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Aidan Forth, "Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement" (U Toronto Press, 2024)
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- [00:00]
Narrator
Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a 4 liter jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.
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Aidan Forth
Oh, come on.
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Narrator
They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia trip planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.
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Aidan Forth
Whatever.
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Narrator
You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel.
- [00:30]
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Aidan Forth
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Leo Bader
Welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Leo Bader and today I'm talking to Aidan Forth, professor of History at McEwen University. Aidan's new book, A Global History of Mass Confinement draws on historical cases of mass confinement from across the world and across centuries. They give us a sense of just how integrated mass detention has been as a feature of modern society. The book moves us beyond the best known examples of mass confinement and illustrates how camps piece together with political control and statecraft. Aidan, thank you very much for joining me.
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Aidan Forth
Thank you, Leo. It's a pleasure to be here.
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Leo Bader
So why don't you start by giving us a sense of the historical scope of mass concept confinement. I think most people will think of Soviet or of Nazi examples, but as your book shows, there's much more than that and there's much more diversity as well.
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Aidan Forth
Right? Yes. No, thank you. Really. Part of the goal of the book, in fact, is to move beyond the common paradigms of the Nazi or the Soviet cases. And so what I've done in this book, and it is, I would say it's a short book. It's just over 200 pages. And it's very much intended to be accessible to students and to classroom use and so on. But in just over 200 pages, there are eight chapters, and only two of those chapters deal explicitly with the Nazi and the Soviet cases. And so I'm very much trying to broaden out the history of camps and of mass confinement, both over space in terms of providing a global history, and also over time, in terms of providing a kind of long Duray narrative that goes back to the 19th century century and then carries the story forward to today. And along the way, the book examines camps and camp like institutions, things like penal colonies. I look at. I look at workhouses, prison camps, slave plantations, labor compounds. I talk about native reservations and residential schools. I discuss transit camps on the Trail of tears in the 1830s in the United States. I turn to the invention of the term concentration camp, which occurred in the early 20th century in South Africa during the Anglo Boer War. I look at other similar cases of colonial encampment, like in Cuba, the Philippines in Southwest Africa, which was at that point a German colony. I look at Nazi concentration camps. I look at the Soviet Gulag. But I try to do so within the framework of. Of empire and colonization. I look at other fascist camps as established, for example, by Italy in North Africa. And then I move on to the camps of liberal and postcolonial regimes. I have a section on Japanese internment in North America. I look at the so called Gulag, the Imperial Gulag of Britain in Kenya in the 1950s during the MAU MAU Rebellion. I look at capitalism camps conducted in the context of counterinsurgency in places like Malaya, Algeria, Vietnam. I look at China, the vast system of labor reform camps in Mao Zedong's communist China. I look at North Korea. And then I bring it up to the present by examining things like Guantanamo Bay, by looking at the detention of Uyghurs in western China today. And I conclude the book with a chapter on refugee camps across the world, which I suggest bear a kind of genealogical relationship to concentration camps. They are a more humane, softer cousin to the concentration camp. And so all in, I do my best to cover a lot of ground and to introduce readers, hopefully, to institutions and types of camps that they haven't necessarily thought about before.
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Leo Bader
And are you able to arrive at a kind of minimum definition of what a camp is? You mentioned the difference between concentration camps and refugee camps, but what constitutes a camp in the first instance?
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Aidan Forth
Yeah. No. And that's of course been a challenge of the book because part of the Goal is to provide a sense of diversity, Diversity over space and time. I do have a definition I laid out on page two of the book where I say that camps, put simply, are demarcated institutions that contain or confine categories of people. Enemy aliens, racial minorities, social outcasts, POWs, non citizens. As a preventive measure, often in a moment of perceived emergency like war, revolution or economic crisis, and so on. Not every single institution I discussed in the book fits that definition completely. Some fit it in different ways than others, and so on. But in general, I try to stitch together these chapters, these different case studies based on a series of themes. And so I think that there are some kind of larger patterns and regularities and themes that keep showing up. There's common attitudes about space and about race. There's common attitudes about discipline, about labor and so on. I find that camps very often emerge in a military context, in a state of war. Camps are often used to occupy and to control new lands. Camps very much a instrument of empire building. They have a colonial function. They're used to occupy new space and to control the populations colonized, often abject populations that previously occupied that space. Camps very much the result of racial or social prejudice. Camps very often have a social engineering function. They are reformist institutions. They often have. Not always, but often have a rehabilitative function. Or at least they claim to have a rehabilitative function, but they also have a punitive function as well. Camps are very often about punishing or at the very least, controlling a group of people that's deemed suspect, that is deemed somehow dangerous. Not all camps are genocidal. In fact, most camps are not genocidal, do not commit genocide, but they're nonetheless repressive by conscious design. I think that a common theme is whether it's a colonial concentration camp in South Africa, whether it's a refugee camp in the world today. Camps are, by design, unpleasant places to live. They often lead to a great deal of suffering. They lead to a great deal of death. Camps concentrate diseases. They place people in. In dangerous situations. Ironically, camps are very often instruments of national security, of state security. But what they do is they deny security, health and safety to the people that they concentrate. And so across the board, I think we see these common themes come up again and again.
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Leo Bader
Well, we'll get into some of those themes, but maybe before that you can talk a bit about where you see the origins of camps being. You talk in your book about penal colonies and about workhouses. And how do then the sort of diversity of camps that we see in the 20th century come out of those?
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Aidan Forth
Yeah, no, that's right. That's a good question. I think that on the one hand, something that the book shows us is that camps exist almost everywhere by the mid 20th century. I have a. There's a map in the introduction which highlights the different countries that are discussed in the book. And for readers of the book, you'll see that this map highlights not every country in the world, but close to it at the same time. Camps haven't always existed. And so camps are a historical phenomenon. They develop at a particular point, moment. And so there is, I think, a story here of industrialization camps very much artifacts of industrial modernity. If you look at just the technology alone, mass produced huts, often on a sort of standardized blueprint, if you look at barbed wire, which is a development of the 19th century, electric lighting and so on, camps also artifacts of a sort of increased state capacity, of modern bureaucracy, of ways of knowing and keeping track of and managing a population. Camps are very much related to other institutions of confinement, like prisons and workhouses. For most of recorded human history, if you wanted to deal with deviants, you took a deviant suspect and you either executed them, or you tortured them in a public square, or else you exiled them, you transported them overseas. And so what we see developing in the 19th century is a new way to deal with deviant groups, deviant populations. Ironically speaking, camps to a certain degree are artifacts of kind of an enlightened humanitarianism. They are institutions of confinement, like a prison, are in fact alternatives to just sort of whole scale slaughter. If you look at changing practices of warfare, it used to be, for example, that captured POWs could often just be killed, but by the 19th century, they're housed in camps instead. Criminals might often just be executed, but increasingly they're confined in camps. Britain used to transport criminals overseas to the United States. Then the United States became independent. And they said, can you please stop sending criminals? And so Britain said, fine, they started sending them to Australia. By the late 19th century, Australia also developed responsible government and convict transportation stopped. And so, you know, European countries in this circumstance developed a new sort of culture of dealing with criminals, dealing with deviants, dealing with suspects, dealing with the outcasts and so on. And that was not to exile them, but rather to confine them. And so camps and prisons, they have a different history, but that history is intertwined and interrelated. And so on the one hand, then I think that camps derive from prisons, workhouses in industrial Europe. They arise from industrial factories in Europe as well. The sort of organization of labor on a macro scale, I think, is certainly one of the essential ingredients that leads to. That leads to camps. And camps are also, I think, products of new forms of warfare. As I mentioned, the word concentration camp was first coined in the year 1900 to describe camps that the British Imperial administration set up in South Africa. What was happening here was there was a colonial war between British forces, on the one hand, and the Boers, who were the descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa who had two tiny independent states that the British were trying to annex. And the Boers had a sort of what we might call modern sort of sense of national identity. And they waged what might be called a total war against British forces. They mobilized their entire civil society to fight, to resist against British occupation. And so in this context, British forces felt like all Boer civilians were suspect in one way or another. They were all potentially dangerous, and in order to be controlled, had to be placed in camps. We see that logic reproduced on a mass, vast scale in World War I, where World War I is not a war between discrete militaries, it's a war between entire societies. And so we see that camps deployed as a measure of total war, both for POWs, for captured soldiers, but also very much for civilians who are detained en masse. Enemy aliens are detained en masse. Ethnic minorities in places like the Austro Hungarian Empire are detained as a category of people rather than as individual subjects under the rubric of national security. And so I think that this history of the late 19th and the early 20th centuries very much assembles all of the preconditions, all of the ingredients for the development of what we in the 20th century call concentration camps.
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Leo Bader
I'm curious about how camps relate to the political systems, the systems of governance that they exist within. Do you think we see camps everywhere, that they're ubiquitous, but maybe have different justifications or different claimed purposes within different political systems? Or do we see some systems being more prone to producing mass confinement than others?
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Aidan Forth
I think their politics very much matters. And we can make a distinction, I think, between kind of modern politics and, you know, like feudal societies in the Middle Ages didn't really produce camps, but modern political systems tend to produce camps. And whether that is an authoritarian system like fascist Germany or communist Soviet Union, or whether it's a liberal democracy like the United States during World War II, or like Britain at the turn of the 20th century, all of these societies have produced camps. And so camps, in some ways, I would suggest, are ubiquitous. They're practically universal across modern political systems. On the other hand, I think just because there is this kind of new genus of modern statecraft, this institution we call the camp, that doesn't mean that all camps are the same. It dogs are part of a single species, but there's a big difference between a pit bull and the fluffy little puppy that my daughter's friend got this morning. And so there are differences. I think that if we look at something like Auschwitz or Treblinka, which were Nazi death camps, those are not universal, those are not ubiquitous, those are very exceptional. I would suggest practically singular in world history. But in terms of its basic architecture of a confined space to detain a problematic group, camps, Camps are universal. What difference does politics make? Well, I think that we can look at some examples here. I think that generally a liberal democracy, although it produces camps, also has mechanisms that check and stem abuses that may occur in those camps. And so one example is some of the very first concentration camps, the concentration camps of the South African or the Boer War. These were established by Britain. Liberal democracy, not a complete democracy. Women couldn't vote yet. But a democratic political culture was very much emerging in Britain in the year 1900. We can compare the camps that it produced with the camps that Germany produced in southwest Africa just a few years later. The camps in Britain caused a massive scandal because almost 50,000 people died in them. They didn't die because they were shot, they didn't die because they were purposely executed or anything like that. They died because of the spread of disease, which was largely the result of poor planning and poor the health care and poor nutrition and so on. But these deaths caused a scandal. It caused a mass mobilization in Britain of civil society. Newspapers reported on conditions in the camps and the British government was pressured by public opinion to do something. There was a liberal reformer called Emily Hobhouse who traveled to South Africa and the military, this is kind of remarkable. The military gave her access. A female humanitarian reformer gave her access to the camps to look at, report upon conditions. As a result of this scandal, British concentration camps, although they started out with very high death rates, drastically reformed over the course of 1901, 1902, the death rate is dramatically cut. By the end of the Boer War, the camps have a lower mortality rate than a sort of seaside town in South Africa. And so that sort of mobilization of civil society, a free press, democratic elections, made a big difference in the German camps in southwest Africa. Just four years later, Germany had a very different political culture. It had a sort of cult of militarization. It was a sort of despotic monarchy at the time. And it was sort of inconceivable, I think, for a civil group to protest conditions in the camps. Certainly it was inconceivable for women to travel to southwest Africa and criticize the military in Germany. So I think that's one case. Another case might be camps. In World War II in Nazi Germany versus in the United States, the United States interned Japanese Americans. These were citizens of the United States. They interned them on the basis of race as a category of people. According to a national security logic, the Japanese internment camps were not nice places to live by any stretch of the imagination, but they had libraries, they had recreational facilities. They didn't have a high death rate. And Japanese internees petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States for release. And the Supreme Court sided with the government a few times. But eventually the Supreme Court deemed that the confinement of Japanese Americans was unconstitutional. And in 1944, the camps started to shut down. I think it's inconceivable that a Jewish resident of Auschwitz could possibly petition a Nazi Supreme Court for due process and release. And so that's, I think, a big difference. Another, I think, more contemporary case might be what China is doing to the Uyghur population of its western frontier and an institution like, for example, Guantanamo Bay. In September 11th, of course, we all remember that the World Trade Centers were hit by Islamic terrorists, and there ensued a global war on terror. And Guantanamo Bay was used as a site to detain terror suspects. China also has a Muslim population, and in what Xi Jinping termed the People's War on Terror, the Chinese state started to detain Islamic suspects. The differences, however, are somewhat significant. So Guantanamo Bay exists outside of American territory. It's in Cuba. It's sort of an extrajudicial enclave. And the reason why Guantanamo Bay is in Cuba is that it would be basically unconstitutional in the United States, or at least as the Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution in the early 2000s. In China, however, the Uyghur Muslim minority is being interned at camps within continental China, within the space of China. And so there's a difference of legality and politics that permits that. And of course, Guantanamo Bay hosted a few hundred suspects. The detention of Uyghurs in western China is far less discriminate. Numbers are hundreds of thousands. And so it's a mass phenomenon. The authoritarian, in many ways, totalitarian state of China is able to get away with things that haven't, as of yet, been possible in the United States. And so politics makes a big difference.
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Leo Bader
And we see also, I Think in all of these examples a sort of tension between mass confinement and the law, that even in the case of the Japanese American internment, although they eventually had recourse to the law, there was a lot of sort of. There was an illegal nature, nevertheless, of what was happening. And with Guantanamo, as you mentioned, there's kind of a necessity of keeping it outside of the law. Are there examples where that tension is less extreme or more extreme or examples of camps within the law?
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Aidan Forth
Yeah. No. We often, I think, see camps as sort of extrajudicial, as what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls a state of exception. And indeed, it is very often the case that camps arise in a moment of perceived emergency, where normal judicial procedures are suspended. If you look, for example, in the United States today, ICE detention facilities have kind of expanded largely by executive order, not via sort of constitutional democratic processes and so on. On the other hand, law often is a function not of justice but of power. And so if you look at various authoritarian regimes, often camps exist within the law. I think that the Soviet Gulag is an example of this. I think that often people have a somewhat skewed perception of what the gulag was about. We see in the 1930s, for example, Stalin's purges and so on very much impacted political suspects. And, you know, the people who tend to write memoirs about their experiences tended to be highly literate political prisoners. But the vast majority of gulag inmates were just ordinary common criminals. People who had committed theft, robbery, assault, and so on. People who, you know, might be incarcerated in a liberal democracy today. And so the Soviet Union basically combined the detention of criminals, of prisoners with the detention of politicals and ethnic minorities and so on. And so even political prisoners in the Soviet Union received a trial. It was often a show trial. It was often a witch trial. It wasn't a trial that would meet the standards of. Of the democratic west, but it was a trial nonetheless. It was part of the legal system. Nazi Germany, which is often seen as the exemplary case of concentration camps, also interned criminals, common criminals. They had a green triangle, and they were often the sort of. If you read a memoir of Nazi concentration camps, the criminals are a pretty significant presence in those camps. They're often that at the top of the camp hierarchy, they're sort of the most privileged of prisoners, which is another topic of the sort of perverse, inverted moral world of Nazi concentration camps. But we do see that perhaps this distinction between camp and prison is important, but it's not absolute. Even in the United States today, there are critics of the prison industrial complex, who calls American prisons the American Gulag and argue that many inmates are in there for very petty reasons, loitering and that kind of thing. There's a huge sort of disparity in terms of racial representation in these prison facilities. You know, the line between often inmates are kind of sentenced not through a trial, but through this kind of plea deal system where, you know, their trial lasts a couple minutes and they are sentenced to a lesser crime in order to avoid a trial. And so, you know, the line between a camp and a prison, it exists, but it's sometimes fine and it's sometimes crossed. And that's something that I think about throughout the book.
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Leo Bader
You write in your book that camps operate within two defining allegories of modern politics, which are gardening and medicine. What are these allegories and how does mass confinement fit within them?
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Aidan Forth
Yeah, no, that's right. I think that language matters, and it's often interesting. One of the other kind of unities, one of the regularities that we see across multiple different cases, is that different regimes often use similar types of language to justify, to explain, to frame what they're doing. And so the philosopher Michel Foucault introduced this concept of biopolitics that by the 19th century, politics became less and less about necessarily occupying territory and more about governing populations, governing people. And there's different elements to biopolitics. One element is that a good government will create a healthy population that are thriving, that are good workers and so on. That can contribute to economic production. And in order to do that, you need to introduce things like hospitals and schools and so on. As an aspect of biopolitics, health becomes really important. You want a healthy population, and in order to get a healthy population, I mean, one way is to provide universal healthcare. That's something that we do in Canada. But another way to do that is to quarantine, to cordon off particular aspects of society that are deteriorating, deemed infectious, and so on. And so you often see societies that develop camps talk about a particular group as somehow unhealthy, as a virus, as vermin, as bacteria. They need to be quarantined so that it doesn't infect the rest of society. And gardening is another metaphor. I actually recently exterminated about 500 slugs from my garden because I wanted to keep my plants healthy. And so a lot of the 20th century Societies developed what the sociologist Sigmund Bauman called a gardening state. The goal of the state was to cultivate certain ideas, certain types of people, while cordoning, fencing off other Types, maybe even exterminating other type of people. And so in this sort of context, camps are places where problematic groups deemed infectious, deemed noxious, can be controlled, contained, confined, and then either reintegrated into society through reform or be kind of exterminated, exiled completely. Sigmund Bauman, he kind of offers two different ways to do this. He says that the state, which is very often seen as a body, the body politic, the state can choose to amputate some parts of society by getting rid of them forever, or it can choose to integrate certain sectors of society, turn them into its own sort of cells, its own living body, by changing those cells, by curing them, by turning them into safe, supposedly productive citizens. And so camps, particularly as institutions of either extermination or of assimilation, fulfill these two kind of functions of the gardening state or the sort of biopolitical medical state.
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Leo Bader
To finish off, I want to ask a lot of these camps aren't in use anymore and they're physical spaces quite obviously. So once camps are no longer in use, how do they play a role in national or cultural memory? And do you see any similarities, any consistencies in how they're treated by history then?
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Aidan Forth
Yeah, I think that the way we remember camps is really important. And the way that we remember them isn't always necessarily historically accurate. And so one example of this is that in South Africa, the first concentration camps, as they were called, you know, as I've said, they were horrendous places. They led to the tragic death of almost 50,000 people, many of them women and children. There wasn't, however, a genocidal intent to these camps. Nonetheless, starting, well, I mean, starting with World War I, but very much intensifying after World War II. The white supremacist Afrikane government of South Africa, who was largely dominated by the so called Boers, by Dutch speaking or Afrikaans speaking residents of South Africa, started to remember the British concentration camps as sites of genocide, as something similar to the Nazi concentration camps. And so camps became, I think, important to the myth making of the apartheid regime. The idea was that Boers, white Afrikaners, were a small besieged minority who had endured a historical trauma. And in order to prevent anything like that from ever happening again, they required a strong authoritarian state that would take care of their interests. The irony of that is that half of the victims of British concentration camps were actually black Africans. But that was, I think, quite conveniently forgotten during the apartheid regime. It wasn't until Nelson Mandela and the liberation of black South Africa in the 1990s that society came to grips in South Africa with the fact that actually these camps were sites of dual suffering, both of white Africanas and of black Africans. You know, I hate to say it, but there is, I think, a sense in which the Holocaust has loomed so large in Jewish and Israeli culture that certain segments of the population in Israel have developed similarly a kind of authoritarian impulse which has led to, you know, some people call what's happening in Gaza genocide. It has led, whatever your politics are, to some pretty brutal military measures which sometimes, I think, justified by the historical trauma of the Holocaust. Sometimes camps are forgotten. In the 1980s in the Soviet Union, as part of Gorbachev's glasnost reforms of constructive openness and publicity, there was kind of a society wide reckoning with the crimes of the Gulag. That in some ways the delegitimization of the Soviet Union via the Gulag as its most enduring symbol led perhaps to the collapse of the regime and to the opening of a more democratic Russia in the 1990s. That didn't last for long, however, as we know. And Vladimir Putin has, I think, done quite a lot in the early 21st century to rehabilitate Stalin, to rehabilitate the Gulag. There was an important institute of civil society, the Memorial Society, which cataloged Gulag crimes. And that was shut down by Vladimir Putin in 2022, just months before the invasion of Ukraine, which has itself led to the development of various types of torture sites and filtration camps and so on. That in some ways, I'm not saying that it's exactly the same, but in some ways, recall a Soviet past. And so forgetting camps is, I think, something we shouldn't do because it can lead to future atrocities. History it doesn't necessarily repeat, but sometimes it does.
- [38:45]
Leo Bader
Well, that's what your book is for, I guess. There's definitely more to dive in here, but we should wrap it up there. Aidan's book, A Global History of Mass Confinement, can be purchased through the link on the New Books Network. Aidan, thanks again for coming on today.
- [39:02]
Aidan Forth
Thank you, Leo. It was great to talk to you.
- [39:04]
Leo Bader
Thank you.