How a Nazi concentration camp became a detention centre for Muslims
JVL Introduction
A concentration camp in the forests near the small town of Vught in the Netherlands held resistance fighters and then deported Jews on their way to Auschwitz. It now houses a national memorial.
Activists in the anti-Nazi resistance were imprisoned here, including Anton de Kom, a leader in the struggle against Dutch colonialism in Suriname, whose story is told briefly here, as is the story of the author’s grandfather, Henricus van Herten, a Dutch Catholic.
But as well as a memorial the site hosts a very large high security prison hosting a “regime of extreme isolation, humiliating searches and continuous monitoring” for an almost entirely Muslim population.
Arun Kundnani tries to make sense of it, then and now, via De Kom’s writings about racism and colonial hierarchies and their continuation in the present realities of racial capitalism.
RK
This article was originally published by Novara Media on Fri 23 Jun 2023. Read the original here.
The Hidden Racism That Turned a Nazi Concentration Camp Into a Detention Centre for Muslims
Liberal ‘antiracists’ are ignoring mental torture.
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So important: ‘Genocidal violence does not always announce itself in the rhetoric of overt hatred; it can also be hidden by the managerial language of cultural reform.’
I look forward to reading Arun Kundnani’s book, remembering too his work at the Institute of Race Relations.
Regarding the comment about the war of terror deaths by the US & UK: “But the number is certainly over a million” actually this has been conservatively calculated at 4.5 million by the Watson Institute at Brown University, Costs of war project https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2023/IndirectDeaths