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What concentration camps reveal is that modern people are squeamish about killing. Consider the Mongol empire. While the Mongol empire had some things in comm

• geezer 9y ago
  People are and have never been squeamish about killing. They just don't like to witness gore in their own backyards while they are enjoying brunch with their families. Concentration camps eliminate the inconvenience of having your day ruined by unsightly executions by moving the fate of undesirables out of your sight. And regarding Mongols, most of what you learn from history is greatly exaggerated. Mongols fought to conquer and the cheapest way to conquer is to intimidate the enemy. It was in their interest to spread terror through stories of murder and brutality and it was in the interest of their victims to spread the same stories to elicit sympathy.
  • RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
    They also backed up their reputation for brutality with stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258) Their actions severely depressed to population of the area for centuries.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  • emodendroket 9y ago
    I don't know that I agree with the parent's conclusions, but it is certainly true that people in the past were much more used to seeing death, whether of humans or animals.
• cowardlydragon 9y ago
  aaa Ayn Randian true devotees won't let such squeamishness stop them from realizing their true potential. If anything, genocide is how you get rid of the lazy people that just drag you down and keep you from your fulfillment as a capitalist knight. Your swords of Rearden Metal shall purge them.
• abetusk 9y ago
  It looks like the claim that the Romans salted the earth is "not supported by ancient sources" [1][2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carthage_(c._149_BC) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carthage_(c._149_BC) [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/269786?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/269786?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...
  • ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
    That is something I have always been skeptical of as well. We know that salt was an extremely precious commodity in the ancient world. It seems like an extreme waste of wealth to ruin fields for the future generations of people you have already killed.
    • Retric 9y ago
      Using ocean water could 'work', though transportation would be more problematic unless you where figuratively destroying a small garden or something. It's presumably just as effective, and vastly cheaper. PS: Salt was expensive because of transaction and transpiration issues plus the need for a lot of land as water only evaporates at ~1/8th inch of water per day. So at 3.5% concentration that's ~4/1,000th of an inch of salt per day. But, having soil absorb sea water would likely work just as well.
    • ptero 9y ago
      As someone said, ocean water is all you need. My history knowledge is basic at best, but as far as I know ruining fields was exactly part of the Romans' goal to ensure that no city gets rebuilt there again (Delenda est Carthago).
      • emodendroket 9y ago
        I don't see how the evidence supports your conclusion.
• charles-salvia 9y ago
  >> What concentration camps reveal is that modern people are squeamish about killing. Well, there's a difference between exterminating a foreign and/or conquered city-state, and isolating/quarantining undesirable sub-groups from within a larger civilization (often for reasons that are more ideological than political). What the Mongols, Romans, Assyrians, etc., did was less like isolating an ethnic sub-group and more like inflicting punishment upon a city-state for not paying tribute. (Also, I think the Assyrians would also export the population of a city-state and resettle them elsewhere, to remove their national identity, just as often as they would kill and/or skin-alive everyone in a targeted city-state.) It's probably worth noting that what happened recently to the Yazidis in North Iraq was closer to what used to happen in antiquity.
• dTal 9y ago
  I don't think you're wrong about modern squeamishness, but I think it goes further than that. The purpose of concentration camps is to not kill people. Methodical killing of any type at scale is very rare in the modern world. It's even rarer for it to to be conducted through camps; to my knowledge, only the Nazis ever did it (and their allies, the Croatian fascist Ustaše regime). Most mass killing simply consists of taking groups of people somewhere remote and shooting them. Concentration camps are what you do when you don't want to do that and are basically a cheap form of prison. Even in the Soviet Gulag, where the harsh conditions and threat of death were part of the punishment, the majority of prisoners survived. Even where death is tacitly the expected outcome of a camp (rare), it's mostly done by slow starvation and overwork. I think that's interesting, given how inefficient that is. It provides a kind of mental "plausible deniability".
  • Retric 9y ago
    Cambodian genocide (1975 - 79) had insanely high fatality rates at it's camps which where mostly there to torture people before death. ~25 percent of the total Cambodian population died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide What separated the Nazi mass killings was mostly the massive population they could pull from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-occupied_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-occupied_Europe
    • aaron695 9y ago
      > ~25 percent of the total Cambodian population died. But not from concentration camps.
  • JadeNB 9y ago
    > The purpose of concentration camps is to not kill people. I agree with this even more than you do. If my understanding of history is correct, the Nazis, whom you single out as an exception, weren't so from the beginning. This: > Most mass killing simply consists of taking groups of people somewhere remote and shooting them. was what they did with their 'undesireables' for a long time, too; and, as you point out: > Concentration camps are what you do when you don't want to do that and are basically a cheap form of prison. I think that they originally intended their concentration camps as a marshalling point for future deportation, and (later?) a source of slave labour. It was only at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, I think, that they decided to turn some concentration camps into extermination camps. (Indeed, one could make the point that your statement is true by definition; a camp intended for killing ceases to be, or just to be, a concentration camp. However, probably this sort of semantic quibble is not what you meant.)
• thaumasiotes 9y ago
  > There was no fourth Punic war because there were no Carthaginians left alive and free. Let's not even talk about the Assyrians! What do you have in mind about "the Assyrians"? Control of Mesopotamia flipped back and forth many times until it was eventually conquered from the east by Persia. The Assyrians neither destroyed any land nor were they destroyed by any enemies. It was common for conquered populations to be deported elsewhere in a Mesopotamian empire, and for conquered cities to be burned (particularly the local palace) -- that's why we have so many contemporary records. But there was no ethos of killing the people or salting the earth, and those things just didn't happen. There is a myth that the late Assyrian capital of Nineveh was sacked, destroyed, and completely abandoned, but this is contradicted by a wealth of archaeological evidence showing that it was sacked, recovered, and sustained its population continuously for several hundred more years.
• jmnicolas 9y ago
  Given how valuable salt was back then I highly doubt Carthage's earth was really salted.
• awkwarddaturtle 9y ago
  > Consider the Mongol empire. While the Mongol empire had some things in common with a modern state, squeamishness about killing was not one of them. The mongols were just as "squeamish" about killing as any other empire - british, spanish, american, etc. Hell, by any measure, the mongols were a far less "brutal" empire than the british, spanish, american. > There are cases where they decided a city needed to be destroyed and they took great pains to make sure that destruction was total. Yes. It's called "sacking" a city. It has happened throughout history. The mongols weren't special. You are just perpetuating stereotypes and myth. The US, british, soviets annihilated cities far worse than anything mongols ever did. It's absurd that you have to resort to silly myths. If you want to see pure evil, go look at what the british empire did to the natives and aborigines. Go look at what we did in hiroshima or nagasaki. You don't have to push racist myth about the mongols. > Ears were put into sacks and carted off in wagons to be counted If you think that was horrific, go read about what we did to the japanese in ww2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanese_war_dead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanes... > Many states throughout history have committed genocide against enemies and many others have persecuted populations within their own borders. No they didn't. Genocides, as we see define them, are relatively new european concept based on racist ideology. You brought up the mongols. Try and find out anyone the mongols "exterminated". You won't find anything other than perhaps mongols tribes that they "merged" into larger mongol tribes. > Modern human society is gentler now than at any point in our past It really isn't. You misunderstood why concentration camps were created initially. They were created for slave labor. When the germans realized they were losing, they decided to exterminate the people in concentration camps. You say modern society has gotten "gentler" but there hasn't been a more evil and callous action in human history than the dropping of nukes on cities. Humans haven't "evolved". We are just more sated and nukes make it harder for serious war. That's it. But sooner or later, it's inevitable we will get a serious war. And then you'll see how much "gentler" we are.
  • ygaf 9y ago
    Sure humans haven't evolved, but the parent poster didn't say that. Society has evolved. We still make desperate actions during wartime, meanwhile during peacetime we are even outraged these days when death row prisoners have their executions moved forward.
• redy 9y ago
  Historically, "genocide" was extremely rare and it was definitely not driven by a lack of "squeamishness." It was then, as it is now, a political calculation. Further, anybody who really understands exactly what the United States did to Japan during WW2 would be very, very hard pressed to declare "modern people are squeemish about killing." (Seriously, this is almost exactly backwards. Nothing the Mongols ever did could even approach the destruction of modern conflicts.) > Concentration camps are only necessary now because most people won't stand for such atrocities, and states therefore feel compelled to carry them out in relative secrecy. Again, this is backwards. Concentration camps are the most basic kind of state terrorism. The goal of modern camps is always to inspire fear in a population in an economically efficient manner. The same is true of historical genocides and slavery. They were tools of terror. What previous governments lacked but the modern state possesses in abundance is the ability to track, contain, and feed large populations. Once you can do this it makes much more economic sense to terrorise your enemy's population than it does to completely annihilate the city (and destroy lots of valuable infrastructure [1]) or enslave the population (slaves are often not very productive from an economic perspective). Hence concentration camps. The article is probably a bit off too. There are even more sophisticated forms of state terrorism available today which largely obsolete concentration camps. Mass surveillance (once you can convince the population they are always being watched most will self-regulate), mass debt (if you really want to control a man give him a 30 year mortgage, to control a country give them insfrastructure loans) and mass institutionalization (force most people into prison or universities). You are far more likely to see modern statesmen advocating for more surveillance powers and "tougher" laws or economic fines/seizures against whoever happens to be enemy. [1] To get down to it, the two basic reasons modern states don't annihilate population centers is (a) nuclear weapons which blow out all cost/benefits calculations (b) global trade has produced highly interconnected goods and services networks. Note that (a) and (b) reinforce one another.