As I've understood things the more I read, the vast majority of mass deportation and mass executions enacted by the USSR and Nazis were largely inspired by the actions taken in the US vs the large native populations.
How those two entities went about pursuing those goals varied, but both were needlessly and mindlessly brutal, just like the act that inspired them.
It can be amazing how awful the acts you commit look when you see another entity perform them on another.
I am currently listing to the audio book 'Black Earth' from Timothy Snyder. There the author shows the aforementioned links and inspirations for Stalin and Hitler in how the US dealt with the natives.
I am interested in how the analysis will progress further.
Not to detract from what the U.S. govt did to natives, but a more likely explanation is that concentration camps are... the obvious thing to build if you want to isolate a population. I don't think the internment camps in the U.S. during WWII were modeled after Nazi concentration camps, and certainly they weren't in that there were no extermination facilities in the internment camps, thank goodness. A "camp" is just too obvious to suppose it's modeled on some past "invention" of the camp.
"Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity." - John Toland, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography[1]
These camps the British deployed in Russia sound as brutal as the ones they had deployed the Natal not so long previously.
Not to defend the US actions in the slightest but their 1940s internment camps were similar to the "villages" they used in Viet Nam in the 1960s (a technique also used by the British during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s BTW). In a hierarchy of brutality: less than the ones in Russia and South Africa).
(You can be just as brutal without corralling people -- Andrew Jackson and the Cherokee, or Gengis Kahn come to mind as being as evil as, say, Guantanamo. But people have found many ways to be mean to others, and I agree with you that taking one step down that path doesn't automatically make you equivalent to those who have taken many).
But "camp" is like so many things more obvious in retrospect than at the time so be careful of accidental anachronistic bias. In part it exists thanks to technology: it used to be expensive to keep prisoners, so unless they could pay their way (i.e they were nobility) it was simpler just to kill them. The invention of barbed wire and practical guns, as well as, ironically, changing views of the moral worth of people (an increase in valuing life) lead to their development.
You can see the technological aspect in Russia itself: when the Tsars wanted to get rid of someone but not kill them, the victim was simply sent to Siberia. Getting back was so hard they were for all intents and purposes interned there. The Soviets, being more industrially minded, were the ones who set up the Gulag system. (And though it would be facile at this point to say "...and so clearly they got the idea thanks to the British counterrevolutionary efforts" I think that would be an unnecessary stretch).
Or, as one of the great chilling quotes of the 1960s put it: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it"
Do you have a link for this type of village used in Vietnam? I've only heard of the Strategic Hamlet program, which was designed to protect rural villages from the VC, not to imprison any Vietnamese.
"protect" indeed. Sort of how the militarized police, NSA surveillance, no fly lists and etc are designed to "protect" the American people?
The Strategic Hamlet program built barbed wire fences and guild posts around existing or purpose-built villages, enforcing curfew, ID checks, etc supposedly by "villagers" but typically by the army. Collective punishment was administered to villages who "failed" to keep out either communists or "communists".
If you don't consider that imprisonment, what is it?
Basically they copied the British "Kampung Baru" (AKA "resettlement") program with even less success than the British. FWIW British ruthlessness in Malaya was more "effective" than the US in Viet Nam -- there were basically no people of Chinese origin left in northern Malaya. A classic "play one side off against another, using troops from yet another outside group" strategy that had been so effective for centuries.
The Malaysia of today is quite different from the Malaya of the 1950s.
My mother grew up in Ipoh. Her brother was drafted by the British in the 1950s for this campaign (as was typical of British colonial practice, he is not malay, chinese or english). His and his buddys' description of the process was pretty clear: 1 - all bumiputrahs into kampongs. 2 - once that's done you are free to shoot anything that moved (which he said was a euphemism for ethnic chinese), with no consequences.
Allegedly the British were fighting communist infiltration from maoist China, so the shape of your body was proof of your guilt. I have no idea if there really was infiltration and the cantonese/fujianese who spread through the British empire were typically hardly of the communist persuasion.
>which was designed to protect rural villages from the VC
A foreign power from 10.000 miles away, no borders with a country, and no reason to be there, comes there with their army to "protect" the local population?
>A foreign power from 10.000 miles away, no borders with a country, and no reason to be there, comes there with their army to "protect" the local population?<
Trying to distill the 50 year old motives of a superpower can be a challenge in a thread, but consider it like this; if the intent of the US wasn't to protect the local population, wouldn't they have done more than this?
To address each point of your argument, distance doesn't really matter in the 20th Century, or earlier. Global actions occur, well, globally. To imply that a country can't have interests outside of it's border isn't a strong argument.
The Soviets and (Communist) Chinese were also operating in North Viet Nam so the idea was that the locals were being protected from those under the influence of an evil foreign power.
You can make up your own mind as to the legitimacy of this (you can probably guess what I think) but my comment is intended as a normative response to your question.
How those two entities went about pursuing those goals varied, but both were needlessly and mindlessly brutal, just like the act that inspired them.
It can be amazing how awful the acts you commit look when you see another entity perform them on another.