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I’m a little late to the latest in @aoc derangement follies, but...It’s not often that my old unfinished dissertation is useful for a subject of current debate, but I actually know a little something about “concentration camps,” both the practice and the origins of the term.
Nerd out with me for a minute if you will: “Campos de concentración” was a Spanish phrase, used to describe General Valeriano Weyler’s brutal method for putting down the Filipino rebellion against Spanish rule in the late 19th Century. That was the first use of the term.
It was a massive military operation— thousands of peasants in rebel areas were displaced, moved to live closer together, so they could be controlled more readily by the Spanish military. The brutality was successful and Governor-General Weyler’s reputation was cemented.
One of the powers of the modern colonial state was its ability to take lessons learned in one colony & apply them in another. In Spain, Weyler helped defeat Catalan & Basque rebels. Most famously, he became Gov General of Cuba after the 1895 rebellion proved hard to quell.
In Cuba he expanded on the war tactic he had pioneered in the Philippines, the campos de concentración. Tens of thousands of Cubans in rural areas were moved, their populations concentrated so they could be better controlled. It was violent and devastating.
Weyler became the principal villain in the story of Cuba told by the Hearst sensationalist press as newspapers worked to build popular support for US intervention in that island. Weyler was known to many Americans as the “Butcher of Havana”.
The Cuban experience popularized the use of the term “concentration camp,” though this @voxdotcom piece is incorrect in stating that’s where the term originated. vox.com/first-person/2…. The practice originated in the Philippines, it was “perfected” in Cuba.
This isn’t about historical nitpicking. The imperial project, intrinsic to the creation of the modern European state, was an inherently comparative endeavor. This matters.What we have come to know as “concentration camps”, associated with Nazi Germany, had historical antecedents.
The modern totalitarian state was, as well, an inherently conparative project. Analysis of our history and of our present can and should, as well, be comparative. The project of concentrating populations deemed to be problematic existed before the 3rd Reich & continued after.
The rightwing and media obsession with @aoc notwithstanding, her call for Americans to examine what is happening in our name through a historical lens, through a comparative frame, is both correct and urgent.
As Jewish historian Anna Lind-Guzick writes in the Vox piece linked above, this is important even if the comparison takes us to contemplating Nazi horrors. 
In Valeriano Weyler’s time, it was much harder for colonial resistors to mirror the state’s strength—learn the lessons of one colony and apply them in another. Filipinos and Cubans did not have means to share knowledge with each other over how best to resist Weyler & the Spanish.
Today is different. The state can inherit lessons from the past but so can we in fighting back against inhumanity & injustice. There is a history of resistance to these & other tactics of oppression, some of it untold, that we must draw on to stop what is being done in our name.
