Re: Stranger in a strange land

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

benlizross wrote:

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

Paul J Kriha wrote:

Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:43FF052B.469F@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
benlizro@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Richard Herring wrote:

In message <43FDD944.6ACE@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Peter T. Daniels

One hates to sound like E. D. Hirsch, but how does one become a
25-year-old American ca. 1990 without ever having heard of
Belshazzar's Feast?

When I was a 15-year-old American ca. 1952, we sang a song in my
highschool that went

Now King Belshazzar took delight in
Starting wars and doing fighting.
Sons of Israel he called scamps,
And he sent them off to work in concentration camps.

Mene, mene, tekel, tekel, tekel,
Mene, mene, tekel upharsin.

Google doesn't know about it.

Me either, but I'm ca. 15 years younger than you.

It can't have been a very traditional song, because "concentration camp"
didn't exist before 1945!

A typo?
The war _ended_ in 1945. There were no (operating) Nazi
concentration camps _after_ 1945. The first ones were
established well before the war, in the thirties.

Did you overlook the quotation marks?

What are you suggesting is the importance of the quotation marks? I took
them to mean that you were referring to the phrase "concentration camp".

You did, but Paul didn't.

You have been given plenty of evidence that the phrase (and the concept)
goes back half a century earlier.

In Britain, perhaps. (The Boer War seems to have been a much greater
part of British consciousness than the Spanish-American War was of
American consciousness.)

As I pointed out in my previous post, by at least the 30s the term no
longer had any specific association with that war, and was applied to
such camps in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Personally, I would be
very surprised if it remained unknown and unused in the USA during that
time, but I do not have convenient means to search for examples. Someone
with access to a historical American corpus could easily do so. The
earliest I can point to for sure is that the film produced by the
Hollywood director and cinematographer George Stevens, who was actually
there at Dachau, which film was shown as evidence at the Nuremberg
trials, was entitled simply "Nazi Concentration Camps". Seems unlikely
that he would have used a completely novel and unfamiliar expression in
this way.

We are talking about American high school boys ca. 1952.

No, we are not talking about how they might have interpreted the words
of the song in the 1950s, but about what those words can tell us about
its possible date of composition.


Their existence was unknown (outside, one hopes, the OSS) before the
first Liberations at Buchenwald (American and British -- Alfred
Hitch*** was brought in to document the situation, and he insisted on
long, long takes with no cuts because he knew no one would believe them
if it looked like there was any sort of camera tricks going on) and
Bergen-Belsen (Soviet).
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx

I believe you may be referring here to "death camps" (where systematic
mass killings of Jews and others were carried out), whose existence was
not generally known until the end of the war. "Concentration camp" is a
more general term; the Bertrand Russell quote in the OED shows that the
existence of Nazi concentration camps (referred to by that term) was
known at least by 1935. Further quotes from 1940 and 1943 show an
awareness that Jews were particularly likely to be sent to them.

The US was utterly disinterested in the fate of the Jews. One of FDR's
great sins (along with the Japanese internment camps) was turning away
shipful(s) of refugees.

Philojudaism, historians are lately noticing, did not set in in the US
until after the Six-Day War (1967).

The relevance of these historical observations to the present argument
escapes me.

Ross Clark
.