[Cross-posted from European Tribune – where dissent is NOT troll rated!]
See what I have written over de last decade and some of my recent analysis …
○ New Fascist Pariah States America and Israel Lashing Out
○ Xenophobia and Islamophobia Roots of Today’s Triad of Evil
America’s 21st century calls them “Austerity Camps” … nice term for the wealthiest of nations to call housing for poor people who have missed out on the profits of the financial crisis and belong to the migrants looking for a better life. Often away from drugs and corruption in their home country.
Not his finest hour: The dark side of Winston Churchill | The Guardian – Oct. 28, 2010 |
Winston Churchill is rightly remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour – but what if he also led the country through her most shameful hour? What if, in addition to rousing a nation to save the world from the Nazis, he fought for a raw white supremacism and a concentration camp network of his own? This question burns through Richard Toye’s new history, Churchill’s Empire, and is even seeping into the Oval Office.
George W Bush left a bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House, in an attempt to associate himself with the war leader’s heroic stand against fascism. Barack Obama had it returned to Britain. It’s not hard to guess why: his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill’s watch, for resisting Churchill’s empire.
Continued below the fold …
#Trump to bring bust of Churchill, removed by Obama, back to the White Househttps://t.co/U7rNdNyPrr
— L Todd Wood (@LToddWood) November 14, 2016
Can these clashing Churchills be reconciled? Do we live, at the same time, in the world he helped to save, and the world he helped to trash?
The young Churchill charged through imperial atrocities, defending each in turn. When concentration camps were built in South Africa, for white Boers, he said they produced “the minimum of suffering”. The death toll was almost 28,000, and when at least 115,000 black Africans were likewise swept into British camps, where 14,000 died, he wrote only of his “irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men”. Later, he boasted of his experiences there: “That was before war degenerated. It was great fun galloping about.”
"Concentration camp" used to be a euphemism: for Spanish prison towns in colonial Cuba, British prison camps in South Africa, and American prison camps in the occupied Philippines. Then in the 1940s the Germans tried to use it to hide what were more accurately called death camps.
— Jonathan M. Katz 🐱 (@KatzOnEarth) June 19, 2018
○ Winston Churchill has as much blood on his hands as the worst genocidal dictators – Indian continent
○ Winston Churchill’s shocking use of chemical weapons in Mesopotamia
○ Mau May rebellion: atrocities during British colonial rule in Kenya
○ Chagossians-the original inhabitants of Diego Garcia island
US Navy plans ‘austere’ migrant tent camps – report
A copy of a draft memo obtained by Time Magazine showed the US Navy was preparing to build sprawling detention centers on remote bases in Alabama, Arizona and California to escalate efforts to implement President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy against people illegally crossing the southern border.
The navy plans to build “temporary and austere” tent cities to house some 25,000 migrants in Alabama; 47,000 people in San Francisco; and another 47,000 at a facility in southern California.
The internal US Navy document indicates it would cost at least $233 million (€199 million) to run a facility for 25,000 migrants over half a year.
Captain Greg Hicks, US Navy’s chief spokesman, told Time it would be “inappropriate to discuss internal deliberative planning documents.”
But Lieutenant Colonel Jamie Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, admitted the Department of Defense (DoD) “was conducting prudent planning and is looking nationwide at DoD installations should DHS (Department of Homeland Security) ask for assistance in housing adult illegal immigrants.”
The @realDonaldTrump administration has selected a border facility near El Paso in Tornillo, TX to build a tent city with 450 beds for migrant children. The weather in Tornillo Texas is expect to be almost 100 degrees. pic.twitter.com/8p35GtEjjM
— Jorge_Silva (@Jorge_Silva) June 15, 2018
Navy Could Build Detention Centers for Illegal Migrants at Military Bases
[Update-1]
○ Women & Children in White Concentration Camps during the Anglo-Boer War, 1900-1902
No need to apologise | The Independent – Opinion | by Jan Morris on Jan 10th, 1999
The thoroughly mixed motives of imperialism were particularly tainted down there because the British- owned Rand goldfields were at stake; economics, strategy and plain greed all made it inevitable, as Winston Churchill wrote, that “sooner or later, in a just cause or a picked quarrel… for the sake of our Empire, for the sake of the race, we must fight the Boers”.
Certainly the British behaved like bullies. The vast resources of the greatest Empire the world had ever known were pitted against 100,000 poor agriculturists. “Follow the Flag!” cried the London press in an excess of imperial braggadocio, and enthusiastic volunteers came from all the far-flung colonies. The most famous regiments of the British Army were mustered for the conflict; Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener, Britain’s most celebrated soldiers, commanded the huge armies in the field. In the end Kitchener won by setting up concentration camps in which thousands of Boer men and women died of disease, starvation or heartbreak – primitive forerunners of Auschwitz and the Gulags.
The C.I.V.S have found war in South Africa a novel experience, and were hardly prepared for such a rough time ; but it is eminently satisfactory to know they do not regret volunteering, and would do so again should their services be required. There is no end to the numbers that would follow the flag. They would come in myriads.
Lord Albemarle, at a dinner given in St. Andrew’s Hall, Norwich, to old soldiers and sailors of Norfolk, on January 15, 1901, alluding to his experiences with the C.I.V.s, said it had been a glory and pleasure to the men of the volunteer forces to be allowed to serve beside the regular forces of the Crown, and he gave the regular soldier hearty thanks for the high example he had set them to follow.
[Source: Archive The City of London Imperial Volunteers]
British Concentration Camps of the Second South African War (The Transvaal, 1900-1902)
This thesis examines the British concentration camps and seeks to establish who was responsible for them; what were the conditions were like inside of them, and why almost 50,000 noncombatants, both black and white, died in the camps during a period of about two years.
These questions are explored through the use of official camp records, government reports and personal accounts from a wide range of involved individuals.
Most studies of the camps have concentrated on the effects of camp conditions and diseases. This study not only examines these themes, but looks beyond them into the headquarters of Lord Roberts, the man who established the camps, and reviews the decisions of Lord Kitchener, the general who was in charge of the camps when the majority of the deaths occurred. This study also exposes the complicity of the British governmentís civilian officials who turned deaf ears to the escalating tragedy and withheld the extent of the humanitarian crisis from the British population. It was Emily Hobhouse, a British subject, who courageously brought the plight of the Boers and natives to the attention of the British and world opinion, and caused changes to be made which undoubtedly saved thousands of lives.
The findings of this study place the blame for the 50,000 camp deaths squarely on the British leadership. Generals gave orders to destroy Boer farms and native kraals on the veldt, and incarcerated destitute families in camps with poor medical and sanitary conditions and little food.
