
Concentration camps reveal the nature of the modern state - urahara
https://aeon.co/ideas/concentration-camps-reveal-the-nature-of-the-modern-state
======
beloch
What concentration camps reveal is that modern people are squeamish about
killing.

Consider the Mongol empire. While the Mongol empire had some things in common
with a modern state, squeamishness about killing was not one of them. There
are cases where they decided a city needed to be destroyed and they took great
pains to make sure that destruction was total. Every man, woman, and child
they could find was put to the sword (or axe). Depopulating an entire city was
a difficult task before carpet bombing became an option. Mongol soldiers were
given quotas and expected to produce enough ears to show that they had met
that quota. Punishments for not meeting that quota were harsh. Ears were put
into sacks and carted off in wagons to be counted. Even dogs, cats and
chickens were killed in some cases. There are recorded instances of Mongol
armies leaving towns after doing this and then deliberately returning a week
or two later, just to make sure they got anyone who had managed to hide in a
basement or who was out of town when they were first there.

Consider the Romans. After the third Punic war Carthage's population was sold
into slavery en masse and the city burned for 17 days. The earth was salted.
There was no fourth Punic war because there were no Carthaginians left alive
and free. Let's not even talk about the Assyrians!

Many states throughout history have committed genocide against enemies and
many others have persecuted populations within their own borders.
Concentration camps are only necessary now because most people won't stand for
such atrocities, and states therefore feel compelled to carry them out in
relative secrecy. Modern human society is gentler now than at any point in our
past, although perhaps navel-gazing and self-accusatory articles like this are
part of the reason why, no matter how uninformed they might be.

~~~
dTal
I don't think you're wrong about modern squeamishness, but I think it goes
further than that. The purpose of concentration camps is to _not_ kill people.

Methodical killing of any type at scale is very rare in the modern world. It's
even rarer for it to to be conducted through camps; to my knowledge, only the
Nazis ever did it (and their allies, the Croatian fascist Ustaše regime). Most
mass killing simply consists of taking groups of people somewhere remote and
shooting them. Concentration camps are what you do when you _don 't want to do
that_ and are basically a cheap form of prison. Even in the Soviet Gulag,
where the harsh conditions and threat of death were part of the punishment,
the majority of prisoners survived.

Even where death is tacitly the expected outcome of a camp (rare), it's mostly
done by slow starvation and overwork. I think that's interesting, given how
inefficient that is. It provides a kind of mental "plausible deniability".

~~~
Retric
Cambodian genocide (1975 - 79) had insanely high fatality rates at it's camps
which where mostly there to torture people before death. ~25 percent of the
total Cambodian population died.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide)

What separated the Nazi mass killings was mostly the massive population they
could pull from. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-
occupied_Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-occupied_Europe)

~~~
aaron695
> ~25 percent of the total Cambodian population died.

But not from concentration camps.

------
Aqueous
This strikes me as a massive overgeneralization. States are just an
organizational structure of institutions, tasked with operating a society.
They are not intrinsically inclined towards building concentration camps any
more than they are intrinsically inclined towards providing healthcare or
delivering a basic income. States operating under an ideology of madness will
operate as if mad. States operating under an ideology of reason will operate
reasonably.

And for me at least, the main take-away from the image of the concentration
camp is clear: elections have consequences, so take your vote seriously. Form
a functional coalition with others to elect the least terrible person you can.
If you don't, you may end up handing the machinery of the state - capable of
harm on a massive scale - over to the unsavory or the insane. That's the
lesson of the concentration camps and the lesson of recent history.

So I think the distinction between the nature of the state and the nature of
its citizens is important for effective democratic participation. If you are
so cynical that you think that 'concentration camps reveal the nature of the
modern state,' why would you participate in such a thing? If we are
collectively down on the very concept of the state, there's no way to run a
good one.

~~~
mmustapic
States, or Nation States, are not just an organizational structure. They are
THE organizational structure of the modern world. It is no coincidence that
concentration camps are created by modern states and not for example tribes or
criminals.

~~~
tptacek
It's not like the predecessors of the modern state were strangers to genocide
and mass enslavement.

------
gumby
Great little summary. It's a shame the author didn't get to / have space for
the discussion of refugee camps, which are structurally little different from
the german internal camps of the eRly 1930s or the DP camps at the end of
WWII.

The nature of the Nazi/Soviet/cpc/nk camps provides "air cover" for the
widespread and more pervasive networks of camps still in use around the world.

------
throwanem
I approached this subject, most of a year ago, here in HN comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12568718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12568718)

I'm glad to have such a clear opportunity to see the vast difference in
quality of results achieved by a professional historian on the one hand, and
an armchair historiographer like me on the other. I'm looking forward to
reading his book.

------
olivermarks
tldr 20th century nation states are based on a world of fear and paranoia
around mutually exclusive notions of ethnic and national homogeneity and
territorial integrity.

Incarceration techniques employed in concentration camps were borrowed in a
transnational framework. They aided each state in isolating the unwanted
(racial, religious, etc) and controlling the rest of the population through
the implied threat of ending up in a camp for not conforming.

------
novia
_[...] a more analytically fruitful approach is to examine the impact of the
First World War. Here, for the first time in modern Europe, we see [...] the
willingness of the state to incarcerate huge numbers of civilians considered
threatening._

This statement was the one I found most intriguing in the entire article, but
then the author did not expand on it. Maybe he does so in his book. It was
strange to me to consider that this state of the world has not always been the
norm.

When I looked into it, I found conflicting sources of information. Anyone with
knowledge on the subject feel like expanding on this?

------
frabbit
Sounds interesting. By contrast Timothy Snyder in _Black_Earth_ argues that
concentration camps were created as institutions that were deliberately
outside of the state to facilitate slaughter:
[http://www.npr.org/2015/09/09/438943243/black-earth-
explores...](http://www.npr.org/2015/09/09/438943243/black-earth-explores-
dangers-of-misunderstanding-the-holocaust)

------
mnm1
We obviously haven't seen the last of them when the US has a network of
prisons that holds almost 2.5 million people, many of them concentrated for
rather obvious racial reasons. Just because they are built of brick and steel
does not change their basic tenet. Nor does the use of prisons for such
purposes or the fact that there are actual criminals in prisons in addition to
the concentrated populations.

------
MichaelMoser123
Stephan Zweig describes this new sense of nationalism as state policy after
WWI in the 'World of Yesterday'; actually before the great world one could
travel without passports or identification papers at all - that serves him as
the detail that serves to explain the big thing.

[https://ia801609.us.archive.org/21/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.1...](https://ia801609.us.archive.org/21/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.176552/2015.176552.The-
World-Of-Yesterday_text.pdf)

"Nationalism emerged to agitate the world only after the war, and the first
visible phenomenon which this intellectual epidemic of our century brought
about was xenophobia : morbid dislike of the foreigner, or at least fear of
the foreigner. The world was on the defensive against strangers, everywhere
they got short shrift. The humiliations which once had been devised with
criminals alone in mind now were imposed upon the traveller, before and during
every journey. There had to be photographs from right and left, in profile and
full face, one’s hair had to be cropped sufficiently to make the ears visible;
fingerprints were taken, at first only the thumb but later all ten fingers ;
furthermore, certificates of health, of vaccination, police certificates of
good standing, had to be shown ; letters of recommendation were required,
invitations to visit a country had to be procured ; they asked for the
addresses of relatives, for moral and financial guarantees, questionnaires,
and forms in triplicate and quadruplicate needed to be filled out, and if only
one of this sheaf of papers was missing one was lost.

Petty details, one thinks. And at the first glance it may seem petty in me
even to mention them. But our generation has foolishly wasted irretrievable,
valuable time on those senseless pettinesses. If I reckon up the many forms I
have filled out during these years, declarations on every trip, tax
declarations, foreign exchange certificates, border passes, entrance permits,
departure permits, registrations on coming and on going ; the many hours I
have spent in anterooms of consulates and officials, the many inspectors,
friendly and unfriendly, bored and overworked, before whom I have sat, the
many examinations and interrogations at frontiers I have been through, then I
feel keenly how much human dignity has been lost in this century which, in our
youth, we had credulously dreamed of as one of freedom, as of the federation
of the world. The loss in creative work, in thought, as a result of those
spirit-crushing procedures is incalculable. Have not many of us spent more
time studying official rules and regulations than works of the intellect ! The
first excursion in a foreign country was no longer to a museum or to a world-
renowned view, but to a consulate, to a police office, to get a “permit" When
those of us who had once conversed about Baudelaire’s poetry and spiritedly
discussed intellectual problems met together, we would catch ourselves talking
about affidavits and permits and whether one should apply for an immigration
visa or a tourist visa ; acquaintance with a stenographer in a consulate who
could cut down one’s waiting- time was more significant to one’s existence
than friendship with a Toscanini or a Rolland. Human beings were made to feel
that they were objects and not subjects, that nothing was their right but
everything merely a favour by official grace. They were codified, registered,
numbered, stamped and even today I, as a case-hardened creature of an age of
freedom and a citizen of the world-republic of my dreams, count every
impression of a rubber-stamp in my passport a stigma, every one of those
hearings and searches a humiliation. They are petty trifles, always merely
trifles, I am well aware, trifles in a day when human values sink more rapidly
than those of currencies. But only if one notes such insignificant symptoms
will a later age be able to make a proper clinical record of the mental state
and mental disturbances with which our world was seized between the two World
Wars.

