> <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21311>
> What Have We Learned, If Anything?
> Tony Judt
>
> War—total war—has been the crucial
> antecedent condition for mass criminality in the modern era. The
> first primitive concentration camps were set up by the British during
> the Boer War of 1899–1902.
The historical record suggests total war was invented by colonialism, which was itself just a stage of capitalist accumulation -- the point was to destroy entire societies, via enslavement and commodification. The first concentration camps were not in Boerland. The first camps were the holding pens, ships and plantation barracks of the slave trade, in which perhaps 6 million people perished out of the estimated 12 million total enslaved over three hundred years. After the horrors of mercantile capitalism came the horrors of liberal capitalism: the labor camps set up by the British in famine-stricken India, where free trade policies murdered 15 million to 25 million human beings in the Victorian era alone.
>From the perspective of 85% of humanity, capitalist modernity has been one
long nightmare of occupation and immiseration. It's only very recently,
following the era of decolonization, that the periphery has begun to
awaken, by forging mighty developmental states which are changing the face
of the planet.
-- DRR