And my assumptions are being refilled with more solid matter.
That was really stupid for the Boer republics to declare war, with no industrial base; and without getting international support lined up beforehand.
The line I’ve been fed was that in defeat the Boers culturally retrenched in their attitude toward the Black Africans, and if Britain hadn’t bullied them they wouldn’t have taken it out on the Blacks. No: they were on the road to apartheid even before the Great Trek.
(I’ve read the there were ex-Confederates fighting with the Boers, but haven’t found any hard facts on that)
The British justification was, basically, “we want their gold.” I’m hard-pressed to think of a modern war where the aggressor had any slimmer moral pretext for war. (Which may be why the Boers felt no ambiguity about declaring war)
Cecil Rhodes and Rudyard Kipling were stupid assholes, and not just in hindsight. Churchill too, but allowances may be made for his immaturity and warped childhood.
There’s a story that Kitchener was killed by an agent whose family had died in the camps. Probably not true, but in a just world it would be. (I now feel guilty because I found his raking the thousands of wounded at Omdurman with machine guns acceptable as teaching the Ansar a lesson, but it wasn’t too far off from his treatment of the Boer noncombatants). Anyway, the Boer War proves that the British were just as nasty and brutal as any other nation, but Emily Hobhouse proves that unlike many other nations, British culture does allow a few individuals to emerge to redeem its honor.
The war gave the British valuable lessons in modern war at an affordable loss, which paid off in 1914. The Battle of Mons was won on the veldt. That one I’m still believing.
I don’t have time to shore up these points should anyone care to dispute them, but I won’t be easily persuaded otherwise.
It wasn’t quite that simple. Imagine what the US reaction would have been if the Mormons had declared Utah their own country. Actually, no need for imagination.
Remember, the Boers were British subjects before the Great Trek, and the British still considered them as such. If the Orange Free State and Transvaal Republic had gone the way of Natal, the war would not have happened. Note there the view of the government of the day: " the pretensions of the emigrants to be regarded as an independent community could not be admitted"
Also note that in the new colony (in theory) “that there should not be in the eye of the law any distinction or disqualification whatever, founded on mere difference of colour, origin, language or creed.” How do you think that was going to sit with people who first left the Cape Colony because the British freed their slaves? And who won their land in Natal by bloody conquest.
:eek: I hope you don’t still feel that.
[QUOTE=Kropotkin]
Legend has it the British “invention” of concentration camps during the Boer War gave the Nazis valuable lessons which paid off in 1933.
[/QUOTE]
That depends on your definition of a concentration camp. As a place to keep enemy noncombatants penned up so they could not supply the guerrillas, a POW camp like Andersonville doesn’t count. The British prison hulks of the American Revolution already set that example. Closer in time and purpose to the Boer War was the camps used by the Spanish in Cuba. The Americans had put the Cherokee in camps while they were organized into marches West, and the British did to the Acadians before shipping them to Louisiana, but these weren’t the same as strategic quarantine.
A detention facility where an organization (usually a govt.) puts large numbers of people in extremely overcrowded condition (such that there is a serious threat to life & health resulting from the overcrowding itself).
By that logic, neither does Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. People weren’t usually put there because they were helping partisans.
To be fair, the Cornfeds didn’t starve their POWs because they were trying to get rid of them, they did it because it was all they could do to keep their own troops at the front minimally supplied with food.
But if we go strictly by your definition, Florence Nightingale also ran a concentration camp.
The damning phrase should be* “you knew this was a deadly situation, and you did nothing about it.”* The Young Turks, Nazis and Soviets had every intention that this should be the outcome. The British were more guilty of willful negligence. Centuries earlier, they had massacred the Irish and the Scots, and had loaded Jews into ships that they knew would sink as soon as they reached open water. But their contemporary antecedents for the deaths of 28K Boers was set by the 19th C. famines in Ireland and India.
The lesson I take away from the history of the Second Boer War- and, at roughly the same time, the “pacification” of the Philippines- is that anarchists are deluded if they think they can defeat a government sufficiently ruthless to pull out all the stops. Gary Brecher a.k.a. The War Nerd said that the Holocaust was the exception: most of the time, genocide works.
Essentially the British got the colony as part of conquest in the Napoleonic Wars, and the Boers didn’t want to be part of it. Pacifying rebellious provinces is nothing new really. The fact that one of them had serious gold reserves just made it that much more important.
I believe what Brecher meant was that the Nazis were defeated and so whatever goal they’d hoped to achieve by it was for naught. An example of a genocide that worked was the Armenian genocide: by ethnically cleansing Asia Minor, the Turks were able to salvage a (mostly) homogeneous nation-state out of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
…because of the abolition of slavery. I just thought it bore repeating. There’s a whole generation between the initial British conquest and the Great Trek. But only one year between abolition and the Trek.
[QUOTE=Lumpy]
I believe what Brecher meant was that the Nazis were defeated and so whatever goal they’d hoped to achieve by it was for naught.
[/quote]
I think their goal was to kill all the Jews, Roma etc. They didn’t do too badly at that bit. But I get the point - although I would quibble with the “most of the time” - didn’t really work in Rwanda, or Ukraine, or Cambodia, or lots of other places.
Kipling may have been a stupid asshole in some respects; but IMO he wrote plenty of terrific stuff: and what he wrote, was highly varied – by no means just banging the drum for Empire. And he was a very acute observer of much in his world and his times.
The General ‘eard the firin’ on the flank,
An’ ‘e sent a mounted man to bring ‘im back
The silly, pushin’ person’s name an’ rank
‘Oo’d dared to answer Brother Boer’s attack:
For there might ‘ave been a serious engagement,
An’ ‘e might ‘ave wasted ‘alf a dozen men;
So ‘e ordered ‘im to stop ‘is operations round the kopjes,
An’ ‘e told ‘im off before the Staff at ten!
And it all goes into laundry,
But it never comes out in the wash,
‘Ow we’re sugared about by the old men
(‘Eavy-sterned amateur old men!)
That ‘amper an’ ‘inder an’ scold men
For fear o’ Stellenbosch!