Did England invent the concentration camp, during the Boer War, and commit the first genocide, in Ireland,?
The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. defines concentration camp as: a camp where non-combatants of a district are accommodated, such as those instituted by Lord Kitchener during the South African war of 1899-1902; one for the internment of political prisoners, foreign nationals, etc., esp. as organised by the Nazi regime in Germany before and during the war of 1939-45. Literally, a Concentration Camp is a place where enemies, perceived undesirables and others are “concentrated”, or all placed together, in one controlled environment, usually very unpleasantly. Similar camps existed earlier, such as in the United States (concentration camps for Cherokee and other Native Americans in the 1830s), in Cuba (1868–78) and in the Philippines (1898–1901) by Spain under the Restoration and the US respectively[5]. The term finds its roots in the “re concentration camps” set up in Cuba by Valeriano Weyler in 1897 to quell opposition to Spanish rule in Cuba. During the Second Boer War (1899-1902),
The British invented the term ‘concentration camp’ for camps established during the Boer War to house Boer civilians. This was a byproduct of Kitchener’s strategy to defeat the Boers, who as guerrilla fighters were hard to pin down and they lived off the Dutch population. Like many confronted with guerrilla warfare, Kitchener tried to separate the fighters from their supporters. After World War II the term came to be synonymous with what we’d call a ‘death camp’- an extermination facility. Kitchener’s camps were not intended to be cruel and evil but they certainly were, being full of disease on an enormous scale… as was the British Army and to an extent British society. The problem was that in the late Victorian era the British aristocracy and ruling classes were particularly incompetent, inward-looking, self-absorbed and unwilling to do anything for those outside their own social class. British citizens suffered for this incompetence just as British visitors exposed the conditions i
