Britain had concentration camps for Boers (Dutch settlers) in South Africa during the Boer War 1899-1902. Around 30,000 died of disease in these camps.
The involvement of Western powers in the Russian Civil war (Temporary occupation of the Far East, aid to the Whites in the West) was a large contributing factor to the USSR's wretched relationship with the West - long after 'Communism in all countries' was forgotten.
As it turns out, backing the losing side in a civil war does not ingratiate you with the winner.
There is a reason why the Western powers (especially France) supported the White Russians. The Bolsheviks had indicated the possibility of not paying back foreign loans that were taken out by the Russian Empire (they followed through on that promise and defaulted on all foreign loans; USSR was basically cutoff from the Western Financial system until WW2). France had provided most of these, but the other powers were involved as well. This was probably the most important reason for their opposition: if they let the Bolsheviks get away with not paying loans, not only would their bankers lose a shit ton of money, but what was to stop other foreign powers (possibly communist ones) from doing the same?
Most foreign wars have surprisingly banal reasons for taking place...
A few more reasons occur: Bolsheviks nationalized all foreign possessions in Russia (which were very substantial - foreigners owned 90% of the railways for instance).
Also they appealed to the proletariat in the world and showed the potential of revolution to be real.
Lastly they simply weren’t integrated with the western global financial and economic system. Really the source of the friction, more so than ideological reasons. For centuries before Russia was a virtual colony of the West, sort of like the third world today.
Look up Lenin's train full of gold and how Trotsky made his way back to Russia through several countries despite being a wanted criminal.. or the actual start of the war w/r/t austrian occupation of serbia and nicholas II's slavic brotherhood movement and things become far more murky as to who 'the west' was backing.. esp. when one considers what position russia would have been in in to negotiate with the fallen ottomans and what that would mean for french/british hegemony in the near east..
As for afterwords - the USSR still traded with the west, and some people still made money.. look into the NEP beyond seeing it as a curious historical footnote and it too is not so clear..
Funny, kind of sounds like the last 20 years or so... hmm..
Russian Empire was allied with the Serbians, who were considered fellow Slavs.
Germans/Austrians were not keen on fighting on the eastern front with the powerful Russian empire and thus wanted to destabilize the country making it incapable of fighting against them (which they actually succeeded: the Soviets signed a humiliating treaty ending the war on the eastern front while ceding huge territories to Germany/Austria). Thus, they assisted the revolutionaries, among them Trotsky and Lenin.
Relations between the west and the Soviet Union were more complex than that:
>...The United States government was initially hostile to the Soviet leaders for taking Russia out of World War I and was opposed to a state ideologically based on communism. Although the United States embarked on a famine relief program in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s and American businessmen established commercial ties there during the period of the New Economic Policy (1921–29), the two countries did not establish diplomatic relations until 1933. By that time, the totalitarian nature of Joseph Stalin's regime presented an insurmountable obstacle to friendly relations with the West.
The US was more than hostile, we had soliders on the ground in Murmansk and Vladivostok. Russia for a few years was in a China like scenario with outside powers.
> The US was more than hostile, we had soliders on the ground in Murmansk and Vladivostok.
US sent soldiers to secure shipments sent to Tsarist Russia. And surprisingly bolsheviks declared themselves "free" of any Tsarist Russia financial burden(s), so allying with Whites was logical.
the bolsheviks sold to the West heaps of art pieces and treasures from museums and expropriated private collections - for food and other vital goods. that would largely explain the "relief program".
> By that time, the totalitarian nature of Joseph Stalin's regime presented an insurmountable obstacle to friendly relations with the West.
That is complete nonesense. The West has had, currently has, and will always have friendly relations with dictators and killers of all shades and stripes, as long as they are useful to us.
There is nothing about their domestic policies that we consider insurmountable.
I'm not sure where this bizarre revision of history comes from. The "West", dominated by the US for the past century, has installed plenty of brutal dictators and military regimes, mostly when countries ignored the US to go left, not right.
See Iran, Syria, a good fraction of Latin America including Cuba, Chile, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras, along with Korea and Vietnam.
Western governments, including Reagan, Nixon, and Thatcher ignored and even actively supported SA's apartheid government for decades.
> If the Apartheid regime of SA had called itself "socialist" there would have been no boycotts or concerts
Well, sure, because the Western anti-Communist support that propped it up wouldn't have existed, so there’d have been nothing to protest or boycott. The US and other Western allies didn't support it and (at a minimum) turn a blind eye to Israel transferring nuclear weapons technology to South Africa independently of it's anti-Communisr orientation.
You are confusing support from a few academics and socialist groups with foreign policy.
As it turns out, Noam Chomsky writing nasty op-eds that don't get published in the New York Times has less of an impact then what side of the bed the Secretary of State woke up on.
It's convenient for some people to say that it's inevitable that the USSR would be paranoid and anti-Western because of the West's ill-conceived intervention there.
But the reality is that, once the situation was stable in the USSR, the West was plenty willing to play ball there. Even the Koch patriarch was more than willing to build refineries there.
A combination of ingrained Russian xenophobia and ideological commitments drove the USSR to go haywire, not a small interventionary force a couple thousand strong.
Drive-by slurs aren't allowed here. Please read the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit all nationalistic flamebait out of your posts. Other flamebait too.
Xenophobia is present in all nations. I'm happy to go further and say that xenophobia plays a more central role in Russian identity than, say, English. Demanding "statistics" is a way of setting a bar that's more focused on dismissing historical and non-quantitative evidence than it is on clarifying anything. I could just as easily demand you prove the existence of Russia using statistics, and you'd fail.
The Russian state has always had a fraught and conflicted relationship with the West. It had a fairly unique place in being geographically situated to avoid economic and political domination by the West, but being less developed and near enough that its interactions with the Western powers led to a persistent inferiority complex. The court ladies excitedly took up the latest fashions and fads from Paris, while the political leadership attempted difficult reforms, partially to ensure their continued ability to resist Western domination and partially because they wanted approval of the more cosmopolitan powers. (The quasi-apocryphal Potemkin villages were built in order to impress Catherine II and a group of Western ambassadors.)
Pan-Slavism emerged in the 19th century. Instead of focusing myopically on aping Western powers, its intellectuals wanted to build a pan-Slavic identity and nationalism, centered around the Slavic folk, the Orthodox church, and the Tsar. This naturally led to conflicts with the more-Westernized countries that dominated Slavic peoples, as well as the Ottoman Empire. The people who questioned religion and the Tsar, for their part, were filthy liberals who were stooges of Western intellectuals (sound familiar?) And, for what its worth, most of the liberals were relatively privileged folk who looked down on the idiocy of the countryside, who made up the heartland of Russia (sound familiar?) It formed a useful dialectic for everyone involved.
Revolution and war come. Through an unlikely series of (un)fortunate accidents, the Bolsheviks come into power. They were a very funny set of people to rule over Russia, but they ruled. Their opinions of the Western ranged from (at best) negative to incredibly bitter and angry. But some compromises were made, in the first decade of Soviet rule. Ultimately, though, Stalin came to power. Mostly because he was the most ruthless autocrat. But he was more than happy to deploy xenophobia and the trope of his enemies being stooges of foreign powers when it suited him, as it often did. The scars of WW2 made him and Russian society even more sclerotic, leading to the present day.
"historical and non-quantitative evidence" is bias, slur or bigotry. Don't label people using that kind of evidence.
> I could just as easily demand you prove the existence of Russia using statistics
I exist and I am a citizen, I can take my photo with a passport in hand. Pfft.
> most of the liberals were relatively privileged folk who looked down on the idiocy of the countryside, who made up the heartland of Russia (sound familiar?)
Are you referring to Hillary's campaign here?
As for the rest of your comment, nowhere you have got close to describing any actual xenophobia, much less show anything unique to Russians.
It also was a powerful factor in forcing the early revolutionaries to adopt a militarized war-footing whose impetus never quite subsided. Turns out when you build a society from scratch and have to spend most of your time solving military problems, you eventually run your entire society like a military.
The failure to appreciate how paranoid and scared the Soviets were almost started a nuclear war in 1983 with the Able Archer debacle - at least Reagan realised that the "Evil Empire" rhetoric was a mistake and calmed things down.
[NB I'm not trying to defend the Soviets, who were a thoroughly unpleasant bunch, but the colossal failure to understand their motivations and just how one side the Cold War was for most of the time almost ended things.]
While we may like to think of the Western intelligence agencies as all knowing for large periods throughout the Cold War they were essentially blind as to the inner working / thinking of the USSR. The occasional defectors or agents who could bring understanding are significant because of their scarcity.
The West had many reasons to believe the USSR was stronger than it was, hawks on the right wanted to believe it, fellow travellers on the left wanted to believe it, the Russian political system wanted to believe it (and lied to itself repeatedly).
The "Bomber Gap" and "Missile Gap" were known to be fiction pretty much at the time but for partisan political purposes nobody could actually be seen to publicly acknowledge how small the threat was.
> It also was a powerful factor in forcing the early revolutionaries to adopt a militarized war-footing whose impetus never quite subsided.
I wouldn't agree with that - I think the Civil war, and the subsequent domestic uprisings were that impetus. Outside of the Second World War, most of the fighting the Red Army did was against its own people.
In any case, these things compound. Immediately after WW2, the USSR still felt threatened by the West, which was not an unfounded fear. Multigenerational paranoia about being invaded by more powerful nations is precisely the kind of thing that damages institutions to the point where they no longer serve any purpose but preserving themselves.
It was always the plan of the Marxists to grab all the power and run a dictatorship. They supposed they needed that to reeducate the masses and change society. Then, they ended up doing what every dictatorship ends up doing. In the end, 100 million people died.
If your ideas require you to impose a dictatorship to implement them, then maybe they're not such good ideas.
I suggest you actually diligently check the sources for the suspect claims that 100 million people died under Communism.
Under the accounting methods used, capitalist systems of government would dwarf that number. Of course, uneven standards are par for the course.
> It was always the plan of the Marxists to grab all the power and run a dictatorship.
"The Marxists". Do you know how many groups participated in the Russian civil war, how many of them considered themselves Marxists, and how many of them were purged by the sole political entity that seized power? Since you uncritically cited that 100 million figure, I'm going to guess no.
As an example just in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Famine_deat..., due to economic mismanagement. I'd be interested to see any sources showing a similar number of deaths under a capitalist government, which I suspect would be hard as capitalist governments by definition don't exercise complete centralised control over the country's economic production.
> I'd be interested to see any sources showing a similar number of deaths under a capitalist government
Have you ever tried yourself? It's not a very hard thing to start to compile. The problem here is ideological though. Everything that would be added to the capitalism list would be rationalized away even if it uses the same measurement stick.
Interesting that this BBC article doesn't mention that the concentration camp was arguably a British invention in the first place -- certainly this Russian camp followed the model developed by the Bitish in the Boer war.
As I've understood things the more I read, the vast majority of mass deportation and mass executions enacted by the USSR and Nazis were largely inspired by the actions taken in the US vs the large native populations.
How those two entities went about pursuing those goals varied, but both were needlessly and mindlessly brutal, just like the act that inspired them.
It can be amazing how awful the acts you commit look when you see another entity perform them on another.
I am currently listing to the audio book 'Black Earth' from Timothy Snyder. There the author shows the aforementioned links and inspirations for Stalin and Hitler in how the US dealt with the natives.
I am interested in how the analysis will progress further.
Not to detract from what the U.S. govt did to natives, but a more likely explanation is that concentration camps are... the obvious thing to build if you want to isolate a population. I don't think the internment camps in the U.S. during WWII were modeled after Nazi concentration camps, and certainly they weren't in that there were no extermination facilities in the internment camps, thank goodness. A "camp" is just too obvious to suppose it's modeled on some past "invention" of the camp.
"Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity." - John Toland, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography[1]
These camps the British deployed in Russia sound as brutal as the ones they had deployed the Natal not so long previously.
Not to defend the US actions in the slightest but their 1940s internment camps were similar to the "villages" they used in Viet Nam in the 1960s (a technique also used by the British during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s BTW). In a hierarchy of brutality: less than the ones in Russia and South Africa).
(You can be just as brutal without corralling people -- Andrew Jackson and the Cherokee, or Gengis Kahn come to mind as being as evil as, say, Guantanamo. But people have found many ways to be mean to others, and I agree with you that taking one step down that path doesn't automatically make you equivalent to those who have taken many).
But "camp" is like so many things more obvious in retrospect than at the time so be careful of accidental anachronistic bias. In part it exists thanks to technology: it used to be expensive to keep prisoners, so unless they could pay their way (i.e they were nobility) it was simpler just to kill them. The invention of barbed wire and practical guns, as well as, ironically, changing views of the moral worth of people (an increase in valuing life) lead to their development.
You can see the technological aspect in Russia itself: when the Tsars wanted to get rid of someone but not kill them, the victim was simply sent to Siberia. Getting back was so hard they were for all intents and purposes interned there. The Soviets, being more industrially minded, were the ones who set up the Gulag system. (And though it would be facile at this point to say "...and so clearly they got the idea thanks to the British counterrevolutionary efforts" I think that would be an unnecessary stretch).
Or, as one of the great chilling quotes of the 1960s put it: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it"
Do you have a link for this type of village used in Vietnam? I've only heard of the Strategic Hamlet program, which was designed to protect rural villages from the VC, not to imprison any Vietnamese.
"protect" indeed. Sort of how the militarized police, NSA surveillance, no fly lists and etc are designed to "protect" the American people?
The Strategic Hamlet program built barbed wire fences and guild posts around existing or purpose-built villages, enforcing curfew, ID checks, etc supposedly by "villagers" but typically by the army. Collective punishment was administered to villages who "failed" to keep out either communists or "communists".
If you don't consider that imprisonment, what is it?
Basically they copied the British "Kampung Baru" (AKA "resettlement") program with even less success than the British. FWIW British ruthlessness in Malaya was more "effective" than the US in Viet Nam -- there were basically no people of Chinese origin left in northern Malaya. A classic "play one side off against another, using troops from yet another outside group" strategy that had been so effective for centuries.
The Malaysia of today is quite different from the Malaya of the 1950s.
My mother grew up in Ipoh. Her brother was drafted by the British in the 1950s for this campaign (as was typical of British colonial practice, he is not malay, chinese or english). His and his buddys' description of the process was pretty clear: 1 - all bumiputrahs into kampongs. 2 - once that's done you are free to shoot anything that moved (which he said was a euphemism for ethnic chinese), with no consequences.
Allegedly the British were fighting communist infiltration from maoist China, so the shape of your body was proof of your guilt. I have no idea if there really was infiltration and the cantonese/fujianese who spread through the British empire were typically hardly of the communist persuasion.
>which was designed to protect rural villages from the VC
A foreign power from 10.000 miles away, no borders with a country, and no reason to be there, comes there with their army to "protect" the local population?
>A foreign power from 10.000 miles away, no borders with a country, and no reason to be there, comes there with their army to "protect" the local population?<
Trying to distill the 50 year old motives of a superpower can be a challenge in a thread, but consider it like this; if the intent of the US wasn't to protect the local population, wouldn't they have done more than this?
To address each point of your argument, distance doesn't really matter in the 20th Century, or earlier. Global actions occur, well, globally. To imply that a country can't have interests outside of it's border isn't a strong argument.
The Soviets and (Communist) Chinese were also operating in North Viet Nam so the idea was that the locals were being protected from those under the influence of an evil foreign power.
You can make up your own mind as to the legitimacy of this (you can probably guess what I think) but my comment is intended as a normative response to your question.
> Interesting that this BBC article doesn't mention that the concentration camp was arguably a British invention in the first place
Probably because the BBC knows that's not even remotely true. The very term "concentration camp" itself derives from the earlier Spanish reconcentrados (reconcentration camps), used most notoriously in Cuba.
The USA not only employed concentration camps - alongside vast amounts of other barbarism, including waterboarding - in the Philippines, as they had done decades earlier against the native American Indians, and even during the American Civil War, but actually forced an act upon that country, the Reconcentration Act of 1903 to forcibly relocate populations into designated areas.
Aside from the USA and Spain using concentration camps well before the second Boer War, the French also used them in Algeria in the 1830s and 1850s.
There are probably other examples, but the first modern era (last ~200 years) concentration camp is perhaps the one established by the Paraguayan military in 1813.
indeed, "People think it was just the Nazis that operated concentration camps. Britain used them in South Africa, Ireland, Palestine, Malaya & Kenya." https://twitter.com/crimesofbrits
Whats interesting in recent years it came up that children in Germany were learning about "Polish concentration camps", highly alluding that those places had more to do with polish people than with Germans (that they were of polish evil invention and ran by polish people).
There is also a long "tradition" in Germany to detach Germans from what they did in past. For example, average Dutch will not tell you "Germans start World War 2", he/she will tell you "Nazis Started World War 2". This goes very far. Before that, it wasn't Germans who were slaughtering Europeans, it was Teutonic Order.
> There is also a long "tradition" in Germany to detach Germans from what they did in past. For example, average Dutch will not tell you "Germans start World War 2", he/she will tell you "Nazis Started World War 2". This goes very far. Before that, it wasn't Germans who were slaughtering Europeans, it was Teutonic Order.
That seems reasonable. A country's government and its population or cultural identity are different. Especially as time goes on.
Germany was arguably the most educated, enlightened, and cultured country of that time. Look at all those Nobel winners. They chose to take on the garments of Nazism. It was Germany that killed all of those Jews, Gypsies, handicapped, Christians, and anyone else who opposed them. Trying to say "that was just this crazy political party" just doesn't cut it.
It's a fine line. The important thing is to emphasise that there was nothing unique about Germany or the Nazi party. What happened there could happen anywhere. If you emphasise the Germanness of the Holocaust, you risk casting it as a uniquely German phenomenon.
The German people didn't suddenly become evil in 1931, nor did they suddenly become good in 1946. They were perfectly ordinary people who were complicit or active in perpetrating awful atrocities. It happened there and it could happen here. There are people in your life who would, in the wrong circumstances, be perfectly capable of kicking people into cattle cars or gas chambers. They're not psychopaths or monsters, they're just people who do what they're told. That's the awful reality; blaming some aspect of the German character is an easy get-out from confronting that awfulness.
One could even argue that it did indeed happened "here". Take a look at recent Iraq invasion under President Bush. Least at least 8 years, at cost of 150-650 thousands (!!) of lives lost, about 110,000 civilians included... and what happened other than few street riots and march under White House? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! Average American family continues to live average american life and even as we still don't know why this war was started, life goes on :(
I am not German, but thanks for writing that. Demonizing people is unfortunately the norm, making a well balanced judgment is very rare. Many, many thanks for your writings here.
From the middle of the 19th century, there was a myth in the western world about being a "superior race". For example in France Jules Ferry [0] said "it is a right for the superior races, because they have a duty. They have the duty to civilize the inferior races."
It went much further than skin color differences, my own ancestors in the Western part of France, were called "animals like people" by Parisian politicians during the 19th century.
For those who admire Victor Hugo (a French writer of 19th century), he wrote a lot about Africa and their inhabitants (and also of inhabitants of Brittany and Vendée). His views on "inferior people" are absolutely terrifying:
"In the nineteenth century, the white man made true men of black people ; in the twentieth century, Europe will make a world of Africa."
It complicated...Nazisms did not persecute Christians in general and considered Christianity a part of the German culture. Atheists were persecuted, and so where members of sects like Jehovah's Witnesses. They wanted a church which was subservient to the state, and members of the clergy which opposed this or criticized the party were persecuted just like other political enemies. But the mainstream churches (Germany have both Protestant and Catholic) cooperated with the Nazi government.
Some Nazi ideologues were negative towards Christianity, but in general the system were positive towards "German Christianity".
There are such things as continuity of state, and also a continuity of culture.
Especially if post-WWII it never sat well with the locals that they lost the war, or that they were in the wrong.
Token gestures like making "mein kampf" illegal post-facto are a dime a dozen.
Especially since most of the post-WWII political and business establishment, in the highest positions, were fervent nazi party members and high ranking officials before 1945:
Your comment is a perfect example of what the parent was commenting on. The notion that a few select Germans misled the rest of Germany and brought upon the Holocaust is unfounded. WW2 and the Holocaust began because of a confluence between the German government, it's citizens, and its culture.
It indicates a systematic desensitization that occured over time.
Additionally, the article that purports current-day Germany as the heaviest anti-semetic place in Europe, with a few anecdotes, mentions Berlin's thriving Jewish population - one of the few places in the world with such an increase.
I do see many parallels to the current behaviors in the US, unfortunately.
>Additionally, the article that purports current-day Germany as the heaviest anti-semetic place in Europe, with a few anecdotes, mentions Berlin's thriving Jewish population - one of the few places in the world with such an increase.
Isn't that orthogonal? There was a huge Jewish community in Germany leading to 1933 as well -- up to 1940 or so.
When I was in school, concentration camps were always described as German (no references to Polish or anything). My kids aren't old enough to go to school, but I doubt that this changed tbh.
Yes, Nazis are mentioned when that time is discussed, but never in my experience to avoid a connection between this country and the deeds done.
German national pride, patriotism, is very very low (I personally don't feel any attachment to this country apart from the fact that I know some places and speak the language).
> "For example, average Dutch will not tell you"
How are the Dutch involved now? Is that a weird "I know 'German' is 'Deutsch' in German" mistake? Or are you randomly talking about people from the Netherlands at that point?
>
Whats interesting in recent years it came up that children in Germany were learning about "Polish concentration camps", highly alluding that those places had more to do with polish people than with Germans (that they were of polish evil invention and ran by polish people).
Source? I really don't think anything like this is taught in German schools.
Concentration camps ( the terminology ) derives from the spaniards' use of concentration camps in cuba ( Reconcentración policy ). But the spaniards got the idea of concentration camps from the US with our use of concentration camps on the natives in the early 1800s and onwards. We just called it a "reservation" rather than a concentration camp.
The first modern concentration camps were created in the 1830s and natives/africans were the first peoples put in concentration camps.
We know the nazis admired what the US and britain was able to accomplish with concentration camps and they took it to another level. Though today, concentration camps are associated with nazi germany, it existed more than 100 years before ww2 and it's been used to wipe out populations for 100 years before the nazis came into power.
Every major power ( every european colonial power, russians/soviets, americans, japanese, etc ) used concentration camps to some degree in the 1800/1900s. Some have even argued it was the greatest tool of war in the 1800s and 1900s before the atomic bombs were invented.
> Lenin had come to power promising supporters not only bread to eat and a share of the aristocrats' land
Timeless lesson. Always beware of a politician coming to power promising free stuff. It never works out in the best long term interest of the people/country. There are no magic tricks in this world, things have to be earned and paid for. Hopefully citizens of the west learn this sooner rather than later
That's the lesson you took from this!? This is an article demonstrating the brutality of Britain's colonialism and how we backed the losing side in another country's civil war and your take-away was "Socialism is bad"?
This is why we should reject public education, public libraries, public safety, public unemployment funds, public retirement funds, and public medicine for the elderly.
Because you, know, it just doesn't work. And all of the positive experiences with socializing certain public goods in liberal western democracies are just a magic trick.
Yes they are. And depending on your political beliefs, taxes are slavery, theft, or violence, and if you're ideological enough, you can see taxes as the moral equivalent of Lenin promising a share of the aristocrat's land.
So, do you think the guy who promised "40 acres and a mule" was a conniving totalitarian?
Yours is one of those comments that seem cutting against your ideological foes--"But Hitler was a vegetarian and anti-smoking!"--but is actually contentless.
A better philosophy would be "beware of any politician," full stop.
This is a fantastic narrative - but I have to ask - how have people who inherited wealth 'earned it'?
You realize that Russia was a society of serfs, all the way up to the later part of the 19th century, right? The aristocracy quite literally owned people, by virtue of owning land.
Their wealth was built on centuries of theft, violence, and repression. And then, they turn around, and say: "It's your problem that you're poor, hungry, landless, and are fighting in a pointless war."
