This is what Hendrik Fraser, a Baster accompanying the Germans in South-West Africa, reported on the work they compelled captured Herero to perform:There must have been about 600 men, women and children prisoners. They were in an enclosure on the beach, fenced in with barbed wire. The women were made to do hard labor just like the men. The sand is very deep and heavy there. The women had to load and unload carts and trolleys, and also to draw Scotch-cart loads of goods to Nonidas (9-10 kilos. away) where there was a depot. The women were put in spans of eight to each Scotch-cart and were made to pull like draught animals. Many were half-starved and weak, and died of sheer exhaustion. Those who did not work well were brutally flogged with sjamboks [heavy rhinoceros-hide whips]. I even saw women knocked down with pick handles. The German soldiers did this. I personally saw six women (Herero girls) murdered by German soldiers. They were ripped open with bayonets. I saw the bodies. I was there six months, and the Hereros died daily in large numbers as a result of exhaustion, ill-treatment and exposure.60
This, too, qualifies as “work.” The prisoners produced some economic output, yet it was a small, incidental detour on the Germans’ path to exterminating them. This was also true of the “labor battalions” Turks formed with Armenians soldiers in the Turkish army. An American hospital doctor reported on the Turks’ treatment of these workers: “It was mid-summer, they, the soldiers were allowed no water and no rest, and were driven with clubs and gunstocks by the gendarmes. . . . They stayed thus in this building without water for three days and even soaked the urine from the ground with handkerchiefs and drank it.”61 What Beatrice Gatonye, a Kikuyu incarcerated in a British camp, said about the task the British made her and other Kikuyu women do, of fingerprinting decomposing bodies whose skin would just come off on them, is true of so much of victims’ work under eliminationist regimes: “The job we were told to do was just to torture us.”62 Of course, not all camp work and not all treatment of the ostensible workers has so shockingly little to do with economic productivity’s norms and procedures as did the Germans’, Turks’, and Britons’ practices. But a stunning percentage of it does.
The perpetrators’ relative emphasis on killing and immiseration, or on work, varies from camp system to system, and within a given system over time. On its face, the two are in inherent tension (assuming the perpetrators really aim for productive labor). Economic productivity requires everything camps often are not: using people’s skills appropriately, husbanding human capital, having rational institutions and plants for work. None of these is typically present in any conventionally rational degree. Thus camp systems tend to be economically irrational at their core. To the extent that perpetrators use camps to slaughter people rather than to keep them fit, they undermine the camp’s economic purposes. To the extent that such a dehumanizing world prevents regimes and societies from maintaining minimal nutrition and health, productive labor is undermined across the board. But to the ideologized perpetrators these contradictions matter not. Rithy Uong explains: “The food wasn’t the issue. All those Khmer [Rouge] people had plenty of food to eat. But they would not give it to us. They wanted us to work hard and starve to death” [my emphasis].63
Camp systems’ broad goals make them irrational labor institutions. Work’s economic rationality is further undermined even while the victims are doing work because of the perpetrators’ treatment of them. Just as many regimes conceive of work in ideological terms, so too do the perpetrators in camps. Communist regimes, drawing on Marxist theory, conceive of work as reeducative, even redemptive. (GULAG is a Russian acronym for Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps, and the Chinese called their camps Labor Reform Camps.) Working the regime’s enemies—many of whom are seen as having shunned productive labor—is ideologically necessary, containing educative and punitive dimensions that Bukovsky conveys when discussing the oxymoronic roles the perpetrators assigned prisoners as thankful slaves. The Germans’ view of work as exquisite punishment for the putatively parasitical Jews governed the Germans’ use of Jews’ work more than conventional economic considerations. In the “work” camp Majdanek, the prisoners had morning roll call.
Then we went to “work.” In our wooden shoes we were chased by blows from rods into a corner of the field and had to fill sometimes our caps, at other times our jackets, with stones, wet sand or mud, and, holding them with both hands and running under a hail of blows, bring them to the opposite corner of the field, empty the stuff, refill it and bring it back to the opposite corner, and so on. A gauntlet of screaming SS men and privileged prisoners, armed with rods and whips, let loose on us a hail of blows. It was hell.64
The Germans’ manner of employing Jews in camps was so utterly irrational and self-destructive that Joseph Schupack, the memoirist describing such work above, put “work” in quotation marks. Thinking of work as ideologically necessary, whether for reeducating victims or making them suffer, is bound to undermine labor’s rational allocation and use, as it has in camp worlds across the globe.
Getting prisoners to work (something socially useful) expresses and confirms the perpetrators’ and their broader communities’ subjectively just control of their victims. That prisoners, however coerced, appear to slavishly serve perpetrators gratifies them and seems to further validate their rule’s justness. Thus camps resemble slave institutions more than prisons, the inmates often functioning as slaves. However, unlike slaves, who often receive minimal legal protections, move among the enslaving society’s general population, and can have relationships with a measure of subjective affection from their masters, the camp worlds’ inmates are beyond the law, (with exceptions) ordinary social intercourse’s realm, or affective ties with their “masters.”
Beyond punishment, work serves as fulfillment or redemption. In the modern world, work is seen as not only economically valuable but a mark of a person’s willingness to contribute to a community. Therefore, getting people to work is its own end. This is true for prisoners eventually going free, making work a perverse reeducational school, or dying, making work an expiatory act. This most clearly existed in the German camps’ early years, when many prisoners, the regime’s political opponents, would eventually return to society, and under communist regimes, including the Chinese and Vietnamese, with their so-called reeducation camps. For the Khmer Rouge this was axiomatic. Uong explains that the Khmer Rouge “said they want to clean the imperialism ideas from you.” So “they told us. Here are your hoes. Here is the rice field. This is your school. Do it. Okay, you learn from the rice field, and exactly what they say, they preach to us every single day. And every single day after work we had to sit down for a meeting and we had to criticize ourselves, what had we done, done wrong.”65 In the warped worldviews of many eliminationist assaults’ perpetrators, an honest day’s labor helps make an honest man, or at least the shell of one.
Serbian camp victims in Trnopolje, Bosnia and Herzegovina, August 1992
A principal operational purpose of camp systems is degrading the victims, to make them understand their subjugated, demeaned, and rightless state. The men and women shaping or carrying out eliminationist projects are rarely policy’s cool, detached, neutral executors. How could they be? The killers often wade in the victims’ blood, spattering themselves with flesh and blood, bone and brain matter, after hearing their victim’s mercy pleas and suffering cries, only to turn to the next victim, the next, and the next. Men doing this are not, in one writer’s conceptually, descriptively, and morally obtuse language, mere “shooters” of victims—technical operators, trigger fingers, in a non-moral, technical enterprise. Guards in camps, even those not slaughtering victims, brutalize them, watch them starve to death, work them to the bone and beyond, let fester debilitating illnesses and conditions.
The perpetrators want the victims to know who the master is. They want to refashion the victims according to their images of them. The Germans infamously reshaped their victims in camps, particularly Jews, Sintis, Roma, and Russians, quickly transfo
rming them through malnutrition, privation, and neglect into beings physically resembling the subhumans of the Germans’ fantasies, the worst off becoming mere skeletal human shadows verging on death, called Muselmänner (Muslims). The Soviets in their brutal camps, without this kind of ideological intent, but no less deadly, created the dokhodyaga (“goner”), the “men who have been reduced to such a low level mentally and physically that even as workers they are of very limited value.”66 The Khmer Rouge turned their communes’ denizens into the atomized, robot-like or animal-like, asocial beings they wanted for their dystopian fantasy future. “During the day,” recalls Savuth Penn, who was then a child, “I would hunt for food like snakes and rats or anything that moved. This was allowed only during a short break after the long labor-intensive work. My body was so thin and weak from lack of adequate nutrition. The other young boys were in the same condition as me. We looked liked grandpas to one another. We rarely played or had long conversations because we lacked energy and tried to conserve it for the next day’s work quota.”67 In all cases, eliminationist perpetrators violently pry from their victims basic qualities marking people as full human beings. They deny the victims’ fundamental human bonds, ripping families apart, including parents from children as they might divide different-sized stones into piles. They shear the victims’ hair and deny them marks of individuality, including in clothing. They rob their names, renaming them or reducing them to nameless tattooed numbers, as the Germans did in Auschwitz. They forbid them many basic human qualities of sociability, including, as the British did in Kenya, communicating with each other all day (except when in their barracks), including during backbreaking work. If the victims dare act as human beings, instead of as their masters’ pliant nonhuman objects? For conversing, the Kikuyu prisoners could be punished and beaten individually or collectively. Karue Kibicho, a Kikuyu victim, once impermissibly spoke to another prisoner: “The guard on the watchtower blew his whistle, and the askaris, who we called rioti [riot squad], were set upon us all. They were using their hoe-handle clubs, clubbing us indiscriminately. Some of the detainees died from the beatings before we were all told to come out of our compound naked, holding our clothing and blankets in our hands. This was not done peacefully, because the askaris were inside the compound beating us, and as we hurried out there were others waiting for us, beating us some more. . . . It was total mayhem, and the white man in charge just stood there screaming, ‘Piga, piga sana’ [hit them, hit them more].”68
Even regimes and perpetrators without such explicit ideological conceptions of their victims related to work tend to force their putatively demonic or subhuman enemies to work in camps to their limit and beyond. Furthermore, for some perpetrators, work becomes a convenient means of inflicting suffering without conceiving of themselves as torturers. Perpetrators can think that if the victims were not such miscreants they would labor harder (no matter how objectively false this is). And they see even excruciatingly hard labor as a socializing means, getting the victims to at least act as contributors to the commonweal.
Camp victims actually producing substantial economic output are often used as brute production factors. The perpetrators destroy their bodies, not to mention their souls, to get their relatively paltry returns. Mao formulated, already in 1933, the ideologically inspired notion of working people to death as production factors, by having them “do limitless forced labor.”69 No rational economy would be run according to the camp worlds’ principles, which often lead to annual workforce mortality rates of 10 percent. Zhao Yushu, the head of Fengyang country, epitomized the Chinese communists’ utter disregard for economic rationality in camps and in general, when he said during the Great Leap Forward, “Even if ninety-nine percent die, we still have to hold high the red flag.”70 Only a deeply ideologized and nonproductively oriented regime and people (apparently as in North Korea) would conceive of constructing an economy along the lines of camps, whether German, Soviet, Chinese, British, or Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge, having destroyed practically Cambodia’s entire physical plant, and, shunning modern machinery, shutting down the urban economy and all but ruining the agricultural one, compelled Cambodia’s people to work growing rice and to fulfill the ideological need to work for working’s sake, even in the most irrational ways. Tens of thousands of Cambodians died digging irrigation canals with the most primitive implements, including their bare hands, all to restore the Angkor Wat Empire’s twelfth-century glories, which rested partly on agricultural canals. Excavating massive quantities of dirt and rock in this way has been a common feature of the German, Soviet, British, and Chinese camp worlds. One Chinese survivor of Mao’s Great Leap Forward conveys the utter irrationality of labor use during this ideologically produced economic and human catastrophe, when the communists dumped expellees in Manchuria’s wilderness with no shelter, which they had to make using wheat stems in temperatures as low as -36 degrees Fahrenheit (-38 Celsius). With a fire, their huts warmed up to “a dozen or so degrees below zero [Celsius or 10 degrees Fahrenheit],” yet “the grass and beaten earth huts we lived in had wind coming in from all sides . . . there were hardly any vegetables or meat. . . . We got up . . . just after 4 at dawn, and did not stop until 7 or 8 in the evening. . . . In these 15-16 hours . . . we basically worked non-stop . . . in summer. . . . We had to get up at 2 am. . . . We had at most three hours’ sleep.”71 Although the landscape was different, Navy Dy describes the analogous irrationality of the creation and character of Cambodia’s ostensible work camps. Those who survived the death march to the village of Moung arrived with almost nothing.
When I got to that village I saw only a few small houses, rice fields, and small irrigation ditches. We had to build our own camp under a mango tree with the other ten families by using every scrap of our old clothes and plastic. Later, my father built a small barn for us. Moung was supposed to be very poor land. There was no river water, but a small pit with very dirty water; no orchids or fruit trees or even soil, but an empty desert with a few mango trees.
About 300 families moved to this place, but three-quarters of them died from disease, starvation, and harsh, bloody torture.72
Only an ideologue—then or now—can see economic concerns or rationality governing the camp world and “work.” Put differently, economic purposes can be seen to have been at work only if one accepts these regimes and their camp world’s eliminationist foundations, and the perpetrators’ dehumanizing or demonizing assumptions. This was explicit and striking in Kenya, where these features coalesced in an official policy. The British, desperate to hold on to Kenya, expelled most Kikuyu from their homes and regions, placing them in the unsustainable, deadly barbed-wire villages. They declared the eliminationist “exile” permanent, as the colony’s governor, Evelyn Baring, publicly explained, “There is no question whatsoever of irreconcilables being allowed to return to areas where loyal Kikuyu live.” They then undertook a massive “development plan” for the Kikuyu, now forced to inhabit formerly uncultivated and inhospitable land. How did the British do it? With brute labor, slave labor, people used as production factors, including by compelling shackled Kikuyu victims to dig an eleven-mile canal by hand. “This was the most miserable experience of my life,” explains Charles Karumi. “Many men died from diseases, I think because we were so weak from the labor and beatings. The white man in charge kept yelling at us to keep working, and ordered the askaris to set on us with their clubs if we moved too slowly.”73 Only because the British had decided to eliminate the Kikuyu from their homes and deposit them in the middle of nowhere did “developing” this area of Kenya become seemingly necessary, as did working slaves brutally and economically irrationally, resulting in an enormous death toll of the putatively subhuman “workers.” Only in the context and assumptions of an eliminationist regime and program, such as that of the British, does “working” people so unproductively for “development” make sense.
Once established, functioning camps cannot escape their inherent pathologies and contradi
ctions: the desire to punish the prisoners, make them suffer, and make them understand their degraded and subhuman or dehumanized status; the subversion of economic potential by starving the camps of necessary factors and conditions of production; and the perpetrators’ tendencies within the camp to abuse their absolute power for personal satisfaction.
Camp systems’ enormous significance, as we see, is multifaceted. Whatever their many variations in size, victims and the perpetrators’ conceptions of them, duration, mix of eliminationist means, and overall destructiveness, camp systems institutionalize eliminationist policies as a core, if not the core, political thrust of regime and society. They integrate eliminationist politics and practices deeply into the broader societies and involve ever more people, often in vast numbers, from the state and civil society to run, maintain, and service them. In so doing, they steadily warp (or further warp) society’s economic, social, and cultural spheres, in addition to its politics, not only by enmeshing ever more people in their assault on humanity but also by creating perverse incentives and corrupting practices at all levels. While the camp world, like many institutions, tends to be self-reinforcing and self-reproducing, and even expanding, the regimes building and maintaining camps also purposefully employ them throughout for political domination and destruction.
Camp systems are significant for another reason. As systems of society, they encapsulate or contain the different worlds the perpetrators create. They are in themselves eliminationist worlds. They are communal worlds and are embedded in still broader communities. And they are sites where the perpetrators create personal worlds, especially through cruelty. In camps and elsewhere, perpetrators personally, face-to-face, inflict cruelty on victims, as to make cruelty many mass murders and eliminations’ constituent feature. They are cruel to the victims in general. They are cruel to women in specific ways. They are differentially murderous and cruel to children.
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