fighting and ship like that. And
Speaker 1: it's just so much more diffuse now. Like you'll notice
Speaker 1: that when it started out, when we start talking about
Speaker 1: the reservations, their individual people like Andrew Jackson can talk
Speaker 1: about the role they played. We can talk about General Whaler,
Speaker 1: we can talk about Tolt Pasha. But the more camps
Speaker 1: there are that we stopped hearing names just because it's
Speaker 1: just any one guy's idea way of culture. It's what
Speaker 1: you do exactly culture. It's part of Western culture is
Speaker 1: putting people into camps. And that's the sad part. Yeah,
Speaker 1: except now is becoming a name again. Yeah, and now
Speaker 1: we have some concentration camps in South Texas. Uh. These
Speaker 1: camps did not start as part of a war, but
Speaker 1: they did come out about as an attempted solution to
Speaker 1: a real problem. Some of this may be familiar to
Speaker 1: you've been keeping up with the news, but may have
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve, less than a thousand people traveling as
Speaker 1: families were caught by border patrol, right they may have
Speaker 1: two thousand fourteen. That number had increased to twelve th
Speaker 1: eight hundred. Uh. The numbers have subsided since then, less
Speaker 1: than I think ten thousand last year. But it's still
Speaker 1: a big issue. And this is not something that we've
Speaker 1: ever like illegal immigration has been a thing that has
Speaker 1: happened or forever. Families coming as groups is a new thing,
Speaker 1: and you know they're largely coming because of political instability.
Speaker 1: You could call them refugees, although we call them asylum seekers.
Speaker 1: There's whether or not someone's an asylum seeker refugee depends
Speaker 1: on the country of origin. Like it's like a legal
Speaker 1: term um. The Obama administration tried holding entire families their
Speaker 1: cases were pending, but that's illegal because of a court
Speaker 1: case I think from which says that you can't hold
Speaker 1: children in immigration attention. You have to release them to
Speaker 1: the least restricted means available. The Obama administration did not
Speaker 1: want to be seen as cutting families apart, so they
Speaker 1: often would just release people. UH. This became politicized and
Speaker 1: talked about by Republicans as quote unquote catch and release policy,
Speaker 1: and the Trump administration did not want to continue catch
Speaker 1: and release policy. The result was that between October one,
Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen, and two thousand eighteen, hundred children at
Speaker 1: least were separated from their parents. That's roughly an average
Speaker 1: of forty five per day. UH. These children were put
Speaker 1: in the least restrictive surroundings available to the government in
Speaker 1: many cases that wound up being tender aid shelters, which
Speaker 1: you've seen on the news and maybe heard the audio of.
Speaker 1: H First Lady Laura Bush compared these shelters to the
Speaker 1: internment camps for Japanese Americans in World War Two. They are, however,
Speaker 1: concentration camps, as where the internment camps the people in
Speaker 1: them have committed no crimes and are not prisoners of war.
Speaker 1: The Los Angeles Times described one of these facilities on
Speaker 1: as Ursula. The kids inside it called La Pereira or
Speaker 1: dog Kennel, as clean and spare, with bear concrete floors.
Speaker 1: The facilities cleaned three times daily in order to avoid
Speaker 1: the concentration camp becoming the disease written kind of hellhole
Speaker 1: that most concentration kimes in history have become. Um. A
Speaker 1: Democratic congressman who visited the site said it was nothing
Speaker 1: sort of a prison. Jacob Suberov, journalist who visited, stated,
Speaker 1: I was inside the building and there are babies sitting
Speaker 1: by themselves in a cage with other babies. That's inhumane. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's inhumane, And I think, yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: what people who are not outraged by this, uh, their
Speaker 1: idea is probably what we were saying earlier, how they
Speaker 1: think concentration camp only means yeah, death, death camp and
Speaker 1: putting people in oven and we're clearly not doing that,
Speaker 1: and we're clearly not doing that. But you get you
Speaker 1: get human beings and kate children. You're ripping them from
Speaker 1: their families. They're sleeping on concrete like they're not prisoners
Speaker 1: in there being treated yet worse than prisoner they have committed,
Speaker 1: not worse crime. Yeah. So, I mean one of the
Speaker 1: things that is emphasized constantly by the government personnel who
Speaker 1: are taking care of these places when journalists will go
Speaker 1: on tours of them so far, is how clean they are,
Speaker 1: how often they're cleaned, that their medical personnel and whatnot,
Speaker 1: and that is true. Like, I can't imagine there's not
Speaker 1: gonna be a typhoid outbreaking one of these places. It's
Speaker 1: not gonna be tuberculosis. But one thing that is consistent
Speaker 1: among all the concentration camps pretty much that we've covered today,
Speaker 1: is that they are breeding grounds for disease. And while
Speaker 1: these camps that we're building in Texas, that we put
Speaker 1: these kids in, they're not going to be breeding grounds
Speaker 1: for physical diseases, there's a lot of evidence that they
Speaker 1: will be breeding grounds for mental and emotional diseases. So
Speaker 1: you're fucking these people, Yes, you are irrevocably messing these
Speaker 1: children's minds. Shane O'Mara is a neuroscientist in Dublin. He's
Speaker 1: conducted studies on how things like torture affect the human brain.
Speaker 1: I interviewed him once back in the day for an
Speaker 1: article I was writing, and I follow him on Twitter. Now,
Speaker 1: when the stories about these child concentration camps broke, he
Speaker 1: posted a thread summarizing all of the research into how
Speaker 1: separating young children from their parents and putting them in
Speaker 1: institutions damages kids. I'll have a link to the Twitter
Speaker 1: threat on our website. He cites a lot of different sources.
Speaker 1: I'm only going to talk about one of those right now,
Speaker 1: which it was a Scientific American article about the largest
Speaker 1: study ever performed on a group of institutionalized children who
Speaker 1: had been separated from their parents. Um. This came from
Speaker 1: back in night the late nineteen sixties. The Romanian dictator
Speaker 1: Nikolai Chachesku decided his country and needed more of what
Speaker 1: he called human capital, which is people. UM. So he
Speaker 1: banned birth control and abortion and created a celibacy tax
Speaker 1: for families with less than five children. Government minstrel police
Speaker 1: examined women to make sure they were putting out enough babies.
Speaker 1: It was a huge success in terms of the amount
Speaker 1: of babies increased in Romania, but Romanians didn't have enough
Speaker 1: money to support their multiple football teams worth of children.
Speaker 1: So by nineteen eighty nine, more than a hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy thousand kids had been handed over to government institutions
Speaker 1: and separated by their parents. Uh. This is terrible, but
Speaker 1: studying those children provided researchers an opportunity to learn what's
Speaker 1: separating kids from their families and putting them in an
Speaker 1: institution does to developing minds. I'm going to quote from
Speaker 1: a Harvard summary of the actual study. The study found
Speaker 1: that institutionalized children were severely impaired in i Q and
Speaker 1: manifested a variety of social and emotional disorders, as well
Speaker 1: as changes in brain development. However, the earlier and institutionalized
Speaker 1: child was placed into foster care, the better the recovery. Now,
Speaker 1: the presidents recently promised to put an into his policy
Speaker 1: of separating families. It's a known how this is going
Speaker 1: to work, since there's a bunch of problems with the
Speaker 1: idea of keeping whole families in detention. That's what the
Speaker 1: Obama administration ran into. Uh so we don't really know
Speaker 1: what's going to happen. Um, hopefully no more kids will
Speaker 1: be separated from their families, but there's also the case
Speaker 1: of the children who have been We don't know how
Speaker 1: many of those are going to be put back in
Speaker 1: touch with their families. When he signed that law, yeah,
Speaker 1: everybody got it excited, but it was not too It
Speaker 1: doesn't solve children, and in most cases it really wasn't
Speaker 1: for anything. Yeah, and it's it's uh, I mean, the
Speaker 1: broader problem is that we continue to have like none
Speaker 1: of these people that were putting in camps, because we're
Speaker 1: putting adults in detention centers too, and the adults are
Speaker 1: not criminals, they're asylum seekers. There are people who are
Speaker 1: fleeing war, and in a lot of cases, like the
Speaker 1: people coming from Guatemala and El Salvador, those are civil
Speaker 1: wars that exist in part because the United States funded
Speaker 1: and supported the civil war beginning. Uh, there's a genocide
Speaker 1: that's been going on off and on in Guatemala for
Speaker 1: decades that we funded and supported, and we executed the
Speaker 1: president who led to the creation of the civil war
Speaker 1: because we killed that guy, and like that's a big
Speaker 1: part of this history. So like there's whether or not
Speaker 1: the kids continue to be kept in separate camps. We
Speaker 1: will continue to be putting families in concentration camps um.
Speaker 1: And I think it's worth noting that very rarely in
Speaker 1: my research did I come across a case where concentration
Speaker 1: camps were used by a country who won the conflict
Speaker 1: that those camps were built in order to establish. The
Speaker 1: British Malayan camps worked out all right, but the British
Speaker 1: lost control of Malaya and they lost the rest of
Speaker 1: their empire. The Spanish lost Cuba, the Germans lost everything. Uh.
Speaker 1: Concentration camps achieved their short, short term goals. They rarely
Speaker 1: work out in the long run, with the exception of
Speaker 1: the United States. Wow. So yeah, I mean maybe that
Speaker 1: that that beacon on the hill. We're number one, yea
Speaker 1: or number one? Is I'm putting people in camps and
Speaker 1: getting away with it. Yeah, that's what power does, man,
Speaker 1: That's what the power and money and having a big
Speaker 1: as military toes well in an ocean in between you
Speaker 1: and everybody else except for like Canada. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean this is I mean, this is depressing. Uh no joking,
Speaker 1: it's depressing, man, because you know, I think this is
Speaker 1: something that a lot of people our age or in
Speaker 1: our generation, we've we've put this out of our history.
Speaker 1: Uh not out of our history, but it's not something
Speaker 1: that we think about. We only hear about one kind
Speaker 1: of concentration camp, and that's Germany. That's toxic Germany. It's
Speaker 1: isolated in time. There were four bad years and then
Speaker 1: it didn't happen again or before, and it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's a little sad that people don't know that has
Speaker 1: happened before. And to hear that it's still happening because
Speaker 1: you think we've gotten better. Yeah, we haven't. And I mean,
Speaker 1: I get it. You obviously nothing that anyone has done
Speaker 1: since has been as bad as the Nazi death camps.
Speaker 1: But that's a low bar to say, because we're not
Speaker 1: exterminating people. It's a very low bar. Yeah, man, I don't,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't understand, you know, I I access
Speaker 1: question before our people inherently good? Are they inherently bad?
Speaker 1: And you hear ship like this, and you're just like,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think the answer is people aren't inherently
Speaker 1: good or inherently bad. People are inherently the products of
Speaker 1: their culture. And if your culture is one that allows,
Speaker 1: for example, slavery, then people who today might be good
Speaker 1: people would think slavery is fine because they grew up
Speaker 1: in eighteen forties America. And most people you know who
Speaker 1: lived in America in the eighteen forties weren't abolitionists. Um
Speaker 1: or how we redefine what these things mean? Yeah, these
Speaker 1: things don't go away. Slavery hasn't gone away. Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: not in change and being whipped and sold and you
Speaker 1: know all that ship, but uh, there are people out
Speaker 1: there still trying to figure out ways to keep people
Speaker 1: enslaved in different ways, more palatable ways, more palatable ways.
Speaker 1: It's like, we have them work in prisons as opposed
Speaker 1: to plantations, and that's not gross to people. Because they
Speaker 1: did something, we could say they did a thing, they
Speaker 1: did a bad thing, just like, well, it's not wrong
Speaker 1: that we're putting these asylum seekers in camps because they
Speaker 1: broke the law imaginary border, which is like, well, I
Speaker 1: mean if you were holding a Jewish family in Amsterdam
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty three and hiding them from the Germans,
Speaker 1: you were breaking the law. Breaking the law is more
Speaker 1: often a right thing than a wrong thing historically, like
Speaker 1: or at least it's fifty fifty. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: I said this on Culture Kings. I think we could well,
Speaker 1: I don't know when this is going to drop, but
Speaker 1: I said this on one episode. Um that without ethics,
Speaker 1: laws mean nothing because just because it's a law fifty
Speaker 1: sixty years ago, it was against the law for me
Speaker 1: to date my girlfriend. You know, it was against Jesus law.
Speaker 1: But you know that I don't want to hear these
Speaker 1: laws bullshit because without ethics, laws mean nothing and that's
Speaker 1: something I try to remember, like you say, fifty sixty
Speaker 1: years ago. And the way I like to think about
Speaker 1: it is I walked past someone on the street today
Speaker 1: who can remember when it would have been illegal for
Speaker 1: you today. Your like that, Yeah, I mean like, yeah,
Speaker 1: are are there many survivors still left? Not many, there's
Speaker 1: a few, But people don't understand the connection is still there.
Speaker 1: Even if my grandmother doesn't remember slavery, for instance, somebody
Speaker 1: very close to her immediate family does. Yeah, they're passed away,
Speaker 1: but that connection is still there. Her mom had a
Speaker 1: mom who was a slavey, or somebody who was in
Speaker 1: those death camps, had somebody connected to their generation or
Speaker 1: connected to their family who was in there. And the
Speaker 1: fact that we don't learn from that ship and we
Speaker 1: don't try to change, and we aren't uproaris we should
Speaker 1: like that. I don't even I can't even really put
Speaker 1: it into words, how saiding it is. And I think
Speaker 1: there's a mistake. I think when people fight against this stuff,
Speaker 1: which any kind of thing you're trying to do to
Speaker 1: fight against this fucking policy border is good, but I
Speaker 1: think people focus too much on changing the laws, which
Speaker 1: it doesn't. It's the culture that has and it's that's
Speaker 1: why I think the people who are doing stuff like
Speaker 1: up in Portland blockading the ICE headquarters and stopping the
Speaker 1: ICE employees from leaving at night to see their families,
Speaker 1: or chasing down the Department of Health and Human Services
Speaker 1: secretary at a Mexican restaurant, or finding Stephen Miller when
Speaker 1: he's eating and like screaming at them and calling them
Speaker 1: like that almost does more good than fighting. Like, obviously
Speaker 1: it's important to fight in the courts and stuff, but
Speaker 1: making it clear that as a culture we're not fucking
Speaker 1: cool with this, that's the most important thing. Because everything
Speaker 1: spawns from the culture. And when we elected Trump, it
Speaker 1: was assigned to certain elements within our culture that things
Speaker 1: are going to roll back. And if we don't want
Speaker 1: things to roll back to fifty sixty years ago, like
Speaker 1: we have to fucking like it starts with shame and
Speaker 1: screaming and being really angry. Yeah, yeah, Do you know
Speaker 1: in your research, did you ever see if there was
Speaker 1: have there ever been any more concentration camps in Germany? Um,
Speaker 1: not that I'm aware. I mean, well, okay, so there
Speaker 1: were camps operated by the Soviet Union in parts of Germany,
Speaker 1: like Saxenhausen, which is a camp outside of Berlin that
Speaker 1: was a concentration camp for primarily Jewish people and political
Speaker 1: prisoners in some POWs during World War Two that the
Speaker 1: Nazis operated. When the Russians liberated it, they just filled
Speaker 1: it up with their prisoners. Um, and I didn't. I
Speaker 1: didn't talk about the Russian gulags, which you could you
Speaker 1: might argue, should be on a concentration camp podcast. The
Speaker 1: people who were put in the gulags had all been
Speaker 1: convicted of a crime, and those crimes were usually bullshit,
Speaker 1: because the Soviet Union was just throwing everybody who they
Speaker 1: defined as an enemy out of the camps. But it
Speaker 1: was different than just we're going to lock up all
Speaker 1: these women and children who have actually who have not.
Speaker 1: We're not even saying they've committed a crime. We just
Speaker 1: need to put them in a camp. Which is why
Speaker 1: I've separated the two. Which is not to say we
Speaker 1: won't cover goologs at some point, But yeah, there there
Speaker 1: were camps that you could call a concentration camp that
Speaker 1: we're in Germany post towards not really deaf camps though,
Speaker 1: nothing to that extreme. And you don't hear about them much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's I mean, there's not as much because like
Speaker 1: we're only starting to understand in the last ten or
Speaker 1: fifteen years getting a good idea of how the Goologs
Speaker 1: and Russia really worked, because you know, it's very recently
Speaker 1: that those archives got open to the world. So yeah,
Speaker 1: here's the thing. I, as a black man, can't say
Speaker 1: there's something changing, and I can feel it because people
Speaker 1: have been asking for this change for decades, you know,
Speaker 1: the change and the way people think and how you
Speaker 1: treat people and stuff like that. What I can say
Speaker 1: is the generation we're in where everything is loud and
Speaker 1: visible is helping. Yeah, because people have an outlet too
Speaker 1: instantly tell you how they feel about something, and they
Speaker 1: have an outlet to instantly show you what's wrong. And
Speaker 1: even though we live in like a twenty four hour
Speaker 1: news cycle, I do think that the fact that things
Speaker 1: are just so in our face and so instant, and
Speaker 1: we see them coming back to back to back to back,
Speaker 1: that something hopefully will change to the point that are
Speaker 1: hopefully our kids and their kids I don't have to
Speaker 1: deal with this ship like anymore. I think that there's
Speaker 1: there's a different story running through you know the podcast
Speaker 1: they just delivered the story of the concentration camp. There
Speaker 1: is a more uplifting story, which is the story of
Speaker 1: you look back at when we were putting Indians on
Speaker 1: reservations in marching and and exit and carrying out, you know,
Speaker 1: genocidal acts. There wasn't it wasn't a single genocide against
Speaker 1: the Native Americans. There was a bunch of different genocidal
Speaker 1: acts against specific tribes. But you listen to how Andrew
Speaker 1: Jackson talked about them, and he didn't talk about them
Speaker 1: like they were human beings. And I don't think you
Speaker 1: go back to the eighteen hundreds, the early eighteen hundreds
Speaker 1: and you go to a person in England or a
Speaker 1: person in France, and you say like, hey, this guy
Speaker 1: over in China, this guy over in Africa, this guy,
Speaker 1: are they all human beings? Most people would say no.
Speaker 1: Most people would say they're different, They're not the same,
Speaker 1: They're not as human as I am, right, And that's
Speaker 1: why you can justify stuff like slavery and stuff like
Speaker 1: the slaughter and the congo. But throughout this story where
Speaker 1: you've got all these concentration camps, you also have people
Speaker 1: getting outraged about them, and that growing. You know, it
Speaker 1: starts with the outrage against Cuba, and then they're outrage
Speaker 1: at the boers, and then it hits a fucking fever
Speaker 1: pitch at the outrage over the German concentration camps, which
Speaker 1: is why everyone starts finding new names for these things
Speaker 1: after that, and why they stopped killing so many people
Speaker 1: in them. Um. And so the uplifting story in this
Speaker 1: dark story of concentration camps is that now we're at
Speaker 1: a point where you go anywhere in the world. You
Speaker 1: go to China, you go to the British England, you
Speaker 1: go to Zaire, whatever, you talk to an average person
Speaker 1: on the street and you say, hey, this guy half
Speaker 1: a world awaite, is he a human being the same
Speaker 1: as you? Now, I think most people say yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's like, yeah, that's the uplifting part. And I
Speaker 1: think that's kind of what I was trying to allude to,
Speaker 1: is there's been outrage yeah before, it's just our outrage
Speaker 1: is growing because we can connect our outrage to somebody
Speaker 1: across the world almost instantly. Yeah. Um, So we don't
Speaker 1: need to just be in the same room to say, hey,
Speaker 1: are you outraged? Yeah, I'm outraged too. Now we can see,
Speaker 1: oh man, there are people all around this world who
Speaker 1: are outraged about this. We're gonna do something about it. Uh.
Speaker 1: And we're emboldened to do something about it. Unfortunately, the
Speaker 1: other side is also emboldened. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, and that's yeah.
Speaker 1: But let's end on the uplifting note of be emboldened.
Speaker 1: Do something about it. Go join a protest, your local
Speaker 1: ICE headquarters, do something. Yeah, don't listen. This is a
Speaker 1: This is a great service that you have done with
Speaker 1: just bringing a lot of this stuff to light, because
Speaker 1: I know there's going to be a lot of people
Speaker 1: who listen to this right now who're like, damn, I
Speaker 1: didn't know. I didn't know that. I didn't know the
Speaker 1: British that we're putting people in camps while they were
Speaker 1: fighting the Germans. Yeah, and and and they won't look
Speaker 1: at this as just a senior moment in history, but
Speaker 1: instead a part of our culture. Yeah, and realize that
Speaker 1: this is a part of our culture that needs to change. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this is the first step. If you don't know
Speaker 1: about this, this is the first step. Now you know,
Speaker 1: I'll do something, Yeah, do something about it? All right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good note. Uh, you want to plug your
Speaker 1: uh plug my plug doubles. Oh man, that sounds bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: uh yeah, yeah yeah. I mean look Culture Kings me
Speaker 1: Edgar who's also been on your pod. Uh, we co
Speaker 1: hosted right here on the House Stuff Works Network. Uh,
Speaker 1: listen to it. We're we're not as smart, but we'll
Speaker 1: make you laugh. I'm not I just I just steal
Speaker 1: quotes from smart people's books. Hey man, we're not even
Speaker 1: smart enough to do that. We get a lot of
Speaker 1: shit wrong. But yeah, listen to it. We like to
Speaker 1: make you laugh and we like to have some thought
Speaker 1: provoking uh conversations hopefully to get you thinking about stuff.
Speaker 1: And also I'm in the streets. I'm out here performing
Speaker 1: all around l A. So you can catch me on
Speaker 1: a number of stages doing some comedy. That's that's what
Speaker 1: it is at Jackie's Nail on Twitter. Well, thank you
Speaker 1: Jackie's Neil for joining us today. Thank you you've been wonderful. Um.
Speaker 1: You can find Behind the Bastards online and Behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards dot com. We'll have there were a lot of
Speaker 1: sources for this podcast, so you will list them all there, um,
Speaker 1: and you can do research on your own, which I
Speaker 1: encourage especially the book British Concentration Camps. It's a really
Speaker 1: important book. You can find me on Twitter at I right, okay.
Speaker 1: You can also find the podcast on Twitter at at
Speaker 1: Bastards pod. So if I've gotten something wrong, or if
Speaker 1: you have additional questions or you know things you want
Speaker 1: to ask about, drop us a line. We love talking
Speaker 1: to you. Um. I'm gonna do something a little weird
Speaker 1: at the end of this because I assume anyone who's
Speaker 1: still listening is a real big fan of the show
Speaker 1: or me. So I'm just gonna suggest something for you
Speaker 1: to check out that I like. There's a great band.
Speaker 1: You can find his video, Courtney on YouTube. He's called
Speaker 1: The Narcissist Cookbook. You can also find him on Spotify
Speaker 1: and on Patreon. He's a British guy. Some of the
Speaker 1: best music I've heard recently. Uh. Doesn't seem to have
Speaker 1: a very right reach yet, so please check him out.
Speaker 1: That's my recommendation this week. Um I'll be back Tuesday
Speaker 1: with another story, probably of a specific terrible person rather
Speaker 1: than a specific terrible trend in history. UM. So yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you for listening, and please check us out.