Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity

3 Containment

3 containent Barbed Wire in the Concentration Camps Would barbed wire be useful for the problem of controlling civilians? At first sight, it might appear to be incongruously violent. Its very function was based on inflicting harm. This was quite appropriate for animals, with which humans always did communicate through the language of pain. But with humans , verbal threats are as effective, and so the control through actual violence can always be removed from sight. There is no need to put barbed wire in the way of civilians: put a sign saying No Trespassing, and ninety-nine out of a hundred will stop. But then again, sometimes they do not stop, and violence must be administered . The problem is exacerbated when fundamental loyalty is in question—when people do not agree with the No Trespassing signs. Suppose you conquer a foreign people, or suppose some of your subjects are citizens of a nation with which you are at war: how would you make them respect your rules?Violence must be used, then, on a large scale. An instrument for the deployment of violence on a massive scale would be very useful for this purpose, and this is how barbed wire enters political history—as a continuation of the history of war. Note that this control over space displays an interesting duality— a microcosm and a macrocosm, so to speak. We find small spaces, within which humans are held, their motion brought under relentless control; and then these small spaces radiate a much larger space of more subtle control over the entire subjugated population . In other words, we have prisons, and we have an entire people , and it is the presence of prisons that pacifies the people. Pris- ons serve two purposes. First, they physically break up contacts and motions: leaders are taken away, families broken apart. In this way, the subjugated people are atomized and reduced to less than the sum of their parts. Second, prisons have an important moral role. Like many other animals, humans feel pleasure in motion itself and suffer when it is prevented. To be confined in a small space where motion is limited to a minimum is a punishment that humans dread almost as much as death itself. You can use this dread—so that the threat of motion prevented will suffice to control human motion outside prison itself. The microcosm radiates into the macrocosm. Thus the colonization of space gives rise to small enclaves within it—settlements of a few squares miles, at most, within which human motion is heavily curtailed. While small in physical extension, these settlements have great historical significance: they are the key to the control over the entire space surrounding them. During the twentieth century, an important class of these settlements came to be surrounded by barbed wire. It is probably for these barbed wire settlements that the twentieth century will be remembered. As in military history itself, so in the control of peoples: the introduction of barbed wire was gradual and serendipitous. The tool was available; the situations arose, and settlements of imprisonment were set up; barbed wire was used; and suddenly a new practice was enshrined. The parallel with military history is even closer. As in military history, barbed wire made its entry into political history in the Boer War, when the concentration camp was invented; the barbed wire settlement was then made routine in World War I. Then, however—in a development original to political history—barbed wire went on to evolve beyond World War I itself. This new tool—the barbed wire settlement—was made routine in World War I. At that time, it merely solved problems that were largely predictable and that kept recurring in each conflict: enemy civilians, prisoners of war. It did not yet originate its own policy but served in the policies of the past. Then something new t h r e e : c o n t a i n  e n t 129 happened: certain political structures were built around this new tool, taking advantage of the new opportunities opened up by the concentration camp. This gave rise to the Soviet and Nazi experience , where the history of barbed wire reached its culmination. The main feature of the political use of barbed wire was its asymmetry: on the one side an all-powerful government, on the other side a defeated...