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Hello. Welcome to the new books and history channel of the new books network podcast. I am your host, Ari Barbara Latt. Today, I'm grateful to engage in dialogue with Robert Cribb.
He is emeritus professor of Asian history. He is a member of the Department of Political and Social Change at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs in the College of Asia and the Pacific at Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. Today, we will discuss his recently published book, which he has co-edited with Kristina Twomi and Sandra Wilson, Detention Camps in Asia, The Conditions of Confinements, in Modern Asian History, Television Leiden, Netherman's by Real Publishers, 2022. Robert, it's an honor to be in dialogue with you today.
Thank you very much for the invitation, Ari. I'm looking forward to chatting with you. To begin, please tell us about yourself. Where did you grow up?
What formative events in your life catalyzed the scholar you'd later become? So I'm Australian. I grew up in Brisbane, in Australia, and I became interested in Asia, specifically in Indonesia, because I studied some Indonesian history at school, and then just shortly afterwards visited Indonesia with my parents, just as a tourist. But I thought it looked like a fascinating place.
And so I began to focus, when I entered university, I began to focus on Indonesia. And I was really fascinated by the question of Indonesia's struggle for independence. Indonesia fought against the Dutch to achieve independence in the 1940s. And in most ways, this was a noble struggle.
But there was also an element of terrible violence associated with that struggle. And then after independence, Indonesia went through some periods of pretty brutal, repressive rule. And so I've been fascinated for a long time by the relationship between noble aspirations and the fact of violence on the ground. So I've done most of my work on Indonesia, but in recent years, I've also been looking at Japanese war crimes, particularly with my colleague Sandra Sandalsson, who was one of the co-editors of this volume on the detention camps.
What inspired you to prepare this book? What message do you hope to convey to readers? So I became interested in the Japanese war crimes partly because of the difficulties that I was having in understanding what was happening in Indonesia in 1965-66, when there was a large-scale massacre of members of the Communist Party, followed by mass detention of people who were often a little bit more remotely connected with the Communist Party. The problem there was lack of sources for the Japanese war crimes.
There was a lot of material because of the active collection of interview evidence, of documents and so forth immediately after the Second World War in preparation for war crimes of Japanese. So what I was hoping was that by looking at Japanese war crimes, I would come to understand the crimes in Indonesia, the mass killings in Indonesia, a little bit better, or at least I would generate some new questions and new approaches. But of course, any time you become interested in a new topic, it takes on a life of its own. So I became interested in Japanese war crimes in their own right.
Many of those war crimes, and particularly the ones that were tried in the post-war tribunals, many of them took place in Japanese camps, and so I became interested in the way that Japanese camps run. That was also another point of comparison with Indonesia, where there were very extensive camps immediately after, or during and after the massacres in 1965, 66. What are the primary themes in this book? What story and stories does your book tell?
So the book ranges beyond Indonesia and Japan. It starts with the Philippines during the Philippine-American War when the United States forces set up detention camps for civilians to try and isolate them from the Filipino guerillas. It looks at Burma, it looks at China, it looks at Malaya, during the emergency Malaya, under the British, it looks at detention camps or prisoner war camps during the Korean War. So we're spreading our story across the whole of Asia in the 20th century, and we're looking at different kinds of camps, camps that were motivated by different kinds of interests on part of the people who were detaining them.
Some of them detained people primarily for their ethnicity. Many of them were political rather than ethnic. Sometimes politics and ethnicity were in defined. We also included prisoner war camps, which is a separate category from political or ethnic detention camps.
So we wanted to look at the full range of detention camps. In your scholarly opinion, what is the difference between a detention camp and a prison? So a prison is somewhere that people are sent after a judicial process. So it used to be that there were many different kinds of punishments, mutilation, exposure and so forth.
We've now basically reduced punishments to imprisonment, fines and occasionally death. So imprisonment is one of the major replicas of the judicial system. But to get put in prison, you need to be found guilty in a court of law. Not all courts of law operate fairly, but the basis of prison is a sentence brought down by a judge on the basis of a guilty finding.
Detention camps are different because they're based purely on administrative law. Someone in a position of power determines that a person or a group of people can be held in detention. They're not officially, they're not being punished. It's not that they've done something.
It's very often that it's anticipated that they might do something or they're just being put out of the way. So detention camps are administrative arrangement put in place by people in power. And the other big differences between a detention camp and a prison is that most prison sentences are for a fixed term. They may be for the term of the whole of life, but even whole of life sentences often hold out the possibility of parole or release after a large number of years.
Whereas detention camps are purely at the whim of the detaining power, the detaining authorities. And that means that the people who are sitting in detention camps have no idea when they will get out. That makes for a different kind of psychological environment in a detention camp from the environment in a prison. You write about detention camps in the 20th century.
Why were camps not featured of earlier times? So, camps were one of the big features of the 20th century. They probably started as a phenomenon in the 19th century, but they weren't particularly widespread. And I think there's three reasons why they became much more widely in the 20th century.
One paradoxically was the rise of human rights discourses. So it used to be that one of the standard solutions for a political problem was to kill people. If you had rebels, if you had political enemies, they would simply be executed. As the idea of human progress became more firmly established, the idea that it was the wrong thing to do to kill people became more widely accepted.
And keeping them in detention was considered to be a human alternative, more preferable, human alternative to simply killing them. Of course, that doesn't mean that the conditions and the camps were good, but the part of the impulse was a desire to meet public expectations of humanity. Second reason was technological. In early times, it simply wasn't possible to detain people for a long period and enlarge numbers in any kind of camp.
It was very difficult to construct a camp of the right size. So the invention of part why was actually very important in the emergence of the camps. The invention of tinned canned food as a means of supplying nutrition to detainees was also very important. In other words, it was partly the technological advances that made it possible to keep large numbers of people under control and in confined conditions that made it possible to look for to use detention camps.
And I think the third reason is that the idea of detention grew from relatively small scale imprisonment. And prisons on the whole had never had very large numbers of people. If you wanted to achieve political aims by detaining a large group of people, then there was always some risk of resistance. If you detain them, then you're promising them food and shelter, which works as a kind of incentive not to resist.
If you're rounding people up with the intention of killing them, chances are they're going to realize this and they'll put up some resistance. So the whole idea of camps was in part a system of lulling the victims into, not into complacency, but into a sense that, well, if they get their heads down and didn't cause trouble, then they might survive this detention, whereas they wouldn't survive a massacre. Of course, that wasn't always true, but that element of deception alongside the technological advance and the sense of having to comply with higher standards of human rights, or combine to make the 20th century the century of detention camps. In what ways were and are the detention camps in East Asia examined in this study, similar to and different from Nazi camps in occupied Europe during World War II?
Well, I think the Nazi camps stand out as being in a different and much more terrible category. A very large number of the Nazi camps really were extermination camps for the Jews for other minority groups within German occupied territory. They were simply a staging post on the way to the death camps to extermination to murder. There were millions of Soviet troops who were held in makeshift prisoner war camps and basically starved to death.
They were put into a camp barbed by was put around the camp. They've got given very little food, very little shelter, and within months, most all of them died, either direct disdilation or of disease or of exposure. The scale of death in the Nazi camps was vastly greater than in any of the camps that we're talking about, even the worst of the camps that we're considering. The number of the shea number of deaths and also the proportion of the detainees who died or were killed is much less in East Asia.
So when we look at the Nazi camps, we're looking at something which is at least another step up in awfulness. The utilitarian aspect of the camps in Asia is much stronger than the simple externatory dimension in the Nazi camps. How does this volume advance our understanding of authoritarianism? Okay, so that's authoritarianism continues to fascinate people because it's a widespread and it's such an important element of human existence.
When it comes to the relationship between camps and authoritarian systems, there's basically two schools of thought. There's one which is represented academically by Giorgio Agamben, which says that camps are a microcosm of what authoritarian systems want to do to society as a whole. And if you think of the famous remark by Martin Nimmler, when they came for the socialist, I didn't object because I wasn't a socialist, when they came for the Jews, they didn't object because I wasn't a Jew, and when they came for me, there was no one to object on my behalf. Nimmler's graphic idea and Agamben's academic idea is that the camps are a kind of experimental ground for the way in which authoritarian governments want to treat and will indeed treat the whole society.
On the other side, there is an approach that's represented academically by Emmanuel Wallstein, who's a theorist of international relations, and he basically put forward the idea of a global division of labor amongst sovereign states. Some states have to be free and open and wealthy, other states have to be poor and repressed. And the Wallsteinian approach to detention camps is represented by, in general, by the idea that law is not applied evenly in society. It's a common saying there is a group in society who law protects but does not mind, and there's another group in society who law binds but does not protect.
So in other words, there's a system within the social order that discriminates amongst members of the society. And if all France is famous for saying that the law with majestic equality forbids both rich and poor from being in the street and sleeping underneath bridges. The Wallstein approach is to say that camps exist as oppressive institutions, as, and in part a device to make it possible for the rest of society to be relatively free. So, in focusing in targeting certain groups, the authorities enable the rest of society to be treated much more kindly and generously.
So that's, that's the one of the big debates about authoritarianism and specifically about camps. So on the whole argument, our book supports the Wallstein approach rather than the Agamben approach. I know we've got a dozen contributors, not all of them agree with that. Some of them are much more inclined to the Agamben approach.
So in some respects there's a bit of debate. Excuse me. Within the book between these two approaches, but on the whole we're interested in the way that camps work to take people out of the political system in order to make government of the rest of the political system much easier for the authorities. So that's how we see ourselves contributing to the broad debate on the nature of authoritarianism.
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You mentioned that establishing detention camps is partly a consequence of the rise of human rights discourse. Why is it in your scholarly opinion that camps are often a self-turbed oppression? Well, there's several reasons for that. One of the reasons is she is logistics.
Authoritarian regimes often exist in circumstances where resources are scarce. So they come to power partly because of the sense that someone needs to take control of resources and allocate them most expeditiously to society, making sure they go to the right people, or the right people as the people who are close to those in power. But that often means that the resources, the logistical support for camps is limited. These are people who have been designated as enemies of society or at least as undesirable.
So the amount of resources that is devoted to camps is often mega in comparison with the rest of society. We saw in the case of the Japanese camps that the Japanese staff who were posted to run the internment and prison reform camps were often the drinks of the Japanese military. They were crippled or they were stupid, they were old and senile. They basically weren't good for anything else.
And so they were put in charge of camps. Food was often short and food was often short throughout the Japanese empire. But there was a sense that prisons, the detention camps rather, were relatively low on the list of priorities. So logistics is one big reason why the camps are often given people poor conditions.
Another thing is that the incentive to supervise camps to make sure that they're being run properly and humanely is similarly relatively weak in authoritarian systems. Why would we put good people to run and make, to run these detention camps and make sure that there's no excesses? And what that means is that there's scope within the detention camp system for people who might loosely call psychopaths. This is also another big area of debate in detention studies.
On the one hand, there is a theory that the system of detention itself creates psychopaths. Many people will have heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment in which a group of ordinary American students were divided into prison guards and prisoners. And the prison guards over time began to treat their prisoners terribly because they were in a position of untramelled power over those prisoners. Now, there's been some recent research that looks more closely at that experiment and what was published, the material that was not published, and it suggests that the verdict of the prison experiment, which was that any prism automatically produces oppression, is not nearly as clear-cuff as it first appeared.
But it's probably too much to say our conclusion. The indication from some of our cases is that it's not so much the prisons or the detention camps produced bad treatment, but they enabled people who already had psychopathic tendencies to treat their captives badly. They were discovered, in other words, that they could beat up detainees, they could humiliate detainees, and no one was going to do anything about it. This was one of the clearest conclusions of our examination of the Japanese prisoner of war camps.
Many of the guards, many of the commanders were basically benevolent towards the prisoners, but they lacked resources to look after them properly. Amongst them, there were some who really reveled in the chance to be brutal, and no one stopped them. Of course, that experience made the experience of detainees in general really terrible. And I suppose the other reason, and this has to be with the nature of the detention camps, is that people are being put into detention camps for what they are rather than what they've done.
If you think of a prisoner, some who's been sentenced in a court, he or she goes to prison for an action that he or she has committed. At the time, that action slides into the past, the person who was in prison 15 years after sentencing is a different person from the person who was initially family and sentenced. Because the group of people who've been detained for what they are, whether it's their ethnicity or their politics or their status as soldiers, in sense, they retain that all the way through, and any prejudices that exist against that category of people are likely to survive in the detention system. And that is an extraordinary incentive, an extra reason why detainees are sometimes treated brutally.
But there's three elements, the logistical lack of support for life in detention camps, the lack of control of a lack of restriction on psychopaths and the general atmosphere of contempt or hatred of the categories that are detained. All those three things contribute to the terrible experience that many people have had in detention camps. How did you and your authors go about conducting research on this topic? What kind of sources did you use and rely on?
So it varies quite a lot from author to author and from topic to topic. For instance, Christina Tumi, who was working on the American detention camps in the Philippines, had no chance to interview anyone, either victims nor perpetrators nor the people who set out the camps, everyone was long dead. In our research on the the Japanese camps, there was also really no possibility of conducting useful interviews. The people, there are some survivors, just a handful of survivors still, and more when we started, but most of them are very old.
And it's very difficult to get reliable testimony from very old people, because in most cases they have worked their memories over and over many times. They've often told their stories many, many times. They've been influenced by what they've really heard from others. So without any intention to deceive, they often give a significantly distorted view of memory of what happened to them.
We've been in the position in the case of the Japanese camps of looking at diaries written at the time, written in the camps, often made by danger, kept secret from the Japanese guards, written in the camps. We've looked at memoirs that were written immediately after release, immediately after the end of the war, and then we've looked at memoirs written long after, say in the 1980s, and this very often a sharp difference between those early memoirs and the later writings. The early memoirs tend to hear the much more varied picture. There are some good Japanese, there are some bad Japanese, there are some good detainees, there are some bad detainees, some people who exploit their position in the camp as detainees to oppress other people within the camp.
By the time we get to memoirs written in the 1980s or recollections collected in the 1980s, a lot of that nuance has been erased, and we tend to get an image of all Japanese as being bad and oppressive, all detainees being noble victims. So there's quite a lot of source criticism that we needed to apply to the Japanese sources. When it comes to more recent camp experience, for instance, in Indonesia in the 1960s up into the early 70s, there are people that can be interviewed who are relatively still relatively young, the memories are still pretty good. And because of the repressive environment in Indonesia, the repressive environment in Indonesia, they had relatively little opportunity to tell the stories publicly.
So in that sense, they haven't worked to the memories over and over in a way that the Second World War veterans, veterans of detention, the former prisoners of war, and civilian and the other, in the way that they had worked their memories over. So the memories of people in Indonesia are often fresher, sharper and more reliable than memories of those in the Second World War. And that also applies to other relatively recent experiences of detention. But of course, there's always a problem when the power, when the authorities who organize the detention are still in power, it can be very difficult to conduct work in country, and it can be quite difficult to talk to people outside the country, because they still have family who might be affected by their, if they're known to have talked to researchers.
So the other difficulty we face, of course, as human beings, we're dealing with terrible experiences. We're dealing with people who suffered greatly. And on the one hand, we have this, we have a human reaction to their experiences. But on the other hand, we want to understand what's going on.
We want to just take a step back as scholars and understand how their experience fits into national history, into into global history. There's a constant interplay there between the personal reaction to these, ranging from difficulties to real horrors, and our attempt to understand what was going on in a broader context. What happens when people are eventually released from camps? What kinds of memories do they have?
Can you comment on the extent of redress for atrocities that occurred under internment? So, people come out of camps, generally, people come out of camps generally experience immediate disappointment, because they're generally released into circumstances that are also quite difficult. The end of war, the end of the repressive regime, or even the position of the repressive regime. So it's very often the case that detainees don't experience exhilaration at liberation, but since they've come out into a world that is still very hostile.
So, civilian detainees of the Japanese were released into an Asia that was in political turmoil. Signific numbers were victims of violence during the nationalist revolutions. The indigenous who were released by the military regime came out of camps, but the identity cards were stamped with the letters ET, which stands for extra honor and X prisoner. And although they were officially free citizens, there were all sorts of restrictions on what they could do.
And when they had to show their identity cards, they were immediately identified as former prisoners, and were sometimes abused, sometimes extorted, and sometimes just restricted. So, it was often very difficult. On top of that, conditions in camps were often very harsh, so they came out with damaged health. Amongst the people who were detained, there were some who ended up with apparently very little delity, very little damaging effect.
I've talked to former prisoners, sometimes I've talked to former prisoners of the Japanese who were in the 90s in the early 90s, and were still bright and alert. But for many, the conditions in the camps led to shorter life expectancy and to reduce conditions of life, were conditions of life as a result of their experience in the camps. So the question then arises of what kind of compensation might be given. In most cases, the political circumstances mean that there is no chance of compensation.
So, after the Second World War, there was some provision for compensation for prisoners of war and the Japanese. So, basically what happened was that Japanese assets that were held outside Japan before the war had all been suspended, had all been temporarily confiscated during the war, and they were then allocated to be sold, and the proceeds given to prison, former prisoners of war of the Japanese. And the Thailand-Burmarellway was sold, and the assets or the proceeds of that sale were distributed specifically to prisoners who had, prisoners of war who had worked on the Thailand-Burmarellway. The Dutch managed also to get a mandatory compensation for civilian-entines.
There have been a couple of hundred thousand Europeans in the Netherlands Indies who were detained by the Japanese in very, very circumstances, never good conditions, but sometimes pretty often something really awful. And the Dutch government in the late 1950s basically did a deal with the Japanese government in exchange for the Dutch authorizing the parole, the early release of convicted Japanese or criminals, the Japanese government paid quite a large amount of money to the Dutch government, which they then passed on to civilian-entines as compensation for their detention. Of course, the problem with any kind of monetary compensation is that you really can't equate suffering with a monetary compensation. It always ends up looking a little bit insulting to pay a certain number of dollars, a certain number of pounds or guilders for lost years of life.
And that's a problem with prison systems in general, if someone's been wrongfully convicted and then eventually released, the compensation that they receive for wrongful conviction is often trivial in comparison with the violence. The loss of the pleasure of life through being in prison for such a long time. So there has been some redress in the case of Second World War detainees, but that was a real exception and it didn't really satisfy anyone. Can you say more about the Japanese wartime detention system?
The Japanese, first of all, put all allied prisoners of war into a prisoner of war camps. Now, about half the prisoners of war that they captured in Southeast Asia were not European, not Western, they were local Asians, they were Filipinos, they were Malays, they were Indonesians. And the Philippines and Malaysia, or they're also Indians from British Indian from the British Indian army. So the Filipino soldiers were largely released within a few months of the American surrender.
The Japanese commander, General Hommar, decided that they were not going to be a great danger. He didn't want to have to spend the resources to keep them in prison. And he was confident that if they went, if they were allowed to go home, they would be reconciled themselves to Japanese rule. And the Japanese in Malaya tried very hard to recruit British Indian soldiers to join what they called the Indian National Army, which they wanted to join the Japanese army and help conquer British India.
And indeed, a lot of nationalists amongst the British Indian soldiers who were interested in joining the Japanese to liberate the, to liberate British India. And so, in Indonesia, Japanese soldiers were released very quickly, but soldiers belonging to ethnic minorities, so a couple of Christian ethnic minorities from island called Manado or regions called Manado and Amban, they were mainly Christian and they were regarded as politically unreliable so they were kept in detention, basically until the end of the war. So, in places where there were relatively few Europeans that were normally put into protected areas, not really camps but protected areas for the duration of the war. And in those particular areas, areas varied quite a lot in China and in Japan, conditions mostly were not too bad, they were supported by the Red Cross, they were supported by the Japanese Department of Foreign Affairs, there was one camp in Japan where they continued getting newspapers right to the end of the war, and there was even a maser who would visit the camp once a week to provide a massage for the the the Internet.
But in in Southeast Asia, there were many more Europeans and conditions in the initially the Japanese decided not to intern them, but after about six months when the war began to grind to a halt on the front lines and Japanese authorities became afraid of allied counter-attacks, they saw these Europeans as a political danger and began to put them into internment camps, those were very large internment camps because of the very large number of detainees, and conditions varied from difficult and tedious to pretty, pretty awful. One of the interesting things is that the Japanese never established detention camps as part of counter-griller activity, so, or because they never did that in Southeast Asia, they tried it once in Manchuria in North East Asia and concluded there that it only allowed them to be able to get to the end of the war. And it only alienated the local population, so they didn't implement it when they came to Southeast Asia. This was a contrast with the Americans and the Philippines who set up detention camps to isolate Filipinos from the International Scholars, in contrast with the British Himalaya, who created what they called new villages in Himalaya with a they heard Chinese settlers who'd been out in the jungle and in the ages of the plantations, heard of them into controlled camps, so they couldn't provide any information or supplies to the communist guerrillas.
And that was the strategy of the Americans in South Vietnam, where they had strategic hamlets, again bringing people together into what were effectively civilian internment camps, where they were prevented from having contact with guerrillas in the countryside. We were very sorry we couldn't find it all to write about the strategic hamlets in South Vietnam, but they do fit into that broader pattern. The differences in the way in which each of the containing powers targeted people for detention, it depended basically on what they thought was going to be effective and who they thought was dangerous. Another case that features strongly in this book is Indonesia.
Why? So part of the reason is that in Australia, and this was a volume put together in Australia with the large and the largest authors, in Australia Indonesia looms fairly, fairly large. So globally, Indonesia doesn't look large, and so we also thought that we needed to bring the Indonesian case forward. Indonesia's mass killings in 1965, 66 were one of four great political genocides of the 20th century.
It was the only one that was conducted by the right, the right wing against the left, the others in Soviet Union China and Cambodia were conducted by the left against the right. It's not had as much attention as we thought that it should have, and the detentions that accompanied the mass killings have had even less attention. So we wanted to give those detentions significant attention. So the Indonesian army basically ordered members and associates of the Communist Party in Indonesia, which was the largest Communist Party in the non-communist world in the early 1960s, ordered them to report.
They were put into makeshift detention camps, and of course, the logistics really comes up in strongly in the condition in those camps. And then from those camps, significant numbers were taken out to be executed. So these camps were, in a sense, filtering camps, which the Indonesian army used to decide who was going to be killed out of the very large number that they detained. And then once they had killed the leaders of the Communist Party, once they had killed an exemplary number, it was pretty ramshackled in any ways.
And so there's a lot of evidence that suggests they're really interested in killing a large number, like Roman decimation, rather than necessarily making sure they got only the right people. Once they'd completed that operation, they kept people, they kept left us in detention, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, sometimes for years. Sometimes they were used to provide unpaid labor on military projects or unpaid labor as servants for military officers before they were finally released. So this was an important element of using detainees as a sort of labor before they were eventually released.
How much difference is there among the detention systems that your authors describe in this book? So the, there's a difference in the targets of the people to be detained. So the Japanese comprehensively detained Europeans and prisoners of war, the Indonesian army sought to detain communists comprehensively. On the other hand, the Burmese government in its detention were much more selective in the political detention.
So the detention was not prison sentences. The, the detentions by the American military were very much regional. They were based on the what American military commanders perceived as the military necessity in each region. With the rulers were strong, they were getting a lot of support from local people.
Then those concentration camps where we set up to isolate the local people from the, from the Filipino nationalists, where there wasn't an issue, there was no such, no such detention. So there's a lot of different circumstances, which means, which is one of the reasons why we have to try and step back and say, what is these detention camps in general? What do they mean? That's why we ended up with the a government wall of stone debate.
So, what is the power of the opinion? Is it possible to compare the oppressiveness of different camp systems? It's a really good question. And it's a very difficult one to answer.
It's absolutely the case that some people experienced detention much was than other people experienced detention. And that's partly a matter of personality, individual personality. But it's also to do with the way in which the camps are run. A chunni prisoner of war camp in in Singapore was notorious after the war as a as a hill hole.
But in fact, when you look at conditions in the in the camp itself, they were not nearly as bad as conditions in on the Thailand, the camp was largely self governing food supplies were relatively reliable until the very end of the war when people were starting everywhere in the in the Japanese Empire. And by contrast, on the Thailand-Burraue health conditions, the availability of food, the need for very hard work made conditions absolutely awful. But there were awful all the time. There were moments when conditions were diabolical.
Other moments when conditions were relatively conditions in Japanese camps vary widely depending on what the camps were for, depending on the character of the commander, the camp guards. All the camps were an affront to human dignity to the caused human suffering. And one of the problems that we have faced in talking about our work more broadly is that people who were engaged who were involved in one camp who had a special connection with one camp rather than another. For instance, so Japanese prisoner of war camps tend to think that they were the worst of all possible camps.
So we have many cases, for instance, of people writing about the Japanese camps in which they say these camps were comparable to the Nazi death camps. Now, we think it's absolutely not the case. They were completely unlike the Nazi death camps. But it's a real problem to talk to people and say, well, you suffered but you didn't suffer as much as the victims of the of the Nazis.
It feels to them as though we're downplaying their suffering. Of course, there's also an ethnic dimension. The conditions that European prisoners of war and European civilian internees experienced under the Japanese have received a huge amount of attention, whereas the experience of Chinese putting the detention camps by Britain during the by-em urgency, the experience of the political prisoners, the experience of Filipinos at the hands of the Americans at the beginning of the 20th century, these have had much less attention, partly because there's much less material. People didn't write their memoirs.
There was no attempt to collect oral testimony. No attempt to collect documents. So on the one hand, yes, there were some very significant differences in experience between the different or among the different camps. There is some moral difficulty in trying to say, yes, these ones were worse.
These ones were better. What lessons does your book have for the 21st century? So I think that the the lesson is one that we draw from Wallenstein, and that is that the problem with camps and detention camps and detention camp systems is not that they're a harbinger for what will happen to us, us being comfortable Western middle class people. So it's not that we are directly under threat as a result of these camps.
The problem is a human one that in our interests, terrible suffering is being imposed on people who are unable to resist it. So in a sense, I find the the nimular formulation when they came for one group, I didn't object to go to that group, and they came for the next group, I didn't object to go to that group, and then when they came for me, no one objected because there was no one left. That's putting it very much in the frame of personal interest, whereas I think Wallenstein forces us to see it as a broader moral issue. It's not that we're in danger.
It's the problem is that we're benefiting from the oppression of other people. So the other issue that is with considering, although it takes it goes beyond anything that we discussed in the in the volume, and that is we're very conscious of the the harshness of conditions in detention camps. We're very conscious of the damage that the camps did to the psychological condition and the physical condition of people who were detained. But we still regard prisons as a suitable means of punishing people who commit crimes.
And I think we probably don't, in our minds, put together what we know about the experience of people like us who were detained, for instance, by the Japanese, and the conditions that we impose on people in ordinary prison criminals in ordinary prisons. Now, maybe we would decide even if we knew that this is what we want to do, but I think we we close our eyes to a significant extent to conditions in prisons as we do in detention camps. Of course, that is a big part of the detention camp system. How does this book shed me light on the Second World Wars history and aftermath in East Asia?
Okay, so I think it demonstrates that the Japanese were not particularly exceptional in their certainly in their conduct of detention detention camps. When we held the conference that became the the basis for the book, not everyone who contributed to the conference was in the book and not everyone in the book was at their conference, but many of the authors were there. One of the striking things was that the specialists on Japanese camps was stunned by the the stories of harsh conditions in the other camps. So if we set the Japanese again.
So if we set the Japanese against the other detention camp systems, they don't stand out as unusually awful. And this is a broader conclusion that Sandra Wilson and I have drawn from our study of Japanese war crimes. They're not particularly similar to the the crimes of the Nazis. They're much more similar to the the crimes of European colonial powers who were fighting wars against their colonial subjects from the 1930s up until the 1950s.
It may be that the Japanese were a little worse, but in you can take off most of the Japanese atrocities and find similar often, similar widespread atrocities conducted by European colonial powers in their in their colonial wars. So one of the big conclusions is that it separates the Second World War in Asia from the Second World War in Europe. What were the most difficult aspects of your research and writing process? How did you overcome and circumvent such challenges?
So there are there are always two difficulties in editing war, one is with the with the material. So when we were dealing with these often terrible events really depressing experiences for people, we constantly face this this challenge. One of the things that we tried to do was to keep the descriptions of allowing our human emotions to be expressed while trying to be dispassionate. One of the one of the rules that we tried to apply to all the chapters in the book was to keep the descriptions clinical and dispassionate.
So we deliberately, judgemental words we wanted to allow the conditions, the atrocities in a sense to speak for themselves. So in a sense we were confident that the conditions we were describing would appore our readers without us having to say these conditions were appalling. The other challenge in editing a book is always that you're dealing with other human beings who have their own interests, their own agendas, their own pressures of time. So this editing a book is always bittersweet.
There are people that you can work with very well and as an editor you can feel that you're helping them to bring their ideas, to bring their research to a broader public. When you're established academic it's very rare that you will get useful feedback from anyone before the work is published. And so the editing process can be very helpful, particularly for more junior scholars. So that was a rewarding aspect.
On the other hand we also had one or two authors who didn't particularly appreciate that process who ended up pulling out of the book because they didn't want to work within this framework. So academics edit books as a contribution to the field. We never get much credit for editing books from our university masters because they don't regard it as real research. But it's often a way of making of bringing people together to make a statement about a new and emerging field and that's what we were aiming to do with this book on detention camps in Asia.
But it's always a challenging experience and most academics who have edited a book vow that they won't do another one. And then they relink again a few years later and they do take on another editing task. As we enter dialogue today can you kindly tell us about where your time at TensorF Gollum since completing this work? Well, since completing this work I've been working with my fellow editor Sandra Wilson on a book which will come out early 2026 or perhaps even like 2025.
It's entitled 12 Japanese walk criminals and one who got away. So rather than taking what has been the standard approach of looking at events like the Dungeon Massacre or the the Souching Massacre in Singapore, we've taken 13 Japanese 12 of them appeared before walk crimes tribunals and were convicted and one who managed to escape being captured and convicted. And we've looked at their biographies. We've looked at where they grew up, how they came to be in the place where they committed the walk run.
To cover a wide range of social and military levels. So we've got to Jojo who was the Japanese Prime Minister. We've got General Homma who was the Japanese General in charge of the at the time of the battle and death march. We've also got a doctor, a medical doctor who was posted to one of the prison captain of the Thailand bomber, Relbay.
We've got a pimp who ran a brothel using Comfort Women for the Japanese army. We've got a Japanese captain who was responsible for massacre in in Burma. So we've got a wide range of people. Some of their crimes were truly awful.
Some of them were not so not all but they weren't unless walk crimes and they were prosecuted for each of these for what they had done. So we looked at what brought them to the scene of the crime. We look at what happened. We use the court records and other materials that we've been able to gather to try and understand just what happened and why it happened.
We look at what we look at the trial. We look at the sentence and what happened afterwards. So about half our people were sentenced to death. And the others were imprisoned.
So we look at what they did in prison and what they did after they were released. And we've got one person who was never brought before a court. And he was actually the worst of a lot. He was the only real psychopath amongst our group.
So the irony is that he was the only one who wasn't brought to to justice. And that walk is a kind of prelude to a broader study that Sandra and I are doing, which was still writing on walk crimes and the Japanese military trying to explain what they did and why they did it. As we end today, I'd like to express my heartfelt gratitude to you for how thoughtful and consider it all your answers and responses were during the course of our dialogue. I can hardly be more appreciative.
Thank you very much, Aria. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you. It has been my hell of honor.
Today, I'm signing off as Ari Barbara, your host on the new books in history channel of the new books out of podcast. Today, I have been grateful to engage in a dialogue with Robert crib. He is a meritist professor of Asian history in the Department of Political and Social Change in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific affairs in the College of Asia and the Pacific at Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. We have been discussing his recently published book, which he has co-edited with Christina Twomey and Sandra Wilson, Detention Camp in Asia, the conditions of confinement in modern Asian history published in Leiden by Brill Publishers 2022.
Thank you.