The battlefields of the Western Front during World War One were rendered especially hideous by developments in defensive technology such as barbed wire. Death rates soared into the tens of thousands before the war’s end, outraging progressive opinion around the world (mainly, it must be said, on account of the white victims). Starvation and disease took their toll on women and children behind the makeshift barbed-wire perimeters. Pursuing a scorched earth policy of wholesale land clearance, British and Dominion troops (including Australian forces) burned farms and abducted Boer and black African population groups, confining non-combatants in open-air internment camps. In South Africa during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), Lord Kitchener employed similarly brutal tactics against civilians. The expedient of barbed wire made it all possible. A hundred thousand Cubans are estimated to have perished in the camps. Similar uses were found for barbed wire as a tool of dispossession on the Australian frontier.ĭuring the same period, barbed wire was increasingly employed by a brutal Spanish colonial regime in Cuba.įacing the rising tide of a popular independence revolt, the military governor divided the island up into strategic zones and herded Cuban civilians into prisons dubbed “ campos de concentracion” (the origin of the term “concentration camp”). Invented in the 1860s and mass produced in the US from the 1870s, barbed wire’s first victims were the roaming tribes of the Great Plains, after the 1887 Dawes Act handed over vast tracts of indigenous land to white farmers.īy fencing in their newly-acquired plots with this new, cheap and simple technology, white farmers managed to confine the “Indians” in reservations, depriving them of access to traditional hunting grounds.Īt a stroke, the wire made the environment foreign and hostile to roaming indigenous groups, many of which suffered annihilation as a result. It confirms their fate: like beasts, they are to be worked or slaughtered.” Barbed wire excludes and includes, magnifying “differences between the inside and the outside”.īarbed wire has long been connected to crimes against humanity. It is no accident that barbed wire - or the “devil’s rope” as the First Nations people of North America called it - has accompanied and facilitated many of the worst crimes against humanity of the modern era.Īs observed in Barbed Wire: A Political History by Olivier Razac (2002), barbed wire “produces a kind of shock when it is used to enclose people, shaking their certitude that they are human. The conspicuous presence of barbed wire in Australian immigration detention centres, such as Rudd’s newly re-opened Curtin detention centre, is a reminder of the inhuman pedigree of these grim despair factories.
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