Behind the Bastards - Concentration Camps Are Back, So Let's Talk About Their History

Episode Date: June 26, 2018

It’s possible the general idea of ‘building camps to hold people who’ve done nothing wrong’ goes back many thousands of years. In Episode 9, Robert is joined by Jacquis Neal (Culture Kings Podcast) and they dive into the history of concentration camps.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello friends and or loved ones. I am Robert Evans and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. With me this week is my guest, Jacice Neal, host of Culture Kings, Comedian, Actor, Golden Gloves, Boxer. No, I did that one last time. What's up, man? Hey, it's good to have you, Jacice.

Yeah, man. This is a show where I read a story about someone terrible or that explains something behind someone terrible to a guest who's coming in cold. Normally we do like a guy like Saddam Hussein or Hitler or something. I'm too special for that. No, today we've got a different one based a little bit on some stuff that's in the news. Obviously there are some camps with children concentrating some children who have been separated from their families on the border. So I felt like now might be a good time to do Behind the Bastards that delves into the history of concentration camps, because it's a weird and fascinating history and it gets behind several bastards.

We will be talking about the guy who invented the concentration camps. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Oh, shit. This is a deep dive, but it's an interesting history. So he's the ultimate bastard. He's kind of the ultimate bastard. He's king bastard.

Yeah, he's one of the king bastards. Okay. There's so many terrible people. Because murderers didn't invent murder. No. Well, except the first A murderer invented it, but we don't know who that is. But the person who invented the concentration camps, he is in a special realm of his own. He is.

And nobody's heard about this guy except for concentration camp nerds like everyone on this podcast is about to be. So yeah, we'll get into it. So in 1997, an archaeologist studying Hadrian's Wall in England suggested that he may have found evidence of the first concentration camps in all of history, built for captives from tribes on the other side of the wall and held as a guarantee of good behavior. Other archaeologists suggest these were early refugee camps operated by the Romans to protect people fleeing from a societal breakdown north of the wall. We'll never know for sure. It is possible that various cultures have instituted ideas that kind of were concentration camps for thousands of years. There's no tracing it all the way back.

But we can trace the roots of our modern conception of a concentration camp. And they start with Andrew Jackson. What? Yeah, well, he didn't invent the concentration camp, but it's important to know this history to understand what comes next. So Andrew Jackson was born in 1767, seventh president of the United States. His father died in a logging accident. He grew up really poor and really mean. When he was a kid, he got stabbed in the face in the hand by a British officer because he wouldn't clean the guy's boots.

He was a salty dude. That's a good reason to be salty though. Yeah, yeah. He did have good reason to be salty. He was like starving for a long time. His dad died when he was real young. He got shot a bunch when he was inaugurated as president. There was a bullet in his lung that was there his whole life. He was just coughing up blood his whole life because he just always had bullets inside of him.

He was a tough guy. This should be a great origin story. It is a great origin story. And he probably killed more human beings personally than any other president. Like he shot a lot of people personally, not like ordering people to do it. He almost beat a guy to death with a cane. A tough dude is what we're saying. We'll probably wind up doing a whole episode on just him at some point,

but right now we're going to talk about his relationship to the Native Americans and how that contributed to the development of concentration camps. So in 1812, Jackson was elected Major General in the Tennessee Militia because we used to vote on generals back in the day. As you might guess from the year, the War of 1812 was on by this point. Our history books tend to reduce that to just, you know, the White House got burned. Right, right. But there was so much more than that.

And there were actually a couple of other wars that were grouped into the War of 1812. And one of them was the Red Stick War. Have you ever heard of the Red Stick War? No, it sounds fun. Yeah, it sounds like it should be fun. It sounds like the beginnings of baseball. Yeah. We were just hitting each other for years and then we realized a ball was a great thing to add.

Well, okay, no, it's actually, it was a civil war within the Creek Nation. The Creek are an indigenous people to sort of like the Eastish United States area, like southeast of the U.S., like almost all the way down from like parts of like Virginia down to like Florida. So the Creek Nation was a pretty sizable like native nation at this point in time. And the Red Sticks were one faction within the Creek. And their name came from the fact that they carried red war clubs that they would beat people to death with. Because they were pretty tough dudes. And they believed that the best way to defend their land from the encroaching Americans was to murder them.

They were encouraged in this thinking by British agents who wanted to do anything they could to fuck with the Americans during the war of 1812. So they would give the Red Creek food and money and stuff and try to get them to fuck with Americans. So a band of these Red Sticks winds up murdering two families of American settlers near Nashville. They were executed by the rest of their tribe who didn't want any trouble with the Americans, but this one at provoking a civil war within the Creek Nation. So Jackson and his militia wind up on the side of the Creek who didn't like killing settlers, right? They fight a war with the Red Sticks. So it's like Jackson and most of the Creek on one side and the Red Sticks on the other side.

And this winds up coming to an end in like 1814. So Jackson does so well in the war that he becomes a major general in the Army. He gets put in charge of Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi and the Creek Nation. This meant that he was in charge when it became time to negotiate a peace treaty at the end of the Red Stick War. The Madison administration wanted us to be nice to the Creek because James Madison didn't want to fuck with him, but Jackson was like, fuck these guys because he was a monster. So he decides to punish the Red Sticks and the Creek who'd fought alongside his forces like all the same. So he just takes half of the land of the Creek Nation.

The site he fought on? Yeah, he fucks them over too. He takes 23 million acres away from the guys who'd just been fighting with him. 23 million acres? I can't fathom how back in the day one man could have all that power. This is like a Kanye Lyric. How could one man have all that power? It's weird just because he didn't die? That's a big part of it? Yeah. If you survived to be old enough?

Yeah. That's the case. 50 cent shit on half of America. If 50 cent shot nine times and not died. If 50 cent could have been a president in the 1800s, he would have been fucking hard as shit. That was the main qualification, was not dying when you were shot repeatedly. Just not dying and have a couple of bullets in you. So the Creek nicknamed Jackson sharp knife because he was a dick. Yeah, and Andrew Jackson gets into politics after he becomes a general.

He became a strident advocate for fucking over Native Americans. In 1829, he was elected president. In 1830, he championed the Indian removal act, which is one of the more sinisterly named laws in the American history. 1830. 1830, yeah. And he delivered this message to Congress. We now propose to acquire the countries occupied by the red men of the south and west by a fair exchange and at the expense of the United States to send them to land where their existence may be prolonged and perhaps may perpetual. So regardless, it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers. But what do they more than our ancestors did or than our children are doing now? That's like him being nice about it.

Right. He was mean but eloquent. Yeah, yeah. And he said that this policy was not only liberal but generous to the, to the, well, he called them the red man. Yeah. Because it was the most racist time that's ever been. Yeah. Fucking 1830s US. That's like. That's, is that before the Emancipation too? Oh, yeah. That's like 30.

Yeah. Jackson three years later would deliver another speech where he was even less nice to the Native Americans and basically said that they weren't intelligent enough to have any land in America. And so it was, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and air long disappear. Like, like they're destined to be screwed because we're screwing them so much. Right. Yeah. Dude. Yeah. It's so great.

It's so crazy how, I know we'll eventually get to this, but how parallel some of these thoughts are to our current person in power or it's insane. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you know, it's worth noting that when President Trump met with the remaining Indian code talkers from World War Two, he met them in front of a picture of Andrew Jackson. Yes. Yeah. I didn't know. I heard that was a thing.

Yeah. And because I'm lazy, I didn't read why it was a thing, but now I fucking know. This is why. What a dick. So Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy winds up leading to the eviction of natives from the land that he had sort of said that they had to leave. So his idea was like, we have to push them all into reservations. That was the evolution of this policy is we kick them off the land that we want to take, but we'll give them other land. Okay.

So this is not quite a concentration camp, but there are aspects of the process that look a lot like stuff you'll see in, you know, the 20th century. So the most clear example of that is in the 1838, the US Army was sent to a victim, a bunch of Cherokee who refused to move from the land that they were told to vacate. So the army took 17,000 Cherokee and 2000 of their black slaves because nobody's entirely a good guy in the 1830s and forced them onto camps. So 300 or so of them died in the camps and then they get marched into Oklahoma, which is basically one big reservation at that point in time. 4,000 Cherokee die on the march to Oklahoma. This is the trail of tears. That's a fucking long march. That is a long march.

I don't know if you've ever walked from like Tennessee to Oklahoma, but don't. Yeah, man. I set out to do it and I was like, after a block, I'm like, this is awful. So yeah, when the Cherokee arrive in Oklahoma, they're placed in reservations, which is a type of camp designed to concentrate Native Americans into a small area so they can't carry out guerrilla wars against the state. This policy continued until 1887 when the government decided that Native Americans had been pretty well beaten and enacted the Dawes Act, which split reservation land up in individual allotments that natives could then sell to white people, which was basically a way of being like, we'll give you a little bit of cash for your land and then you don't have land anymore. Right. And also, did you say that they had already been well beaten?

I mean, yeah, man. Is that what they said? No, it's just, that's crazy. Well, I guess we've beat you enough. It worked is what I'm saying is like the resistance, if you're looking at, and this is important to understand what comes next, if you're a sociopath looking at the US policy against the Native Americans, it worked. You know, in the early 1800s, they were a real threat to white people's ability to take over North America. Yeah. And this strategy broke them.

It broke them. If you don't care about human rights or dignity or anything like that, it functioned. Yeah. So it's terrible, but other people in history would pay attention to the example that the Americans set in our policy towards Native Americans. Now, we're going to veer off of North America and over to Spain. The same year as the Trail of Tears, 1838 also saw the birth of a guy named Don Valeriano, Weyler and Nicolau. Oh, great name. He was born on the island of Mallorca.

Yeah, it is a good name. Yeah. A lot of names for people in those days. Yeah. Not just two or three. So he was born on Mallorca, which is a part of Spain. He grew up with dreams of military glory, but alas, was only four foot ten when he turned fifteen. He elisted in the Toledo Military Academy.

He was below the Spanish military's minimum height requirements, but they let him join anyway because they just finished having a bunch of civil and colonial wars and they didn't have enough soldiers. They were like, oh, it's okay if you're tiny. Yeah. Your doors would just go over your head. Maybe you won't get shot. Maybe you won't get shot. He wound up actually being really good at army stuff. Hearing the nickname Scipio from his fellow students, who was Scipio Africanus was a famous Roman general who was really tough.

And Weyler had a reputation of being really tough, which in those days meant you just didn't get sick and die easily. Because like that was just fucking Europeans whenever they would go to the colo, like half of them would die from the fever. So if you survive that, you're a tough son of a bitch. You're a tough guy. Yeah, you're a tough guy. So yeah, Valeriano Weyler wound up sent to Cuba in 1863 where he developed a reputation for being the only colonial officer who wouldn't drink alcohol. Spanish officers in this time had a habit of drinking nothing but enormous quantities of cold champagne instead of water because they thought it kept them safe from malaria. Kept them safe but drunk as hell.

So he drank water, which made him popular with his soldiers because they didn't get champagne, and he was probably the only sober Spanish guy on the island. That's why he was so good. That's why everybody out there fighting war is drunk. It's a real low bar. It's a low bar. He figured it out like, I'm going to stay sober and I'm going to kill a whole bunch of fucking people. What if I'm just not blacked out the whole time? So Cuba was a pretty chill place in 1863 from the Spanish point of view. There wasn't any resistance to their rule at that point, or at least not effectively.

Weyler's time there started well because he won the Spanish National Lottery and became super rich, which is great. Then he caught the yellow fever, which tried to kill him but didn't quite and in fact just made him stronger. So that would be a benefit for the rest of his life is that he wouldn't get yellow fever again. That fall, as he was recovering from the fever, a war broke out in the nearby Dominican Republic, which was also owned by Spain. The Dominicans had just been invaded by Haiti, and pretty much as soon as the Spanish threw Haiti back, the Dominicans were like, well, okay, now we want to be an independent nation and we want Spain gone too. So Weyler got sent over to the Dominican Republic to fight an insurgency against Spanish rule. He became a staff officer and eventually earned a promotion to Lieutenant Colonel and a bunch of awards for his gallantry.

The conflict went great for him because he got a bunch of awards, but Spain wound up losing control of the Dominican Republic in 1865. So Weyler gets transferred over to a Spanish embassy in Washington, D.C., where he caught the tail into the Civil War and picked up some really cool ideas from America. I wonder which. Now, this might not be the idea you're expecting. This is a quote from the book British Concentration Camps, which was a major source for this podcast. We'll have the link to all the other sources up on the website, behindthebastroids.com. So anyway, Weyler winds up in the D.C. embassy, and he starts reading about the tactics and hearing about the tactics being used by a general named William Sherman in the south. Quote, Not only was Sherman an exponent of brutal warfare, burning entire towns to terrify the enemy into submission, he also waged a campaign which some thought amounted to genocide against the Indians.

Using as his slogan, the only good Indian is a dead one, Sherman harried the Indians mercilessly, seeing that they were pinned up in camps where they died from starvation and illness. Sherman's activities, both against the Confederacy and the Indians, made a great and lasting impression upon the young soldier who went on to govern several Spanish colonies. So, Weyler gets sent over to the U.S. and is like, these guys, they're good at suppressing people. So Weyler gets transferred back to Spain for a little while, but then in 1868, the Cubans decide they're not happy with Spanish rule, and they have a revolution. So Weyler gets sent over to Cuba and fights in what's called the Ten Years War, which is a war from 1868 to 1878 against the Spanish government. By all accounts, it was a pretty badass conflict. I'm going to quote here from a book called The War with Spain by Charles Morris. That's about the Cuban armies in this time that were fighting against Spain. The strength of the insurgents lay largely in their horses. They were admirable horsemen riding like Cossacks or Cowboys, and far superior in this respect to the Spanish cavalry, few of whom were trained to the saddle.

Many stories are told of the women who rode on their ranks and wielded the machete even more fiercely than the men, and there is little doubt that these stories have some foundation in truth. The favorite mode of fighting by the insurgents was to harass the Spanish troops with skirmish fire, in which they sought to pick off the officers by sharpshooting. Then, if the opportunity presented, they would dash forward in a wild cavalry charge, machete in hand, and seek to wreak havoc on the ranks of the foe. Pretty badass, bunch of ladies with machetes on horses too. Or just in general. Yeah, on horses. It's like Wonder Woman or the Amazons. Yeah, I feel like Danny Trejo could make that into a movie. He's got a production company.

Yeah, you hear that Danny? Bunch of ladies on horses with machetes cutting up Spanish soldiers? Make it happen. So, Wailer was put in command of a 600-man unit, which he quickly turned into the deadliest unit in the Spanish army. There were no rules at the time in the Spanish military for how to fight insurgents, so Wailer made up rules of his own, the most important of which was that there were no rules. His troops were ordered to give no quarter to the enemy. The enemy was defined as anyone near a combat area, including civilians. He became famous for his brutality and was at one point asked, is it true that your men returned from battle holding the severed heads of their enemies by the hair? Wailer replied, what do you think war is? And war men have only one job, to kill. Yeah, you predicted that. How did you call that?

You're getting a feel for this guy. I get the feel. I get the feel. Great minds. So part way through the war, Wailer gets recalled to Spain because there's a monarchist uprising in Spain. The whole 1800s, Spain is just civil war after fucking civil war. Yeah, I mean they'd lost so many territories at that time too. It's not a great time. Yeah. So yeah, Spain's having like a monarchist uprising, so Wailer goes back to help fight it.

He has some fighting outside of Valencia, which doesn't go well, but then the general fighting him dies and that guy's army sort of falls apart, so Wailer kind of wins. And then the government sends him next to Catalonia, where there's like kind of a leftist workers uprising and he promptly just murders everyone he suspects of being connected to the rebels. Spanish citizens didn't like seeing the tactics they'd cheered for him to use in Cuba, being used on them at home, so General Wailer was reprimanded and removed from that particular command. This is still a four foot ten dude. This is still four foot, I think he's about four foot eleven now. He grew an inch. He grew a little bit more, but not all that much. He grew an inch off all the blood he's drawn, he's just standing on it.

A tiny little man just bathing in blood. Yeah, he's a monster. So his career for the next few years is kind of up and down, he's served as the military governor in the Philippines from 1888 to 1891. How did he bounce around so much? Well, because they're like, we can't have him in Spain because he's too brutal and people don't like seeing what we do to our colonial possessions being done in Spain, but we need a guy to put down insurgencies and he's fucking good at it. He's good at it. So they just say, he's good at it, you're in charge here, come on over. Yeah, go crush these insurgents now.

So he winds up in the Philippines fighting insurgents. In one four month campaign, he succeeded in wiping out rebels on the island of Mindano through the use of something called Troca, which were fortified military lines built to isolate insurgents. So General Whaler invented a new tactic, which is basically he would fortify towns and villages and then he would force civilians in rural areas to leave their farms and congregate in those walled rural villages that he built. And then he would build these like fortified lines around areas he knew the rebels were in to kind of isolate them so you can pin them into smaller and smaller areas. Exactly, force them to fight. This worked out very well and in November of 1891, Whaler returned to Spain as a newly elected senator. He didn't get to spend much time on the job because a revolutionary workers movement in Catalonia again started threatening to act against the state. Whaler arrested hundreds of them and became very popular among Spaniards who weren't angry working class people.

Multiple towns declared him their adopted son. He was made a senator for life and credited with saving civilization from the barbaric workers. So he's a nice guy. Now go save some lives. So this is where we are in 1895 when another revolution breaks out in Cuba. And we're going to get into that revolution in the birth of the first concentration camps after the break. But before we do that, if you're anything like me, Jacice, talking about concentration camps makes you really want to purchase products and services. I mean, I'm ready to buy some stuff, right? I'm on Amazon right now. Well, let's see what things you can buy that are supporting the show.

Let's do it. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic. And occasionally ridiculous. Deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts.

We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. We're talking about General Valeriano Whaler. In case you didn't say, you know what, I'm coming to listen to the podcast, but I'm starting at minute 21. Yeah, and if I want to add, if you're coming in to listen to the podcast and you are a representative of the Doritos Corporation,

let me just say we are trying to get sponsorship from Doritos. Listen, I get eternally sad when I walk into this office and there's no Cool Ranch Doritos. I took the whole bag home. And we're talking about revolutionary movements a lot right now, colonialism, and nothing says fighting colonialism like the taste of extreme nacho flavor. I feel like if the Cuban rebels were about to talk about it, had more nacho flavor in their lives, maybe the revolution would have gone better. This is the next Crash the Super Bowl commercial that Doritos does. I just said it with General Whaler. Please stop killing us, sir. What do you have? Doritos.

And they live in harmony. I think you've, yeah, that's a solid Super Bowl commercial. It's a deep cut. It's a deep cut, but I think it'll do well. Speaking of deep cuts. Alright, so yeah, in 1895, when General Valeriano Whaler was 56, Cuban revolutionaries again declared their independence from Spain. The Spanish military leader in charge of Cuba proved unable to contain them and the government begged Whaler to step in, which he was happy to do, providing the government gave him a free hand to do whatever he wanted in order to suppress the revolution. So in January of 1896, he meets with the Spanish government and he tells them how he thinks that they can win this war. The key would be to relocate the population. Civilians would be forced into camps inside of fortified cities and towns to deny insurgents aid and comfort.

He put together a team that included several men who'd served under him in the Philippines and promised them that, quote, what we became in the Philippines will serve us well in Cuba. Then he promised the press that he'd have the situation handled in two years. General Whaler arrived in Cuba in 1896, and at this point the insurgents are like at the gates of the last city. I think it was Havana that the Spanish still controlled. So the revolution's gone really well up to this point. He immediately issues the order. All the inhabitants of the country now outside the line of fortifications of the towns shall within the period of eight days concentrate themselves in the town so occupied by the troops. Farmers were not allowed to farm their land and their homes were often burnt behind them. The camps were poorly built and most of the houses had no roofs. No provision was made to feed or take care of the captives who were being forced into these walled camps. Whaler had also picked close to the worst locations possible for the camps, usually low lying swampy ground that was a perfect breeding area for disease. Whaler called this the Reconcentration Policy. He named the camps Reconcentrados.

So that's the start. So that's the start. These are the first official concentration camps in human history where it's like they're known by that name and it's the same function. The idea is we're taking people who haven't committed any crime, they're not prisoners of war, they're civilians and we're forcing them into camps for some sort of political purpose. Because if they do uprise, they'll fuck us up. Well and just because also we're worried we know that someone is supporting the insurgents and so since we don't know which individual farms are supporting the insurgents we're going to force all of the farmers into these camps just so that there's nobody left to support the insurgents. So by 1898 one-third of all Cubans had been moved into concentration camps. Between two and four hundred thousand of them would die there. Most accurate number is probably around 320,000. Here is a picture of a man looking at a mountain of Cuban bones while wearing a Victorian era suit. Good lord.

We'll have that up on the site. That's real? Yeah, that's a real picture of a mountain of Cuban bones. It looks like Charlie Chaplin. Yeah, it looks like Charlie Chaplin sitting on a pile of bones the size of a house. That's sad man. Yeah, it's messed up. That's so sad.

Yeah, yeah. He's a mustache though. Yeah, he looks great. Yeah. He looks like he's on his way to Hollywood. Yeah, so this was a bunch of Americans started visiting these camps including like American senators and politicians and like starting an outrage about it being like this is really fucked up what's going on. This winds up kind of being later on one of the reasons we get involved in a war with Spain. Like the sinking of the main was a bigger factor like outside of Cuba this battleship of ours explodes and we blame it on the Spanish. But the main is there in the first case and people are already angry at the Spanish for what they're doing in Cuba.

For what they're doing. Yeah. So one witness to the camps an American senator described them this way. It is not peace nor is it war it is desolation distress misery and starvation every town and village is surrounded by a troca trench a sort of rifle pit but constructed on a plan new to me the dirt being thrown up on the inside and a barbed wire fence on the outer side of the trench. These trocas have at every corner and it frequent intervals along the sides what are called forts but what are really small block houses many of them more like a large century box loop hold with firm musketry and with a guard from two to 10 soldiers each. The purpose of these trocas is to keep reconcentrados in as well as to keep the insurgents out from all of the surrounding country the people have been driven into these fortified towns and held there to subsist as they can. They are virtually prison yards and not unlike one in general appearance except the walls are not so high and strong but they suffice where every point is in range of a soldier's rifle to keep in the poor reconcentrado women and children. So what does that sound like to you.

Sounds like. Barbed wire fences guards on the outside jail and concentration yeah yeah it sounds very familiar with like our modern concept of the concentration camp yeah which is. Yeah yeah this is where it started. So whalers forces in country managed to drive back the insurgents but the brutality and death of the camps obviously causing international outcry whaler winds up getting recalled to Spain and of course during the Spanish American Wars Spain loses control of Cuba. General whaler wound up living on though he continued to fight he fought in a couple more Spanish civil wars he had a long career he died in 1930. 90 92. One of his last recorded sentences that he ever spoke is reported by a time magazine interview was quote the good die young. He wanted to be like what's it doing from Ghostbusters.

He fucking was man like at least he knew what he was. You imagine you imagine being 92. I'm too young to go. So I think he was saying I'm 92 because I'm a piece of shit. I thought he was saying like I'm too young to die. He was saying like I'm fucking old as dirt because I'm the worst person who's ever lived. So he so he on his death bed he was he knew he was a piece of shit. That's that's what happens when you raise hell all your life.

Yeah you're about to die and you like man I want to get into heaven. All right I'm saved now. Probably didn't kill 400,000 people. Yeah. Yeah. That was a strategic misstep. I made a mistake. You know God if you just pay attention to the last 20 years and ignore those skull mountains.

I did pretty good. I did pretty good. Pretty good. But he who has not built a mountain of bones cast the first bone. Bone. And hell. Yeah. Okay.

92. Yeah. So the first reconcentration camps were a political disaster but they were a military success. You know he beat the insurgency almost by the time he got recalled. So yeah the first concentration camps work out militarily not so much politically but you know that's the history. So in 1899 when the British government found themselves fighting a brutal war with the Bowers in South Africa. They looked at what Whaler had done in Cuba and they looked at the American reservation system and they were like what if we give these things a try. So the Bower people in South Africa were descendants of the original Dutch colonizers who first had stolen South Africa from the actual people who lived there before Dutch people wound up there.

In 1806 the British Empire had taken control of a Dutch South African colony and the Bowers didn't like this. They fled and formed two independent nations the Republic of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. They called themselves burgers which meant citizens and makes reading about them sound delicious. The Bowers didn't like the British coming in and Britishizing their home which was understandable. Nobody enjoyed that. They also hated the fact that the British wouldn't let them keep slaves which is less understandable. Again nobody's a good guy. When you go back to these conflicts everybody's a piece of shit.

We're here dude we've become good. 2003. Did we do that? 2008. And then we lost it in 2016. We had a good run though for a couple years there. We were really making some strides. So yeah the two Bower republics in the British South African colony managed to coexist kind of well until 1867

when golden diamond mines were discovered in the Republic of the Transvaal. Winston Churchill who was at this time a journalist felt this discovery made war between the Bowers and the British inevitable. Sooner or later in a just cause or a picked quarrel for the sake of our empire for the sake of the race we must fight the Bowers. So war broke out in 1899 and it went pretty well at first for the Bowers. They beat back some British armies and they laid siege to some of the British hilariously named cities like Ladysmith. This is a great band name. Yeah well I think they're from South Africa right? Ladysmith Black Mombazo?

Oh shit that is a band name. Yeah that is a band. I assume they're from Ladysmith. What's their most popular song? That I don't know. I know their name because it's amazing. Okay. Yeah.

Hey well they got that's what they got. Yeah they got that. So listen to the Ladysmith Black Mombazo. I will be doing that too. Is it Black Horse? No that's it. Is that it? I don't know.

I don't know either. Anyway. Woefully unprepared to joke about Ladysmith. But it is a fun name for a town. So yeah the British Empire obviously was the British Empire and they eventually beat these two small Boer armies. And by 1900 the British had conquered all their cities and annexed all Boer territory. Now the normal war became a guerrilla war because the Boers didn't stop fighting just because they lost their cities. They became insurgents.

The British commander at this point was a famous guy named Lord Kitchener who had replaced a general named Roberts, who had replaced a general named Redver's Buller because the past was a silly place. It was under Kitchener's command that the first Boer concentration camps were established. So Lord Kitchener decided that camps would be quote the most effective method of limiting the endurance of the guerrillas. Because they were all these little Boer farms and were the wives and the kids of these soldiers fighting the British army in the field lived. And so they would fight the British during the day and then you just go home at night and get a cooked meal and sleep in their bed and then get back out into the field. So Kitchener ordered that the women and children should be divided into two categories. One category would be refugees, which was people that they took off their farms that the British didn't know had a relative fighting in the field.

And the others were the families of Boer soldiers who were commandos. And his idea was to treat the families who didn't have soldiers fighting the British better. But in practice they all get lumped into the same concentration camps. The Boer camps worked exactly as well as the Cuban ones by which I mean they became stinking diseased helpits where thousands died. There wasn't enough food, there was no sanitation and because the British had burnt all of the farms in South Africa they couldn't really afford to send in any food either. So between June of 1901 and May of 1902 some 28,000 of the 115,000 interned people died in the camps. It was about 10% of all the Boers. 22,000 of them were children. 10% of like the Boer population gets killed in these camps.

There were also separate concentration camps the British established for black people caught fighting with the Boers. A 2001 Guardian article I used as a source notes about 20,000 black people also died in other camps and says nothing else about them. So I did a little bit. Why would it? That's clearly not. They got slavery. They got enough written up about them. As a general rule the deaths of black people in British concentration camps during the Boer War are treated as an afterthought. So knowledge of what was happening in the Boer War of these camps was brought over by a couple of British ladies who were like Red Cross volunteers who saw the camps and went back to England and were like what we're doing is fucked up. But they would always talk about the concentration camps for the Boers and then say I also hear there's camps for black people but I didn't go visit any of them.

But they're probably not nice either. Can you imagine this time where all this terrible shit is going on and people are still so racist that they don't even want to go there. It's amazing because the Boer concentration camps were awful but it was even worse for the black people. How could you make it worse? Well there's a quote from the book British concentration camps that explains how it could be made worse. By July 1901 some 38,000 blacks were being held in special camps. Over 30,000 of them being women and children.

Thousands of black men were taken into the service of the army where others were sent to work the gold mines. The white camps were provided with tents however leaky and drafty these may have been. Nothing of the sort was thought necessary for the blacks who were expected to build their own dwellings. So you've got about 115,000 Boers in camps of whom 28,000 die and you've got about 38,000 black people in camps about 20,000 of whom die. On the upside eventually word of the nightmarish conditions in the concentration camps did escape South Africa and caused a wave of condemnation. The British put a guy named Lord Milmer in charge of cleaning it up and trying to save the people who'd been put into camps.

His notes about this period of time wound up getting found just a couple of years ago and they give you real insight into like the British imperial mentality over their own war crimes. I'm going to read this in a British-y voice. So that'll make it more fun. It is impossible not to see, however blameless we may be in the matter, we shall not be able to make anybody think so and I cannot avoid an uncomfortable feeling that there must be some way to make the thing a little less awfully bad if one could only think of it. Alright.

I just love the idea like there must be some way to make this a little less bad if we can only think of it. Don't put people in camps. Don't put people in concentration camps. That's the way. Don't burn their farms. It's very simple actually. Yeah, just like people. He noted that you know when he'd first got there in like 1902

they'd hope that like all the weak kids had died first so people would stop dying but they didn't stop dying and yeah anyway. So the Boer concentration camps were horrible PR just as General Weyler's camps in Cuba had been but they were effective from a military standpoint. The British beat the Boers. This led the idea of concentration camps to spread like wildfire across the empires of the 20th century. So in 1915 and 16 during World War I the Ottoman Turks got up to a little bit of genocide against the Armenians.

They killed probably around 1.5 to 2 million of them in total. The Turkish government still claims this didn't happen. The U.S. does not officially recognize it as a genocide because we need our military bases in Turkey but it definitely happened. Yeah, 1.5 million. Yeah, something like that. Generally 1.5 is sort of the accepted middle ground. It might have been higher, it might have been a little lower

but somewhere around a million and a half people. And there was a mix of ways. A lot of them were killed through mass executions. A lot of them were killed through starving and forced marches. Most of them died in what was essentially a reverse trail of tears. So you remember the trail of tears they started in a concentration camp and they got marched to a reservation and most people died during the march. They flipped that.

So they marched people down to a desert around a town called Diyar Azor and most of the people died marching towards the desert. Like something like a million people died on the march. Just from executions, they weren't given food, they weren't given water. It's like the Syrian desert. They could walk thousands of miles. And then when they arrived at Diyar Azor, they were put into a gigantic open-air concentration camp near the town. They were forbidden food or water and had to bribe their guards to get anything.

Roughly 400,000 people died in this open-air concentration camp. It was so many people died that a visitor to the area in 2002 noted, I was shown a piece of land that keeps subsiding. It is called the Place of the Armenians. So many thousands of bodies were buried there that the ground has been sinking for the last 80 years. Human thigh bones and ribs come to the surface. Yeah, it's bad. Real bad. This is our world.

This is the birth of the modern world. About a century ago. And very important for what comes next. Because people were paying attention to all of this. They were paying attention to America's policy with the Native Americans. They paid attention to Cuba, to the Boer War, and to what happened with the Armenians. So a monument was built for the Armenian genocide in Diyar Azor. ISIS destroyed in 2014.

Hopefully it will be rebuilt at some point. The main architect of the Armenian genocide was a guy named Talat Pasha. He was one of the young Turks who'd risen to power in Turkey during a 1913 coup. After World War I, he fled to Germany to escape prosecution for his war crimes. He was shot dead in Berlin in 1921 by Saganman Talyrian, an Armenian who lost his extended family in the genocide. Saganman's trial brought knowledge of Turkish war crimes and German complicity in them into the public eye. He was acquitted.

The German courts at the time were like, well, of course you shot that guy. He was fucking terrible. He was carried out of the courtroom on people's shoulders. The only happy story we're going to have on the podcast today is to savor this one. For he's a jolly good fellow. So if you want, you can kind of view... I think it's often interesting to look at ideas as sort of like a virus, because you can kind of trace their spread around empires throughout history.

If you view the idea of concentration camps as a virus, you can watch it spreading from the germs of the idea to Cuba and then to the Boers and then to the Armenian genocide. And then Tullet Pasha brings it to Germany in the 1920s, just in time for World War II. So you know what goes great with a podcast about sad things? What? Happy things like the wonderful people who support this show. Oh.

Yeah. Let's listen. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic...

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From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth,

his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, we are back and we are talking about concentration camps.

I'm trying to think of a cute name for that. Focus camps. Focus camps. That sounds even worse. Imagination camps. Imagination camps. That's actually scarily close to it. We're actually calling the ones that we built for those kids.

Oh yeah, the tender age camps. Yeah, we probably don't have the flour. We'll get there eventually. We're in 1921 now. As I just said, the guy who orchestrated the mass open air concentration camp in the desert that killed all the Armenians gets shot in Berlin in 1921. And the virus is passed on to the next nation that will use it. I'm not going to go into an in-depth history of Nazi concentration camps here. I'm going to hope most of you know that if not, it really deserves its own focus. But I will read a couple of quotes that point out just how,

because I think one of the mistakes that a lot of education on concentration camps makes is that it over-emphasizes how exceptional they are historically, which is important to do to some extent because no one has ever killed so many people so quickly as the Germans did in those camps. But they're part of an intellectual tradition that we've been tracing throughout the length of this podcast. And it's important to understand that at the time the Germans justified what they were doing to themselves and to the world by the fact that all of their enemies in these conflicts had also done it. Exactly. It's almost like, well, you can't tell me I can't do it. Only you get to have concentration camps? Yeah.

Yeah, so here's a quote from Adolf Hitler, The Definitive Biography, by Pulitzer Prize winner John Totland, which is a fantastic book if you're wanting to read about Hitler. Hitler's concept of concentration camps, as well as the practicality of genocide, owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the Wild West, and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination by starvation and uneven combat of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity. So the German government in the pre-war years would generally use the Boer Wars camps as an excuse for their own camps. Here is a quote from the book British concentration camps. In February 1939, for example, Sir Neville Henderson, British ambassador to Germany, had a meeting with Hermann Gehring. In the course of their encounter in Berlin, Henderson denounced the loathsome and detestable brutalities taking place in the concentration camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald. For answer, Gehring went to a bookshelf and took down the volume of a German encyclopedia, covering the letter K, and showed the ambassador the entry for Konzentrationslogger, which began first used by the British in the South African War. Throughout the 1930s, Minister for Propaganda Joseph Goebbels had also fostered the notion that concentration camps were a British invention. Postcards purporting to show the grim conditions of the camps run by the British during the Boer Wars were circulated. A film, Om Paul, was subsidized by the German government. This historical drama about the Boer War suggested that the British army had devised and operated the first concentration camps, which we know wasn't entirely true, the Cubans had, but this is how the Germans are justifying them. The Boer War, and with the Americans. Everyone else has done it. Hitler is also known to have stated during his run up to the invasion of Poland when they were talking about getting rid of the Polish Jews, and people brought up like, this is going to cause an international outcry.

A sentence he famously is credited to have said is, who now speaks to day of the Armenians? So people were like, if we try to get rid of all the Jews in Poland, people are going to be angry at us. And Hitler was like, why do you think anyone's going to get pissed off? Do you hear anyone yelling about the Armenians? Nobody's talking about the Armenians. Nobody's angry at Turkey for what they did. Nobody won't care about that until 2017 when they had their parade in Los Angeles. Exactly. And it causes international outrage. You still to this day, it's very difficult to film a documentary about the Armenian genocide. There was a famous book that came out, I think in the 30s or 40s, about there's this one group of Armenians who hold up on top of a mountain and fought off the Ottoman army until a French warship rescued them. And it was this crazy story that people have tried to make into a movie a couple of times, and every time the Turkish government will come in and say like, we won't take any movies from America. Period. No one will be able to run movies in our country, no Hollywood studio if you make this movie. If you make this movie? Yeah.

And it's amazing how cowardly. Yeah, we all are. I mean, even Barack Obama, before he was elected president, talked about the Armenian genocide and acknowledged it as a genocide. And then as president, he continued the U.S. line of denying it ever happened. Not denying it ever happened, but we won't call it a genocide. Yeah, we won't call it. Because we need those bases, because we can't bomb the Middle East without our bases in Cirlik, which is where we have our bases in Turkey. So, from the Hitler point of view, I think it's important just to understand, while the German concentration camps, and particularly the death camps, because they weren't all the same kind of camps. Right, they were different types of camps.

Yeah. Because people died in all of the camps, but some of the camps, their purpose was not to kill people. Right. People just died there because the Germans didn't give them a shit. And then Auschwitz had concentration camps in it where people, the point wasn't execution, the point was a labor camp. It also had extermination camps in it, but it was a gigantic facility. This is sad. Yeah. Because, like you said, people know about that, but I was one of the people who lumped it all in. I just think, oh, it's just a place where they killed a whole bunch of people.

And the movie that made me actually challenge that was X-Men, the first class, in the beginning of the movie when Magneto's mom got taken away from him. And they were supposed to be in concentration camps when I'm mistaken. I was like, they all don't look like they're there to die. Yeah. But they were taken her away to go to the death camp. Yeah, to the death camp. And so that made me look into it like, oh, wow, there were multiple camps. Well, that's good.

Yeah. So thank you, X-Men. Yeah. Thank you, X-Men, for helping to spread some good history there, I guess. Yeah. That's what made me look into it. Yeah. And it's important to understand, like it is important, because I used to, before I dropped out of school, the last two years was spent on, like, holocaust studies.

Like, that was the thing that I did in college. And it's very important, particularly to Jewish scholars of the holocaust, to emphasize how unique the holocaust was. And that is important, because nothing quite like it has ever happened. But it's also, I think, important to understand that it's the middle of a long intellectual tradition. Like, the Germans were pointing to other examples in history when they carried out the holocaust. They got it from somewhere. They got it from somewhere. They didn't come out of nowhere.

And I think that's important. They looked at it and was like, we'll make it bigger. Yeah. Stronger. More German. More German. Yeah. It's also important to understand that the Germans were not the only people using concentration camps in World War II.

The Japanese internment camps in America were a type of concentration camp. Right in Griffith Park. Right in Griffith Park. Yeah. They were not as brutal, obviously, as the Nazi camps. But 1862 people are known to have died in our Japanese concentration camps. Some of them from disease. Some were old people from heart attacks.

Some people were shot by American soldiers. We tend to use the term internment camp now. And that appears to be the result of a successful propaganda campaign to separate what we did to the Japanese Americans from what the Nazis did to Jewish Germans. At the time, though, that the camps were proposed, FDR used the term concentration camp to describe what we were doing. And in 1946, Harold Ike, former Secretary of the Interior, said this, As a member of President Roosevelt's administration, I saw the United States Army give way to mass hysteria over the Japanese. Crowded into cars like cattle, these hapless people were hurried away to hastily constructed and thoroughly inadequate concentration camps, with soldiers with nervous muskets on guard in the Great American Desert.

We gave the fancy name of relocation centers to these dust bowls, but they were concentration camps nonetheless. This was not America's last flirtation with concentration camps. And no, I'm not talking about the camps we've built for immigrant children in the desert. The USA actually tried out the whole concentration camp idea again before that point. In 1961 and 62, the US government began to execute what was called the Strategic Hamlet Program in Vietnam. Which sounds nice. Like Hamlet. Like the Strategic Hamlet.

Hamlet. That's a cute word. Yeah. Little Hamlets. Yeah, strategies are not a bad term. Little Hamlet. Little Piggy or the King. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it's cute. To fortify certain towns, to wall them off and to make them defensible in order to isolate communist guerrillas from local support. Locals who lived outside these towns would be relocated inside the walls. Does that sound familiar at all? Sounds like something Cuba was getting up to. Yeah. Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. It was not that bad. Right. But it was pretty awful. Large numbers of peasants were forced from their homes, many watched as their houses were burnt behind them. Some peasants were executed by South Vietnamese forces, although we have no death toll for this program as we do for the other camps. Here is a quote from a U.S. military report on one of these strategic Hamlets. Unfortunately, the government was able to talk only 70 families into relocating into the new Hamlet.

Another 135 families were forced out of their homes and into the new settlement. Some came with meager belongings. Many had only the clothes on their backs. Their old homes were burned behind them to preclude their sneaking back. It didn't work. I don't know. This might be a spoiler alert, but Vietnam did not end well for us. No, it didn't.

Or South Vietnam. And this was a big factor. So, number one, it convinced a lot of Vietnamese people to join the Viet Cong because they were like, Well, you just fucking burnt my house down. I don't like you anymore. I hate you. And it was also like what started the escalation and the fighting because in 1961, when the strategic Hamlet program started, the North Vietnamese wouldn't attack American military bases. They were considered no-go zones because they didn't want to escalate shit with us.

Yeah, we had a large military. Yeah, we're terrifying. They avoided attacking American troops for the most part, but that ended in 1965 after a few years of this policy. Now, that Defense Department report that I read stated the inspiration for the strategic Hamlet program came largely from the British responses to the Malayan emergency from 1948 to 1960. Have you ever heard of the Malayan emergency? No. You've ever heard of the British colony in Malaya? I have that.

Yeah, I hadn't even heard of that when I started this, so you're ahead of me in that regard. Yeah, I've heard of that in school, actually. Okay. Well, yeah, good school then because I didn't even know they'd fucking been in what's modern-day Malaysia at that point. So the Malayan emergency is interesting because it might be the one case. It's the only case I've read about where concentration camps actually worked out really well for everybody, including the people inside of them. It's a weird case study, but it's important to cover. So Malaya was a British colony.

Bad economic programs brought on by bad British policies post-World War II led to a communist uprising. It's called the Malayan emergency and not the Malayan civil war due to lobbying from British business owners in Malaya because their insurance wouldn't cover war. So that's why it's the Malayan emergency. Right. Because like, yeah, it's just wacky. So the British called the people fighting them communist terrorists. There were groups of Chinese people living in Malaya who had been trained and armed by the British in World War II to fight the Japanese and who then turned their guns on the British when World War II ended, which doesn't sound like anything that's ever happened.

Again, yeah. That was the last time Western power would have that happen to them. So the emergency kicked off when a group of communists executed three British farmers. This prompted the colonial government to suspend all civil liberties and arrest suspects for up to two years prior to charging them. Despite their harsh methods, the emergency did not go great for the British at first. Their main opponent was a guy named Chin Peng, who was a 26 year old bicycle shop owner and apparently bicycle shop owning and running an insurgency are two trades. Hand in hand. Yeah, work really well together.

Yeah. You can fix it. One qualifies for the other. You can fix a tire. You can bomb a military convoy. Yeah. And then get away on your bike. Yeah.

So for a while, the Chinese insurgents were winning, but in 1950, Lieutenant General Harold Briggs came up with a plan to eliminate the insurgency. The communist forces during this emergency were largely Chinese and they received most of their support from ethnic Chinese squatters who lived in slums outside the main Malayan cities. Now, these people, the squatters had no title to their land, so they didn't own anything and they had no sense of investment in the cities around them or in Malaya as a community because they were just considered squatters. So Briggs's plan was to build walled and fortified villages and move some 400,000 squatters into them. Based on everything I've talked about today, you might have expected it to end in disaster, but it didn't. The camps they built were like large, they were made out of concrete, they had electricity, clean drinking water, schools and clinics, and the British government gave the people brought their title to the land. Wow. So it made all 400,000 of these people landowners.

Okay. And it worked. So it's only that by name then. I mean, it's a concentration camp, it is the same thing, but it's the most humane execution of that plan. It's the humane of it. Yeah. How many people died? Did you say that?

Did I miss that? There were definitely some people who died, but there's no evidence of large-scale starvation and disease. The British did execute people in the course of the war. I'm not going to claim that they were blameless in this. There was at least one case where they killed 20-something civilians. It's compared to everything else on this list, it's by far the most humane execution of the plan. Yeah. Yeah.

And it did, a lot of Malayans were made angry because they didn't like the Chinese squatters or whatever, but the insurgency eventually stopped. And a lot of the people who were put into these, what were called new villages, seemed to think it was a positive step. Because now they own land and they had electricity and clean water and stuff. So if the British got concentration camps right in Malaya, if that is fair to say, it's probably because they had more practice than any other people on the planet at running concentration camps. You've heard the expression that if you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, if you've got the British Empire, every problem looks like it needs a concentration camp built around it. The British used concentration camps, like I said, more than anyone else probably in history.

More than I had ever heard before I started researching this. Yeah. You don't even, that's not something that you even fathom. You don't connect, you hear concentration camp, you think Germans for sure. Exactly. And you know, I mean, yeah, some people know about the ones that popped up in other countries. And like I know about the one here in America, I heard about one in Spain. But not to the scale that this was, you know, like the World Cup and it just happened every four years or some shit.

The British put them everywhere, including on their own soil. So during World War One, the British built concentration camps for German citizens who had been captured on boats or who had just happened to be in England when the war started. Many of these people were forced to labor in British fields. The book British concentration camps points to an article in The Guardian from December 4, 1914, titled Disorder at Lancaster Concentration Camp. Here's a quote from the book. The Disorder at Lancaster Concentration Camp was dealt with by a bayonet charge against unarmed civilians.

On 19th November that same year, protests at another concentration camp on the Isle of Mann resulted in troops firing volleys of shots at the inmates, killing six of them. Among the dead were two men who had, until three months earlier, been working as waiters and hotels. Later in the war, the British established the Frangot concentration camp in an abandoned factory. More than 2,000 Irishmen were held there. In 1940, with fears of a German invasion stoking panic, Winston Churchill had every German and Austrian in the country arrested and sent to concentration camps. Here's another quote from that book.

To those who reminded him that many of these people were Jewish refugees, he responded briefly and memorably, collar the lot. Of course, no one wanted to call these new institutions concentration camps, so they renamed them internment camps to differentiate them from the Nazis' practice. So the British were keeping concentration camps that included Jewish refugees on British soil and forcing them to labor in British fields the entirety of World War II. There were also Polish concentration camps that existed in Poland prior to the German invasion,

and when the Germans conquered Poland, a bunch of Polish soldiers like 20,000 of them in the Polish government were exiled to the United Kingdom. The UK gave them a bunch of land in Scotland, which was essentially treated as sovereign territory for the government in exile, and the Poles built concentration camps in Scotland to house political dissidents, including Jewish political dissidents. Yeah, multiple Jewish prisoners were executed in Polish concentration camps in Scotland during World War II. More than 300,000 people were imprisoned and forced to farm in England up until 1947.

While Nazi concentration camp guards were on trial in Nuremberg, the British were using forced civilian labor housed in concentration camps to harvest their crops. This is modern day slavery. Modern day slavery and murder. I could go on. Yeah, that's just insane, man. We may do a whole podcast someday on just British concentration camps. Yeah, because it seems like they were the champions of the world.

Yeah, they are the world cup winners of putting people in camps. Yeah, good lord, man. And there are hundreds of examples from other countries. I didn't even get into the French recruitment camps in Algeria, into which more than a million Muslim villagers were forced to move. There were Spanish concentration camps in the Canary Islands. The 20th century was the century of concentration camps. And now it looks like the 21st might wind up being one, too.

I mean, look, dude, yeah, that's the sad part is... So here's the thing that's crazy to me, especially a lot of the stuff we were talking about earlier, where you know a lot of these generals and a lot of these people by name, like General Wailer, they were just not heroes, but they were champions of what they did, right? And how that's kind of changed today. You don't know a single person's name when they're fighting them.

You don't know one person's name in front of the Iraqi War or something like that. Maybe you do, but nothing like a General Wailer who was on the battlefield fighting and shit like that. Well, and it's just so much more diffuse now. You'll notice that when it started out, when we start talking about the reservations, there are individual people like Andrew Jackson. We can talk about the role they played. We can talk about General Wailer. We can talk about Tollett Pasha.

But the more camps there are that we stop hearing names just because it's not any one guy's idea. It's the way of culture. It's what you do. Exactly. It's culture. It's part of Western culture is putting people into camps. And that's the sad part. Yeah. Except now it's becoming a name again.

Yeah, and now we have some concentration camps in South Texas. These camps did not stay as part of a war, but they did come out about as an attempted solution to a real problem. Some of this may be familiar to you've been keeping up with the news, but in May of 2012, less than 1000 people traveling as families were caught by border patrol, right? By May of 2014, that number had increased to 12,800. The numbers have subsided since then, less than I think 10,000 last year. But it's still a big issue.

And this is not something that we've ever like illegal immigration has been a thing that has happened for forever. Families coming as groups is a new thing. And they're largely coming because of political instability. You could call them refugees, although we call them asylum seekers. Whether or not someone's asylum seeker or refugee depends on the country of origin. It's like a legal term. The Obama administration tried holding entire families while their cases were pending, but that's illegal because of a court case, I think from 1997,

which says that you can't hold children in immigration detention. You have to release them to the least restricted means available. The Obama administration did not want to be seen as cutting families apart, so they often would just release people. This became politicized and talked about by Republicans as quote unquote, catch and release policy. The Trump administration did not want to continue catch and release policy. The result was that between October 1st, 2017 and May 31st, 2018, 2700 children at least were separated from their parents.

That's roughly an average of 45 per day. These children were put in the least restrictive surroundings available to the government. In many cases, that wound up being tender age shelters, which you've seen on the news and maybe heard the audio of. First Lady Laura Bush compared these shelters to the internment camps for Japanese Americans in World War II. They are, however, concentration camps, as were the internment camps. The people in them have committed no crimes and are not prisoners of war. The Los Angeles Times described one of these facilities known as Ursula,

the kids inside it call it La Pereira or dog kennel, as clean and spare with bare concrete floors. The facilities cleaned three times daily in order to avoid the concentration camp becoming the disease-ridden kind of hellhole that most concentration camps in history have become. A Democratic congressman who visited the site said it was nothing sort of a prison. Jacob Soboroff, a journalist who visited, stated, I was inside the building and there are babies sitting by themselves in a cage with other babies. That's inhumane. It's inhumane.

And I think what people who are not outraged by this, their idea is probably what we were saying earlier, how they think concentration camp only means death camp. And putting people in ovens. And we're clearly not doing that. And we're clearly not doing that, but you got human beings in cages. You're ripping them from their families. They're sleeping on concrete. They're not prisoners and they're being treated worse than prisoners.

They have committed no crime. So one of the things that is emphasized constantly by the government personnel who are taking care of these places when journalists will go on tours of them so far is how clean they are, how often they're cleaned, that they're a medical personnel and whatnot. And that is true. I can't imagine there's not going to be a typhoid outbreak in one of these places. It's not going to be tuberculosis popping off. But one thing that is consistent among all the concentration camps pretty much that we've covered today is that they are breeding grounds for disease.

And while these camps that we're building in Texas that we've put these kids in, they're not going to be breeding grounds for physical diseases. There's a lot of evidence that they will be breeding grounds for mental and emotional diseases. Oh yeah. You're fucking these people. Yes. You are irrevocably messing these children's minds up. Yeah. Shane O'Mara is a neuroscientist in Dublin. He's conducted studies on how things like torture affect the human brain.

I interviewed him once back in the day for an article I was writing, and I follow him on Twitter now. When the stories about these child concentration camps broke, he posted a thread summarizing all of the research into how separating young children from their parents and putting them in institutions damages kids. I'll have a link to the Twitter thread on our website. He cites a lot of different sources.

I'm only going to talk about one of those right now, which was a scientific American article about the largest study ever performed on a group of institutionalized children who had been separated from their parents. This came from back in the late 1960s. The Romanian dictator Nicolae Cecescu decided his country needed more of what he called human capital, which is people. So he banned birth control and abortion and created a celibacy tax for families with less than five children.

Government minstrel police examined women to make sure they were putting out enough babies. It was a huge success in terms of the amount of babies increased in Romania, but Romanians didn't have enough money to support their multiple football teams worth of children. So by 1989, more than 170,000 kids had been handed over to government institutions and separated by their parents. This is terrible, but studying those children provided researchers an opportunity to learn what separating kids from their families

and putting them in an institution does to developing minds. I'm going to quote from a Harvard summary of the actual study. The study found that institutionalized children were severely impaired in IQ and manifested a variety of social and emotional disorders, as well as changes in brain development. However, the earlier an institutionalized child was placed into foster care, the better the recovery. Now the presidents recently promised to put an end to his policy of separating families.

It's unknown how this is going to work, since there's a bunch of problems with the idea of keeping whole families in detention. That's what the Obama administration ran into. So we don't really know what's going to happen. Hopefully no more kids will be separated from their families, but there's also the case of the 2,700 children who have been. We don't know how many of those are going to be put back in touch with their families. When he signed that law, everybody got excited,

but it was not to reunite the children. In most cases, it really wasn't for anything. The broader problem is that we continue to have none of these people that we're putting in camps, because we're putting the adults in detention centers, too. And the adults are not criminals. They're asylum seekers. They're people who are fleeing war.

And in a lot of cases, like the people coming from Guatemala and El Salvador, those are civil wars that exist in part because the United States funded and supported the Civil War beginning. There's a genocide that's been going on off and on in Guatemala for decades that we funded and supported. And we executed the president who led to the creation of the Civil War because we killed that guy. And that's a big part of this history.

Like, whether or not the kids continue to be kept in separate camps, we will continue to be putting families in concentration camps. And I think it's worth noting that very rarely in my research, did I come across a case where concentration camps were used by a country who won the conflict that those camps were built in order to establish. The British Malayan camps worked out all right, but the British lost control of Malaya, and they lost the rest of their empire.

The Spanish lost Cuba. The Germans lost everything. Concentration camps achieved their short-term goals. They rarely worked out in the long run, with the exception of the United States. Wow. Wow. That beacon on the hill.

We're number one. Putting people in camps and getting away with it. Yeah, that's what power does, man. Power and money and having a big-ass military task. Well, in an ocean in between you and everybody else, except for like Canada. Yeah. This is depressing.

What floor are we on? No, I'm joking. It's depressing, man, because, you know, I think this is something that a lot of people our age or in our generation, we've put this out of our history. Not out of our history, but it's not something that we think about.

We only hear about one kind of concentration camp. And that's Germany. It's isolated in time. There were four bad years, and then it didn't happen again or before. And it's a little sad that people don't know that it's happened before, and to hear that it's still happening,

because you think we've gotten better. We haven't. I mean, I get it. Obviously, nothing that anyone has done since has been as bad as the Nazi death camps. But that's a low bar to say that we're doing better because we're not exterminating people. That's a very low bar.

Yeah, man, I don't understand. You know, I asked this question before, are people inherently good? Or are they inherently bad? And you hear shit like this, and you're just like... I mean, I think the answer is people aren't inherently good or inherently bad. People are inherently the products of their culture.

And if your culture is one that allows, for example, slavery, then people who today might be good people would think slavery is fine, because they grew up in 1840s America. And most people who lived in America in the 1840s weren't abolitionists. Or how we redefine what these things mean. These things don't go away.

Slavery hasn't gone away. We're not in chains and being whipped and sold and all that shit. But there are people out there still trying to figure out ways to keep people enslaved in different ways. More palatable ways. It's like we have them work in prisons, as opposed to plantations,

and that's not gross to people, because they did something. They did a thing. They did a bad thing. Just like, well, it's not wrong that we're putting these asylum seekers in camps because they broke the law. They broke the law. They're trying to cross our imaginary border. Which is like, well, I mean, if you were holding a Jewish family in Amsterdam in 1943

and hiding them from the Germans, you were breaking the law. Breaking the law is more often a right thing than a wrong thing historically. Or at least it's 50-50. I mean, you know, I said this on Culture Kings. I think we could... Well, I don't know when this is going to drop,

but I said this on one episode that without ethics, laws mean nothing. Just because it's a law... 50, 60 years ago, it was against the law for me to date my girlfriend. It was against the law. But, you know,

I don't want to hear this laws bullshit because without ethics, laws mean nothing. And that's something I try to remember like you say 50, 60 years ago. And the way I like to think about it is I walked past someone on the street today who can remember when it would have been illegal for you to date your girlfriend.

Yeah. Like, yeah, are there many survivors still left? Not many. There's a few. But people don't understand that the connection is still there. Even if my grandmother doesn't remember slavery, for instance, somebody very close to her

immediate family does. Yeah. Yeah, they're passed away, but that connection is still there. Her mom had a mom who was a slave. Yeah. Or somebody who was in those death camps had somebody connected to their generation

or connected to their family who was in there. And the fact that we don't learn from that shit and we don't try to change and we aren't uproarous, we should, like, I don't even, I can't even really put it into words how upsetting it is.

Yeah. And I think there's a mistake, I think, when people fight against this stuff, which any kind of thing you're trying to do to fight against this fucking policy on the border is good, but I think people focus too much on changing the laws, which it doesn't, it's the culture that has, and it's,

that's why I think the people who are doing stuff like up in Portland, blockading the ICE headquarters at night to see their families, or chasing down the Department of Health and Human Services secretary at a Mexican restaurant or finding Stephen Miller when he's eating

and screaming at them and calling them like, that almost does more good than fighting, like obviously it's important to fight in the courts and stuff, but making it clear that as a culture, we're not fucking cool with this, that's the most important thing.

Because everything spawns from the culture, and when we elected Trump, it was a sign to certain elements within our culture that things are going to roll back, and if we don't want things to roll back to 50, 60 years ago, like we have to fucking like, it

starts with shaming and screaming and being really angry. Do you know in your research, did you ever see if there was have there ever been any more concentration camps in Germany? Not that I'm aware, I mean well, okay, so there were

camps operated by the Soviet Union in parts of Germany, like Saxonhausen, which is a camp outside of Berlin that was a concentration camp for primarily Jewish people and political prisoners, and some POWs during World War II that the Nazis operated, when the Russians liberated it, they just filled it up with their prisoners.

And I didn't talk about the Russian gulags, which you might argue should be on a concentration camp podcast, the people who were put in the gulags had all been convicted of a crime. And those crimes were usually bullshit, because the Soviet Union was just throwing everybody

who they defined as an enemy onto the camps, but it was different than just we're going to lock up all these women and children who have actually, who have not, we're not even saying they've committed a crime, we just need to put them in a camp, which is why I've separated the two. Which is not to say we won't cover gulags at some point,

but yeah, there were camps that you could call a concentration camp that were in Germany post-World War II. Really death camps, though. Right, nothing to that extreme. And you don't hear about them much. Yeah, and it's, I mean, there's not as much, because we're only starting to understand

in the last 10 or 15 years, getting a good idea of how the gulags in Russia really worked, because it's very recently that those archives got open to the world. So yeah. Here's the thing, I, as a black man can't say

there's something changing, because people have been asking for this change for decades. You know, the change and the way people think and how you retrieve people and stuff like that. What I can say is

the generation we're in where everything is loud and visible is helping. Because people have an outlet to instantly tell you how they feel about something. And they have an outlet to instantly

show you what's wrong. And even though we live in like a 24-hour news cycle, I do think that the fact that things are just so in our face and so instant, and we see them coming back to back to back to back, that something hopefully

will change to the point that hopefully our kids and their kids don't have to deal with this shit. It's not like anymore. I think that there's a different story running through, you know, the podcast I just delivered, the story of the concentration camp.

There is a more uplifting story, which is the story of you look back at when we were putting Indians on reservations in March and carrying out, you know, genocidal acts. It wasn't a single genocide against the Native Americans. It was a bunch of different genocidal acts against specific tribes. But you listen to how

Andrew Jackson talked about them, and he didn't talk about them like they were human beings. And I don't think you go back to the 1800s, the early 1800s, and you go to a person in England or a person in France and you say like, hey, this guy over in China, this guy over in Africa, this guy, are they all human beings?

Most people would say no. Most people would say they're different. They're not the same, they're not as human as I am, right? And that's why you can justify stuff like slavery and stuff like the slaughter and the Congo. But throughout this story where you've got all these concentration camps, you also have people getting outraged about them.

And that growing, you know, it starts with the outrage against Cuba, and then they're outraged at the Bowers, and then it hits a fucking fever pitch at the outrage over the German concentration camps, which is why everyone starts finding new names for these things after that, and why they stopped killing so many people in them.

And so the uplifting story in this dark story of concentration camps is that now we're at a point where you go anywhere in the world. You go to China, you go to England, you go to Zaire, whatever. You talk to an average person on the street and you say, hey, this guy, half a world white, is he a human being the same as you?

Now I think most people say yes. And that's like... That's the uplifting part. And I think that's kind of what I was trying to allude to is there's been outrage before. It's just our outrage is growing because

we can connect our outrage to somebody across the world almost instantly. So we don't need to just be in the same room to say, hey, are you outraged? Yeah, I'm outraged too. Now we can see, oh man, there are people all around this world who are outraged about this

and we're going to do something about it. And we're emboldened to do something about it. Unfortunately the other side is also emboldened. Yeah. But let's end on the uplifting note of be emboldened, do something about it.

Go join a protest at your local ice headquarters. Do something. Yeah, don't listen. This is a great service that you have done with just bringing a lot of this stuff to light. Because I know there's going to be a lot of people who listen to this right now who

be like, damn, I didn't know. I didn't know that. I didn't know the British were putting people in camps while they were fighting the Germans. Yeah. And they won't look at this as just a singular moment in history, but instead a part of our culture. And realize that this is a part of our culture that needs

to change. Yeah, for sure. So this is the first step. If you don't know about this, this is the first step. Now you know. I'll do something. Yeah. Do something about it. All right. Yeah. That's a good note. You want to plug your plugables?

Plug my plugables. Oh man, that sounds bad. Yeah, I use that every time. I leave all my holes open. No, it's gross. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, look. Culture Kings. Me, Edgar, who's also been on your show.

We co-hosted it right here on the How Stuff Works Network. Listen to it. We're not as smart, but we'll make you laugh. I'm not smart. I just steal quotes from smart people's books. Hey man, we're not even smart enough to do that. We get a lot of shit wrong.

But yeah, listen to it. We like to make you laugh and we like to have some thought provoking conversations, hopefully to get you thinking about stuff. And also I'm in East Street. I'm out here performing all around L.A. so you can catch me on a number of stages doing

some comedy. That's what it is. Add Jackie's Neal on Twitter. Well, thank you, Jackie's Neal, for joining us today. You have been wonderful. You can find Behind the Bastards online at BehindTheBastards.com. We'll have, there were a lot of sources for this podcast, so we'll list them all there.

And you can do research on your own, which I encourage, especially the book British Concentration Camps. It's a really important book. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. You can also find the podcast on Twitter at BastardsPod. So if I've gotten something wrong, or if you have additional questions or

things you want to ask about, drop us a line. We love talking to you. I'm going to do something a little weird at the end of this, because I assume anyone who's still listening is a real big fan of the show or me. So I'm just going to suggest something for you to check out that I like. There's a great band. You can find his video Courtney on YouTube.

He's called The Narcissist Cookbook. You can also find him on Spotify and on Patreon. He's a British guy. Some of the best music I've heard recently doesn't seem to have a very right reach yet, so please check him out. That's my recommendation this week. I'll be back Tuesday with another

story, probably of a specific terrible person, rather than a specific terrible trend in history. So yeah, thank you for listening, and please check us out. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations.

In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date,

the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole? My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on Trial on the iHeart Radio App,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.