Freedom In Wickedness

dionthesocialist:

When you hear about black children being put in detention camps, and you get really, really upset… that the word “concentration camp” was used.

Anyone who claims that POC are “appropriating” the term concentration camp requires a history lesson.

The term “concentration camp” was invented by the British as a euphemism for the camps they built to imprison Boer (i.e. Dutch colonists) and African civilians (mostly women and children) while carrying out “scorched earth” warfare in South Africa as part of the war between the British and the Dutch over colonial holdings in Africa.

It should surprise no one that even though the Boers were the people they were actually at war with and the Africans were innocent civilians caught in the crossfire, conditions in the concentration camps for Boers were much better than conditions in the concentration camps for Africans. It is estimated that over 26,000 women and children died in the British concentration camps, all due to entirely preventable starvation and disease. And, of course, the majority of those deaths were Africans, not Boers.

(via cloakable)