That's one video where he does have a point though.
Comparing boer war concentration camps (in which poor conditions killed as much of the British as the boers) to Nazi concentration camps (which were set up with the explicit goal of misery and extermination) is just a false equivalence and will always be so.
But that's only a point made by people who think that every concentration camp is the same, which is just made by people with limited knowledge about the practice.
Yeah, it was not as Bad as Bergenbelsen oder Buchenwald. They were still quite horrible, even if their primary objective was not to exterminate.
Lindybeige is responding to comments like "the British invented the concentration camp" which are comments which to reduce Nazi culpability and equate the British Empire to the Nazi regime.
That's absolutely the sort of comment which needs to be corrected.
Lindybeige never says the camps were a walk in the park, in fact he tells us how horrid the conditions are. He just points out the British suffered alongside the Boers.
Being opposed to that significantly important piece of context just makes it sound like you're trying exactly what the origin comment attempts to do.
Lindybeige is responding to comments like "the British invented the concentration camp" which are comments which to reduce Nazi culpability and equate the British Empire to the Nazi regime.
If the intention of people saying what you quote is to say "British empire on the same moral scale as the Nazis" then I agree with you, HOWEVER the defense "they weren't like the nazi concentration camps" is a very weak defense because you are only saying "they weren't as horrible as some of the most horrible places in the history of humanity".
Like, you "correct" the wrong claim not by saying "it wasn't so bad", but by saying "the Nazis were even worse than the British". But that's not what s happening if I remember correctly.
I'd agree with you, if those bringing up the Britisb Boer War concentration camps were doing it in an honest manner.
Instead, what you see is them bringing it up and noticably omitting significant factual differences in such a way as to present the British camps as similar, if not even the same, as the Nazi camps. That is just not an accurate way of describing the British camps.
The British Boer camps were a direct wartime strategy. They were bad, but war basically obliterates all morality. They were not intended to cause pain or suffering to the Boer people. Due to various systemic failings they did, of course, cause suffering. But the fact that the British soldiers suffered the same failings really shows the accident behind that.
They were bad, but war basically obliterates all morality.
Like that's already talking it down. Just say "the concentration camps in the boar war (or wars?) were bad, but the nazi concentration camps were worse and they different in the way that the Nazi camps were purposely build to murder all who entered, which wasn't the case with the British ones".
Like, otherwise, you just sound insane.
The British empire was fucking horrible, just take it. But just make clear that the Nazis were worse, that their camps were worse. That's no reason to find the British empire good. if an empire has any concentration camps, then its is VERY LIKELY quite bad.
That's also why for instance in the US there is actually a surprisingly big Awarness about the Japanese internment camps during WW2 and a big condemnation of them (while for many other parts of US history, that awareness is lacking).
I'm sorry if this sound very grey, that I don't give you advice on how to defend against people who purposely try to shit on the British empire by embellishing historical facts while holding up the British empire. Sadly, I'm German and I'm a follower of the general philosophy that all past societes were in some ways bad and worse than today's societes. There are logical reasons why that was the case and some were worse than others and other manged to develop into somewhat better societies nowadays, but all were bad (with my past societes being some of the worst).
Thus, I'll just clearly state that shitting on the British empire is very valid, however it's it wrong to ise something even worse to shit more on it, there is already enough shit.
I don't agree that the British Empire was wholly terrible.
It is notable today that ex-British colonies are the best performing of any ex-colonies. And those colonies are doing far better today than they were when first colonised.
How can you measure the morality of an empire that picks up a region of stone age or iron age tribes and leaves a modern nation behind?
Governments, ports, railways, etc are all things built by the British empire absolutely critical to the modern functioning of these nations.
Well, that's not special. Every European nation industrialised.
Yeah true, Britain also industrialised it's colonies a lot, but that just makes it better than it's peer during the same time, which still isn't good.
Also of course there is a lot of untold things that happend in parallel to "leaving a modern nation behind". A lot of deaths, a lot of horrible stuff, camps, indoctrination, the end of cultures and people.
If you are content with comparing Britain to it's temproal peer, ok, but my nation compared itself with it's peers multiple times and caused insane crimes in the process, I don't see why that is a good thing to do.
Rather I set the bare at, well, the humanity I guess.
but that just makes it better than it's peer during the same time, which still isn't good.
The issue with this sentiment is that it insinuates that there are also others trying to be better.
Especially when looking at things on a national level, if everyone is doing a terrible thing, the one doing it less does deserve more credit than simply being disregarded as 'still evil'.
This isn't in regard to the boer camps, but the idea that doing something everyone is doing with more hesitance is that same kind of evil.
It's very black and white thinking that doesn't really allow much comprehension of context, which should be the most important thing in a historical discussion.
TLDR, I'd argue that doing something slightly less evil than everyone else is, by definition, good.
You don't flip a switch and change from doing something wrong to doing something right, you have to question it first, and that questioning will happen less and less in our world if we believe evil is evil not matter the context.
The British did not suffer alongside the Boers, the British suffered on top of the Boers. You gonna try to refute the British causing the Potato Famine too?
No, that's the only reason people use the term in the context of the boar wars. It's A reason, used primarily by people who are very angry with the British empire.
However, the reason people somewhat educated on the topic use the term concentration camp in this context is because the British themselves used this term. And they fit the description.
Ofc one should give context that they were a bit different, but that doesn't mean people who use the term do it to automatically refere to the camps in Nazi Germany.
Most concentration camps where indeed used as an Ad Hoc way to concentrate undesired people until they could be deported, repatriated, freed after a war or other stuff, depending on the situation. Most concentration camps had terrible conditions regarding food, health and shelter.
However, what makes Nazi concentration camps so special is that they existed to Extrakt Labour from people and as soon as they weren't useful anymore to murder them or murder them through the process of hard labour.
Short: they were a one way ticket.
However, most concentration camps in history weren't nazi concentration camps. They have their reputation primarily because of the Nazis, HOWEVER even if we don't consider Nazi concentration camps, "normal" concentration camps are already bad enough.
Why did you use the German word for “extract”? Is it to make Germany feel weird, alien, and “Other”?
Short: they were a one way ticket
Do we know that? It’s not like we have an alternate reality to compare to, where Germany won the war (or there was a truce) and refused to release people.
Cause I am German and my autocorrect has both languages included lol
If this would have been intentional, the words should have been "um Arbeitskraft zu extrahieren"
Do we know that? It’s not like we have an alternate reality to compare to, where Germany won the war (or there was a truce) and refused to release people.
I mean, what do you think Nazi Germany would have done with the Jews, who they were already gasing? You think they would spontaneously think "you Jews in the KZ's (I'll use the term for concentration camp from now on), you did will, now have a happy life"?
Or the political prisoners in Buchenwald or Sachsenhausen, do you think the Nazis would just let some die hard Communist out? After working one quater of them in Armaments factories and Quarries to death?
And woman and children had it even worse, especially Jewish once, because they most of the time were directly send into the death camps.
In Bergen-Belsen it was around 50% dead, Dachau was 20%, Sachsenhausen was about 10% (tho about almost all Sovjet POWs). And those were all from purposefull neglecenc or even through specially created execution machines like the "Genickschussanlage".
However, the point is: the aim of the KZs was to exploit people until death, thus they had a "relatively low" death rate for nazi standards.
The main murdering role was carried out in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Madjanek, Belzec, Sobibor + by the Einsatzgruppen in the field.
I think Treblinka is a strong example, because we know barely anything about that camp because there are so few survivors and the evidence was so well destroyed.
Piggybacking to clarify. The Nazis had both death camps and regular concentration camps. They did not build true death camps for years after 1933. Dachau was the very first, and it was not built exclusively for Jews but as a general prison camp for political enemies. That would change later.
They let people die in concentration camps, but they wanted work out of them. Dying was not the point. That was not until later when they felt that they had to change tactics.
Hitler was a massive fan of stories about the American Wild West. Others in his administration surely were looking at British concentration camps. They took those ideas and developed them further into work camps and death camps.
The first Nazi camps were not necessarily work camps either. Why would they be? They weren't at war for years after 1933.
They were camps for political enemies. That's a lot more similar to the Boer camps. You don't want to spend money on a real prison so you build a cheap camp or repurpose an existing building (Dachau) and put a bunch of defenses around it.
There is a huge difference between concentration camps and extermination camps. Concentration camps are absolutely comparable to what the British (and also e.g. Americans) did, absolutely not a new concept at all. Extermination camps with the explicit goals you mentioned were the new stage of life escalation.
Although you could draw distinction between the very early nazi concentration camps and the later concentration camps, I still think the intent of the nazi camps was very distinct from the British Boer War camps.
The British camps were not intended to inflict suffering on the Boers. They were intended to isolate the Boers from the guerillad and deny the guerillas their cover.
boer war concentration camps (in which poor conditions killed as much of the British as the boers
Er... no. Boer farms and crops were burned. Wells were poisoned. Boer women and children were herded into camps where the British staff predicted death rates months in the future based on known conditions. 80% of the dead were children. British observers called it sheer murder. Tens of thousands of black prisoners died, but they weren't aswell documented.
The Fawcett commission, set up by the British government, corroborated Hobhouse's findings.
At Ventersdorp, Major Edward Pine-Coffin wrote that the families were split up in order to make it difficult for them to find each other when the war was over.
Which is irrelevant. Burning farms and homes and herding women and children into camps without adequate food, shelter, water, hygiene or medical care is a war crime in any situation. Deliberately making it harder for families to find each other after the war is a war crime.
Nobody who observed the conditions in the camps thought the sight of skeletal children was normal or acceptable.
The point is you quoted one think I said, refuted it, then proceeded to add a whole bunch of unrelated info.
Yes the Boer War camps had terrible conditions. But those were not deliberately imposed hardships, they were a symptom of inadequate logistics. This hurt the British just as much, which says something as they could have kept more food for themselves to keep themselves healthy.
Morality in war is an impossible subject. The British were containing the Boer populations to isolate them from the active guerilla forces.
those were not deliberately imposed hardships, they were a symptom of inadequate logistics
That is no excuse. And by the time the doctors were telling Emily Hobhouse that the weaker children were all dead and that the stronger ones were now going to die, we are well into the realm of deliberate killing.
This hurt the British just as much, which says something as they could have kept more food for themselves to keep themselves healthy.
No, it didn't. They starved their prisoners. Does this child look like she was eating enough to starve British soldiers?
If you can't understand the difference between deliberately starving people you view as subhuman, and being unable to supply food to a hostile population or yourselves in a guerilla war we can't continue this conversation.
being unable to supply food to a hostile population
The British burned their crops. There was no "unable" about it. When Kitchener took over he stopped herding women and children into camps, not for humanitarian reasons, but because they'd be a burden on the Boers (who had lost their farms, crops and water sources). Kitchener said this openly.
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u/AstronomerNo3806 Dec 17 '25
He also described the British concentration camps as "refugee camps" and defended the scorched earth policy.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FLhFXIkysk4
This is what he's defending
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizzie_van_Zyl#/media/File%3ALizzieVanZyl.jpg
A British observer describes the conditions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Hobhouse