Originally Posted by
Lookleft
Indeed the question about where you learnt your history needs to be asked because at its most basic you are getting it wrong. It may surprise you to learn that the first British concentration camps, in fact the first concentration camps were in South Africa during the Boer War. Rounding up the civilian population was an effective , if very cruel, way of suppressing the Boer insurgency/freedom fighters. Not genocide but in today's world possibly a war crime. What the Brits were doing in Kenya, which you either didn't know or failed to mention, was suppressing quite a vicious guerilla uprising by groups wanting independence. So the concentration camps would have been in response to that and which had proved effective in SA. The Brits had also suppressed a communist insurgency in Malaya so they had a proven strategy of dealing with in country uprisings. Their response was a military and security response but in no way does it meet the genocide definition. Crazy Adolf set about completely obliterating European Jewry as an aside to his military ambitions. To say the British actions are the same is simply incorrect.
Ah yes, suppressing a vicious guerilla war...for their independence. Just like using the black and tans in Ireland or famine as a weapon in India, kill those pesky civilians and take the heat out of the whole situation. It worked for centuries but then came along print media and radio and suddenly it did more harm than good (ie increased anti Empire feeling and support for independence).
The estimates vary wildly on the number of Kenyan civilians killed in those camps, from about 30k to well over 100k. The facts are the civilian population of a particular ethnic group (Mau Mau) were systematically rounded up, tortured, starved or just plain murdered with the intention of making them disappear or stop fighting for their independence, whichever occurred first (the women tended to have broken glass bottles shoved up their orifices for example, both as a form of torture and to make them infertile, again to wipe out the ethnic group). It only stopped when, as usual for the 20th century, the failing empire realised they had gone too far, could no longer suppress the insurrection and needed to get the hell out of Dodge fast (whilst burning as much incriminating documentation as possible).