# So I'm reading and thinking anew about the Second Boer War **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 22, 2015, 2:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174 "2015-09-22T02:46:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Slithy\_Tove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slithy_tove/32/18248_2.png) [@Slithy\_Tove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slithy_Tove)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 2:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/1 "2015-09-22T02:46:01Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Kropotkin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kropotkin/32/18045_2.png) [@Kropotkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kropotkin)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/2 "2015-09-22T03:55:41Z")
“The war gave the British valuable lessons in modern war at an affordable loss, which paid off in 1914.” Legend has it the British “invention” of concentration camps during the Boer War gave the Nazis valuable lessons which paid off in 1933. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 5:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/3 "2015-09-22T05:42:14Z")
> [@Slithy\_Tove](#): > > 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) 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War). 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalia_Republic#Transfer_to_colonial_government), 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. > [@](#): > > I found his raking the thousands of wounded at Omdurman with machine guns acceptable as teaching the Ansar a lesson :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] The Nazis had [more immediate, more direct](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Namaqua_Genocide) lessons in genocide from Africa. And the British didn’t invent KZ. [It can be argued](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andersonville_National_Historic_Site) Americans did. The Brits just applied them to noncombatants. ---
**Author:** ![Slithy\_Tove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slithy_tove/32/18248_2.png) [@Slithy\_Tove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slithy_Tove)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 9:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/4 "2015-09-22T09:26:45Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 9:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/5 "2015-09-22T09:56:50Z")
> [@Slithy\_Tove](#): > > That depends on your definition of a concentration camp. 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). > [@](#): > > As a place to keep enemy noncombatants penned up so they could not supply the guerrillas, a POW camp like Andersonville doesn’t count. By that logic, neither does Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. People weren’t usually put there because they were helping partisans. ---
**Author:** ![up\_the\_junction](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/f1d935/32.png) [@up\_the\_junction](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/up_the_junction)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 11:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/6 "2015-09-22T11:38:40Z")
> [@Kropotkin](#): > > Legend has it the British “invention” of concentration camps during the Boer War gave the Nazis valuable lessons which paid off in 1933. I was going to introduce you to Andersonville but I see it’s already been done. To underline the point here is the photo of a prisoner: > **[Andersonville Prison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andersonville_National_Historic_Site#/media/File:Andersonvillesurvivor.jpg)** > > The Andersonville National Historic Site, located near Andersonville, Georgia, preserves the former Andersonville Prison (also known as Camp Sumter), a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp during the final fourteen months of the American Civil War. Most of the site lies in southwestern Macon County, adjacent to the east side of the town of Andersonville. The site also contains the Andersonville National Cemetery and the National Prisoner of War Museum. The prison was created in February 1864 and se... ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 1:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/7 "2015-09-22T13:06:27Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Slithy\_Tove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slithy_tove/32/18248_2.png) [@Slithy\_Tove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slithy_Tove)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 1:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/8 "2015-09-22T13:08:43Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > 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. 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. ---
**Author:** ![orcenio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/orcenio/32/1036_2.png) [@orcenio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/orcenio)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 1:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/9 "2015-09-22T13:13:39Z")
> [@Slithy\_Tove](#): > > But if we go strictly by your definition, Florence Nightingale also ran a concentration camp. Not if you reasonably interpret “put” as “forcibly confine.” ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 1:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/10 "2015-09-22T13:24:29Z")
> [@Slithy\_Tove](#): > > But if we go strictly by your definition, Florence Nightingale also ran a concentration camp. I was unaware that Nightingale’s patients were detained… ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 1:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/11 "2015-09-22T13:24:37Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 1:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/12 "2015-09-22T13:29:50Z")
> [@orcenio](#): > > Not if you reasonably interpret “put” as “forcibly confine.” I think that’s covered by the “detention facility” part. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 1:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/13 "2015-09-22T13:31:35Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > Gary Brecher a.k.a. The War Nerd said that the Holocaust was the exception: most of the time, genocide works. I don’t see how the Holocaust is an exception, there. It worked about as well as any other genocide. ---
**Author:** ![up\_the\_junction](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/f1d935/32.png) [@up\_the\_junction](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/up_the_junction)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 1:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/14 "2015-09-22T13:44:37Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > 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. As all the links tell, food was only part of it - dysentery, water, etc, etc. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 1:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/15 "2015-09-22T13:57:01Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalia_Republic#Transfer_to_colonial_government), the war would not have happened. 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. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 2:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/16 "2015-09-22T14:15:05Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > I don’t see how the Holocaust is an exception, there. It worked about as well as any other genocide. 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. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/17 "2015-09-22T14:51:49Z")
> [@bump](#): > > 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. …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. ---
**Author:** ![Sangahyando](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f14d63/32.png) [@Sangahyando](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sangahyando)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 3:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/18 "2015-09-22T15:16:42Z")
> [@Slithy\_Tove](#): > > Cecil Rhodes and Rudyard Kipling were stupid assholes, and not just in hindsight. 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. ---
**Author:** ![txjim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f07891/32.png) [@txjim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/txjim)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/19 "2015-09-22T16:17:41Z")
[QUOTE=MrDibble;18706191 And the British didn’t invent KZ. It can be argued Americans did. The Brits just applied them to noncombatants.[/QUOTE] Tell that to the POWs kept on British prision ships in New York [http://www.thedearsurprise.com/the-wretched-prison-ships/](http://www.thedearsurprise.com/the-wretched-prison-ships/) ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174/20 "2015-09-22T18:58:55Z")
> [@Sangahyando](#): > > 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. > [@](#): > > How far does Kipling really identify himself with the administrators, soldiers and engineers whose praises he sings? Not so completely as is sometimes assumed. He had travelled very widely while he was still a young man, he had grown up with a brilliant mind in mainly philistine surroundings, and some streak in him that may have been partly neurotic led him to prefer the active man to the sensitive man. The nineteenth-century Anglo-Indians, to name the least sympathetic of his idols, were at any rate people who did things. It may be that all that they did was evil, but they changed the face of the earth (it is instructive to look at a map of Asia and compare the railway system of India with that of the surrounding countries), whereas they could have achieved nothing, could not have maintained themselves in power for a single week, if the normal Anglo-Indian outlook had been that of, say, E.M. Forster. Tawdry and shallow though it is, Kipling’s is the only literary picture that we possess of nineteenth-century Anglo-India, and he could only make it because he was just coarse enough to be able to exist and keep his mouth shut in clubs and regimental messes. But he did not greatly resemble the people he admired. I know from several private sources that many of the Anglo-Indians who were Kipling’s contemporaries did not like or approve of him. They said, no doubt truly, that he knew nothing about India, and on the other hand, he was from their point of view too much of a highbrow. While in India he tended to mix with ‘the wrong’ people, and because of his dark complexion he was wrongly suspected of having a streak of Asiatic blood. Much in his development is traceable to his having been born in India and having left school early. With a slightly different background he might have been a good novelist or a superlative writer of music-hall songs. But how true is it that he was a vulgar flagwaver, a sort of publicity agent for Cecil Rhodes? It is true, but it is not true that he was a yes-man or a time-server. After his early days, if then, he never courted public opinion. Mr. Eliot says that what is held against him is that he expressed unpopular views in a popular style. This narrows the issue by assuming that ‘unpopular’ means unpopular with the intelligentsia, but it is a fact that Kipling’s ‘message’ was one that the big public did not want, and, indeed, has never accepted. The mass of the people, in the nineties as now, were anti-militarist, bored by the Empire, and only unconsciously patriotic. Kipling’s official admirers are and were the ‘service’ middle class, the people who read BLACKWOOD’S. In the stupid early years of this century, the blimps, having at last discovered someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side, set Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as ‘If’, were given almost biblical status. But it is doubtful whether the blimps have ever read him with attention, any more than they have read the Bible. Much of what he says they could not possibly approve. Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot. As a rule it is the British working class that he is attacking, but not always. That phrase about ‘the flannelled fools at the wicket and the muddied oafs at the goal’ sticks like an arrow to this day, and it is aimed at the Eton and Harrow match as well as the Cup-Tie Final. Some of the verses he wrote about the Boer War have a curiously modern ring, so far as their subject-matter goes. ‘Stellenbosch’, which must have been written about 1902, sums up what every intelligent infantry officer was saying in 1918, or is saying now, for that matter. [“Rudyard Kipling”,](http://www.george-orwell.org/Rudyard_Kipling/0.html) by George Orwell [“Stellenbosch”:](http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/stellenbosch.html) 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! [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/so-im-reading-and-thinking-anew-about-the-second-boer-war/732174.md?page=2)