Today (Tuesday) is an interesting one as I attended one of my professor’s book launch. But that was after my early Europe class. We basically just talked about the Renaissance, what it meant, and the most famous artists at the time. Nothing super crazy especially because we are running behind schedule. So let’s move on to the seminar!
They gave us cake and coffee which was cool and the event was hosted by my modern Europe professor as my Historiography professor talked about his book. I wish I could tell you all the title, but again, that will not happen until I graduate as it would give away so much information. I know you understand. My immediate thoughts as I entered the room was that there were a lot more people there than I figured there would be, not that I thought there would be a small group, but just that it wouldn’t be a fire hazard (it was definitely over capacity for that room). I found a seat and I was able to see the cover art of the book displayed on the projector screen, it was an illustration of the alleged “Uyghur camp.” The seminar began and my professor explained that this book is a globally history on camps and expands on his last book (which was about British concentration camps). This specific professor’s specialty is on Empire, for anyone wondering. He did request a box of copies of the book for us to purchase but that box was stuck in transit so he passed around his own copy so we could check out the pictures. He then read a few vignettes:
He began with talking about Anderson Prison camp, US Civil War 1864
Native Reservations and camps in South Africa comparison
Brief chapter reading about the Nazis
Chinese labour camps (back in the day) were similar to the gulags; then there was talk about someone shamed Henry Wu
Japanese internment camps in Canada and the US
Wambui Otieno - challenges that women faced in the camps, and details of Otieno’s assault by a white officer
Uyghur camps… apparently its the largest concentration camp today where ethnic cleansing takes place and is comparable to residential schools (killing native culture)
I have to be honest, I have no idea if he used non-western sources. If you all would like, I could purchase and read the book, providing an overview for you and show what sources were consulted. I did try to find free versions of the book, but because it was published very recently there are none available. What is available is his previous book, so thats interesting.
He made this book to decolonize the idea of concentration camps and pull away from Eurocentric views of them. Theres even a chapter dedicated to refugee camps. It is a process of transnational learning. The Nazis used British camps for propaganda purposes, one example is in the movie Ohm Krüger. When talking about Beijing prison number 1, he mentions Chiang Kai-Shek’s camps, and when “China fell to communism” (that is a direct quote from my professor) Mao turned to Soviet forms of camps. Israel was mentioned.
If this sounds messy and weird that because I’m writing what I wrote in my notes, so its basically point form, not a transcript.
He then shows two books to illustrate people who experienced two concentration camps in their lifetime: Twice Interned and Margaret Buber-Neumann’s Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler. Have any of you read these books? His book also talks about how previous prisons are still used today, the example he gave was Putin utilizing the gulags to imprison his political enemies and a photo of an article about Navalny was used. He also compares the gulags to US mass incarceration. This book was written for undergrad students, it was not written to make one prison system look worse than the other, its to show diversity. It was also written in a way to purposefully disorient the reader.
He then goes on to list the different “logics” used to build and utilize these camps: exception (Guantanamo), counter-insurgency, surveillance, medicine (equating prisoners to sickness and viruses; he quotes a nameless Chinese official who said something about the Uyghurs being a virus or something like that), empire, and social engineering (thought reform, apparently in Mao’s china people were imprisoned and had to beg for absolutism because of their thought crimes).
Then it was question time. A guy asked if the Belgian Congo would fit and my professor said hat some historian (he was named but I can’t remember and I didn’t write it down) called the Belgian Congo an open-air gulag, and he gulag was a form of slavery. Just a side note, but my professor talked a lot about the Soviet gulags but never mentioned hem under the Tsar, I don’t know if he talks about it in the book but the seminar was Tsar-less. I may ask him about it during office hours. A girl asked him what sources he used and he said while he did not travel to multiple countries to consult sources (unlike when he wrote hi first book) he did rely on secondary sources from specialists (who are these specialists, I wonder). Another student asked if concentration camps are based on racism or ideology, my professor answered that even the gulag was racial based with targeting Poles and Ukrainians. He briefly mentioned the “Doctor’s Plot” when Stalin went nuts before his death, going off about Jewish people. I don’t know anything about this “Plot” but it was just brought up to say that Stalin would’ve imprisoned Jewish people if he lived long enough to do it. He talked about how some historian said that black markets were pretty much essential in the USSR to survive or everyone would’ve starved. The seminar ended with how concentration camps make prisoners develop a common identity and solidarity. Then we were offered cake and coffee. I got my cake but a student I dislike very much was yapping my professor’s ear off, in the way of the cake line and it took me much longer to get out of there than I would’ve liked.
I then headed off to my Modern Europe class and we finished off the liberal phase of the French Revolution and moved on to the radical phase.All I’ll say about that is Louis XVI was a fucking idiot. He could’ve been chill with the constitutional monarchy, but instead he ran away, got caught, and lost all goodwill with the people causing his death. Nice going asshole.
Anyway, I apologize for this being super late, I had a quiz and quite a bit of reading to do this week and put off writing these posts because of it.
Your professor sounds incompetent, to be honest. They have absorbed and reproduced a substantial level of liberal bullshit and misleading emphasis. For most people I don't judge because it is all around us and unquestioned, but he is (1) a professor, it's his job to be a big nerd about this stiff, (2) he wrote a book about it presenting his work as academically competent, and (3) he appears to be appropriating left language re: decolonization at the same time that he spreads literal colonizer myths like demonizing the gulag system under the soviets.
He sounds like someone with a casual interest in the topic that learned most of what he knows from Reddit, some reactionary books found at Barnes & Noble, and ghoulish hacks like Anne Applebaum. Anyone reading critically on this topic, who actually investigates sourcing and political dynamics, would not come to these conclusions.
For example, it requires an incredibly lazy level of reading to come to the conclusion that Uyghurs are having their culture erased. It requires, in fact, knowing basically nothing about Uyghur culture at all, which has large Turkic influences and many unique attributes. When Western "scholars" have tried to make their case, which they almost never do with any concrete evidence nor visiting Xinjiang (which they have always been free to do), they end up revealing their own internalized islamophobia, portraying recent far-right Arab practices and beliefs as Uyghur culture. While China itself has been hamfisted in many ways, these criticisms of the treatment of Uyghurs are invariably lazy, wrong, and reactionary. Many of them are even straight-up intentional propaganda by people whose career trajectories are all about anticommunism and getting paid to work at fed-funded think tanks with titles like "Kissinger Fellow".
Re: The Soviet gulags, eliding tsarist times is either intentional or they are breathtakingly incompetent, as it is well-known that the soviets massively decreased their scale and improved conditions in them. The only Soviet period where they expanded substantially was temporary and was for holding a bunch of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers during WWII. Gulags were just the Russian prison system, work camp prisons have been common in many countries and cultures, and the US has consistently had more people imprisoned than the Soviets had in Gulags. But folks like your professor don't use special scary foreign words for US prisons, they accept their normalization.
In conclusion I think your prof is the kind of lazy hack that is unfortunately common in academia. He has apparently never been punished for being so incompetent, though I know professors that were bullied out of academia for opposing Israeli settler-colonialism. It would be an interesting exercise to go through his sources on Uyghurs and play "6 degrees of Adrian Zenz", as I would bet money everything is, at most, 2 degrees removed, as there are zero people saying such things who aren't connected to the propaganda program that funds him.