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Old 12-10-2008, 01:53 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Graebarde
Yes, the camps would tend to turn a loyal follower sour. And as for the US camps being better than the Nazi camps. Perhaps the conditions were better in the US camps in general, but the barbed wire fence and lack of freedom were the same. Also many of the US guards were not the fine friendly boys you would see in the propaganda.

Would there be camps post TDM? You bet'cha, but they wouild be refugee camps, and once you got in, it would be hell getting out IMO. And hell while you were in there. Think of the dome in NOLA after Katrina, 1000 time worse.

just my 2 cents
Grae
My great-grandfather, having crossed with his daughter the Spanish-French border through the Pirennes at the end of the Spanish Civil War, was interned by the french authorities in a refugee camp in the south of France. They followed the steps of thousands of Spanish republicans that tried to escape from what they thought, a nearly secure execution at the hands of the Spanish Nationalist soldiers. And, as Grae said, it was a hell.

The french authorities were overwhelmed by a true tide of terrified refugees. 500.000 refugees crossed the border in three weeks.Perhaps our northern neighbours have not noticed the extraordinary level of hate that the conflict (by the two sides) had generated and they cannot anticipate the dimensions of the flow of people running away from the armies of Franco.
Perhaps it was some kind of paralysis caused by the calm-down politic towards the fascist powers in Europe (that was about to end abruptly in September of that same year, with Hitler's invasion of Poland).

But the fact is that the french refugee camps were, at the beginning, only a piece of terrain surrounded by a fence. In the case of my great-grandfather, he was interned in a camp located in a beach near Argelès-sur-Mer. Only fences, sand and sea water. It was in February. 80.000 refugees. You can imagine the rest. Epidemics, louses, starvation, cold... Neither accommodations nor materials to build them, no latrines, no kitchens... With four or five blankets it was possible to improvise a low shack using reeds (the only and scarce resource available). But it was a poor solution against the rain. Quoting a refugee, "El llit de cada home es l'emprenta que el seu cos deixa a la sorra", "the bed of each man was his own mark on the sand". Thanks to god, the conditions of the refugees camp were improved with time.

The conditions on the T2K would be still worse. Thinking about Europe, in most of the parts, a refugee camp would not have sense. We need a community with enough resources and goodwill to admit a substantial number of refugees (to form a camp) for humanitarian reasons, without receiving anything in exchange (at least at the first moment). I can see small numbers of refugees flowing from disputed or devastated zones to organized zones. But nothing similar to a refugee camp. Basically, for the same reason that refugee camps didn't exist in the Middle Age. Most pprobably, in the communities organized as military cantonments, the military units providing protection would block the way to any thing similar to a group of refugees. At the most, they will be allowed to go through the cantonment territory under the surveillance of an escorting force. And finally, a great and unprotected group of refugees will attract all kind of unpleasant people.
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