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Originally Posted by RCAF_FB_Orville
[B]
I think the 'Moral relativists' here have to re-examine their Morality, and think again. As to the "The British created Concentration camps" baloney.......Lets put that record straight. A concentration camp is by definition a concentration of persons.....usually by forcible internment. What the tents in South Africa were very much not however, were part of a very deliberate and calculated, perverse, wicked mission to exterminate, permanently, with no remorse vast swathes of the Human race who did not conform to some twisted "Ideal".
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http://grapeinvestor.com/BoerWar/camps.html
The English term "concentration camp" was first used to describe camps operated by the British in South Africa during this conflict.
The camps had originally been set up by the British Army as "refugee camps" to provide refuge for civilian families who had been forced to abandon their homes for one or other reason related to the war. However, when Kitchener succeeded Roberts as commander-in-chief in South Africa in 29 November 1900, the British Army introduced new tactics in an attempt to break the guerrilla campaign and the influx of civilians grew dramatically as a result. Kitchener initiated plans to "flush out guerrillas in a series of systematic drives, organized like a sporting shoot, with success defined in a weekly 'bag' of killed, captured and wounded, and to sweep the country bare of everything that could give sustenance to the guerrillas, including women and children.... It was the clearance of civilians - uprooting a whole nation - that would come to dominate the last phase of the war."
As Boer farms were destroyed by the British under their "Scorched Earth" policy - including the systematic destruction of crops and slaughtering of livestock, the burning down of homesteads and farms, and the poisoning of wells and salting of fields - to prevent the Boers from resupplying from a home base many tens of thousands of women and children were forcibly moved into the concentration camps. This was not the first appearance of internment camps. The Spanish had used internment in the Ten Years' War that later led to the Spanish-American War, and the United States had used them to devastate guerrilla forces during the Philippine-American War. But the Boer War concentration camp system was the first time that a whole nation had been systematically targeted, and the first in which some whole regions had been depopulated.
Eventually, there were a total of 45 tented camps built for Boer internees and 64 for black Africans. Of the 28,000 Boer men captured as prisoners of war, 25,630 were sent overseas. The vast majority of Boers remaining in the local camps were women and children. Over 26,000 women and children were to perish in these concentration camps.