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European colonial empires killed millions as well and faced no prosecution. Never forget what Hitler said; he said that concentration camps were not his idea in
by mrkramer 6y ago
European colonial empires killed millions as well and faced no prosecution. Never forget what Hitler said; he said that concentration camps were not his idea instead he learnt about it from reading about British concentration camps during the Second Boer War in which thousands of Boers died.
- frenchy 6y agoNot to mention there was Hitler's quote about how no-one remembers the Armenian genocide. He wasn't even wrong about that, as few remember the brutality that the Nazis exacted on the Poles.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoAnd the inspiration for the gas chambers came from US border posts with Mexico, where anyone coming in from Mexico had to have their clothes fumigated with Zyklon-B and themselves bathed in gasoline (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5176177&t=1609770957354 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=517617...).
- ntsplnkv2 6y agoThere's a big difference between using chemicals to prevent disease from entering your country (However misguided) and using it as a tool for mass murder and genocide.
- dcolkitt 6y agoThe comparison is silly. While the Boer War concentration camps were brutal, they were nothing on par with the Nazis. In fact “concentration camp” is largely a misnomer. The sizable majority of Holocaust victims were killed in extermination camps, like Treblinka. These never even purported to hold any prisoner population, and simply murdered all prisoners immediately upon arrival. The British have no shortage of problems. But nothing in their history is even remotely comparable to Hitler.
- smcl 6y agoI mean we did have a pretty brutal occupation of many other countries and were directly responsible for the deaths of millions of people in the process. We even had our own fair share of racist leaders - take a look at what Churchill had to say about Indian people for example. The timescales were different - Britain committed its crimes over the course of centuries rather than a decade or so - but it's not accurate to say "nothing in their history is even remotely comparable" to Nazi Germany. The main visible difference nowadays is that Germans of today are hyper-aware of the atrocities committed in the past by their ancestors. Britons are often either ignorant of theirs or are proud of them.
- mrkramer 6y agoThere is no difference between starved Boer children[1] and starved Jewish children[2]. Warning: Disturbing images [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War_concentration_camps#/media/File:LizzieVanZyl.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War_concentration_... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_in_the_Holocaust#/media/File:Zw%C5%82oki_dzieci_getto_warszawskie_05.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_in_the_Holocaust#/med...
- dcolkitt 6y agoWell, there is a slight difference between 26,000 and 7 million.
- mrkramer 6y agoMurder is a murder and it is wrong in both views of the law and the god if you are religious.
- dcolkitt 6y agoAnd I absolutely agree with that. Earl Kitchener is an evil man. But he acted independently to convert humanitarian refugee camps into punitive concentration camps. The British government itself investigated the allegations, and explicitly put an end to Kitchener's abuses after they came to light. The opposition party and subsequent prime minister vehemently denounced his actions. In contrast, Nazi leadership sat in a seaside resort and meticulously planned out the industrial mass execution of millions of people. The entire regime from Hitler down was involved. So while, I'd agree there's a moral equivalence between Kitchener and Heydrich, the Nazi regime itself is far more guilty than the British Empire.
- tootie 6y agoThat seems improbable given that German colonizers committed a genocide in Africa in the years following the Boer War.