Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Tuesday 8 December 2015

We are not allowed to forget

about the concentration camps
in Europe
which lasted 10 years at most.
We are not encouraged to remember
those many, many, and equally unspeakable
which lasted 200 years
in the United States of America.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did the Italian troops not establish concentration camps when they invaded Ethiopia? Raul

Wofl said...

I don't know about that. The difference between a concentration camp and a prisoner-of-war camp might be difficult to determine...

Marcus Billson said...

The slave holding plantation in the South and the single family household in the North cannot be compared to the starvation and daily torture of the Nazi concentration camp, nor the systematic killing that was one of the purposes of the Nazi concentration camp. You make a point far more applicable to the British plantations in the Carribbean Islands, where the population of slaves went down as slave populations had done historically. What puzzles American historians is how and why the slave populations of the old South grew and grew so much so that even after the international slave trade became illegal in the United States, the old South continued to supply slaves to the new South year after year for the duration of their histories as slave states. There is no justification at any time anywhere for slavery. There were many mistreatments, but not enough to keep the slave population thriving and rebellions and revolts almost non-existent without any fences around the plantations. Every man wants his freedom, and runaways were very common and a constant problem. The Underground Railroad was very successful. You make a good point, but it is made at the expense of the complexity and reality of what happened. Written from the U.S.