A very minor footnote to current debates about the treatment of migrants on the United States’ southern border… The emotive phrase ‘concentration camps’ has been used a fair amount, and whenever that happens you can guarantee that someone on the Twitter will come up with the “well actually they were invented by the British in South Africa” line – not, I think, with the aim of relativising the Holocaust or playing down the outrage, but perhaps to side-step invocations of Godwin’s Law and emphasise that respectable Anglo-Saxon democracies can do this sort of this as well.
This week brought a new variant: well actually it wasn’t the British but the ancient Greeks, see Thucydides’ account of the Athenian prisoners kept in terrible conditions in quarries after the Syracuse disaster (7.87). Hmm. The obvious objection is that, however inhuman their treatment, these were prisoners of war, whereas the hallmark of the modern concentration camp is the internment of civilians. The obvious question is: What function does such a claim serve? In the actual Twitter exchange it comes across less as an attempt to exculpate the British than simply as the provision of yet more historical information. But it still feels like a distraction, a missing of the point, or at least a dissolving of the point into a general ‘humans have always done this to each other’ sigh of despair rather than a focused attack on the choices of a particular state.
Sphinx 
People take short cuts in their arguments, by passing the brain and aiming straight for the gut.
What annoys me is when they say, “This is not who we are.” Ah, well, we are doing it, and we’ve done it before. Americans have the worst memory of any culture I’ve experienced, especially the conservatives who want to return to “the good old days.”
In discussions and debates, especially between people whose self-worth is tied up with their identity as clever and well-read, there is always a temptation to drift from seeking truth together to trying to one-up each other. “See, I know something you do not know!” That is one reason why I focus my web presence on a weekly blog, not on places which expect constant responses or spending as many hours rebutting something as the person who posted it spent minutes thinking it up.
I’m feeling very uncertain about how far your criticism of one-upmanship is directed against the Twitter discussants and how far it’s aimed at me. My defence would be that this is a data point, albeit a minor data point, for the study of Thucydidean reception and the ways that classical antiquity is invoked in contemporary political discussions.
Not aimed at you at all! I was suggesting that this specific case, turning a discussion about “this is shameful and we should stop” into a competition to name the earliest parallel, is part of an antipattern which certain kinds of people often slip into … I think that Fred Pohl or Isaac Asimov had similar stories from growing up in the 1930s, and academic book reviews sometimes slip into it. Recognizing the pattern helps me decide when to give someone my attention and when to ignore them (and which way to try to lead the conversation).