Barbed Wires

choi

Robert Zaretsky, The Tangled History of ‘Devil’s Rope.’ Boston Globe, Sept 27, 2015.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/idea ... Y8iSp7JJ/story.html

Quote:

(a) "Earlier this month, the Hungarian government, scrambling to seal its southern border against the influx of North African and Middle Eastern refugees trying to reach Germany, placed a bid for 10,000 rolls of razor wire. Though the deal was worth hundreds of thousands of euros, a German manufacturer, Mutanox, wouldn’t sell to the Hungarians. 'Razor wire is designed to prevent criminal acts, like a burglary,' explained the company spokesman. 'Fleeing children and adults are not criminals.'

"Had you doubts about the cunning of history, lay them to rest. From Germany’s welcoming of refugees to its outrage at Hungary’s violent efforts to stop them, the country that, 75 years ago, made barbed wire into the symbol of man’s inhumanity to man has done much to overcome its past.

"Yet, the Mutanox spokesman did not fully uncoil the history of barbed wire. Contrary to his claim, one of the hallmarks of our age is that fleeing children and adults have often been considered criminals.

(b) "Like inventors from Joseph Guillotin to Alfred Nobel, whose creations escaped their original purpose and were yoked to evil ends, Joseph Glidden would have been shocked at what became of his. In 1874, the Illinois farmer and New Hampshire native, fastening sharpened metal knots along thick threads of steel, created barbed wire. Thanks to its high resilience and low cost, the rapid installation of the coils and lasting dissuasion of the barbs, the wire transformed the American West. Ranchers could protect their cattle against predators, both wild and human, as they pushed the frontier ever further west. The wire itself came to be called 'devil’s rope.' "

(c) "South Africa was also the birthplace of the modern concentration camp — the demarcation of space by barbed wire, but this time to keep people in and not out. When the British rounded up families from their farms and villages to throttle support, material and logistical, for the commandos, they needed to build camps for the civilians as quickly and cheaply as possible. * * *  they soon became breeding grounds for disease and despair"

(d) "Western Front [of WWI], where the usual war of movement had coagulated into a static line stretching from the English Channel to Switzerland, barbed wire [n conjunction with trenches] was heaven-sent. Or, more accurately, US Steel sent. The company produced nearly 3 million miles of barbed wire during World War I.

“It was a cheap, rapid, and effective means to stop the movement of large forces of men bent on your destruction. When combined with another recent invention, the machine gun, barbed wire became more imposing than the largest fort or cannon. As advancing soldiers on both sides quickly discovered, the massive bombardments that preceded their attacks might have leveled a fortress, but was mostly useless against barbed wire. * * * Barbed wire, an accessory to earlier wars, stars in WWII.


My comment:
(a) There is no need to read the rest, which is inane.

(b) If you had “doubts about the cunning of history”
(i) Richard E Rubenstein, The Cunning of History; Mass death and the American future. Harper & Row, 1975  (In later editions, the subtitle would be “The Holocaust and the American future.”)
(ii) The “cunning” here is a noun, whose definition is closely related to it being an adjective (I check major American and English dictionaries). So the author was a wordsmith to create a new use of “cunning” as a noun in this context.
(iii) Richard E Rubenstein
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_E._Rubenstein
(1938- ; (holding degrees from Harvard College, Oxford University (as a Rhodes Scholar), and Harvard Law School; was an attorney at DC; is an author and University Professor of Conflict Resolution and Public Affairs at George Mason University)

(c)
(i) barbed wire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbed_wire
("The first patent in the United States for barbed wire was issued in 1867 to Lucien B Smith of Kent, Ohio, who is regarded as the inventor. Joseph F Glidden [qv] of DeKalb, Illinois, received a patent for the modern invention in 1874 after he made his own modifications to previous versions")
(ii) Barbed Wire: The Saga. Joseph F Gidden Homestead and Historical Center, undated
www.gliddenhomestead.org/barbedwire.html

“Joseph Glidden then returned to his experiment of clinching the coils with their tangs and twisting it with another smooth wire on the single strand.” What does this mean?  See next.

* Click "HOME" in the left column, and you will realize what "homestead" means.
(iii) The Development and Rise of Barbed Wire. In Scott Cook, The Rise of Barbed Wire and Its Transformation of the American Frontier. American Studies, University of Virginia, undated
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~class/am485_98/cook/develp.htm

Quote: "This breakthrough began at the De Kalb County Fair of 1873. At the fair, Henry M Rose, a local farmer, presented a curious contraption of fencing. The fencing consisted of a normal wooden rail "equipped with short wire points extending out in "sharp projections""(29). The apparatus was not designed to be an entity to itself, but instead was meant to be attached to an existing fence. * * * Joseph Glidden was the first man to begin experimenting with Rose's design to make a more practical and effective fencing material. Unlike Rose, Glidden saw the advantage of applying barbs to the smooth fence wire that was commonly used in this time. He first experimented in his farm kitchen with the help of his wife, simply attaching barbs to the smooth wire. Yet he quickly realized that this method was also ineffective, for he 'saw that wherever he used the barbed strands, on garden or cowlot, the twisted wire pieces gradually slid along the straightened fence strand, and he realized that he must find a way to crimp the barbs so that they would stay in place' ([footnote:] 32). By using a coffee mill, Glidden quickly developed a method of wrapping the wire around the barb, and 'by this method a fairly uniform barb was produced with each operation of the coffee mill' (32). Furthermore, with the additional use of an old grindstone, he wrapped a second wire around the first, 'and the result was a double strand of cable having wire barbs secured along its entire length' (32).

* Please view the reproduced Gidden’s 1874 patent which is a figure to the right of the text, about two thirds down the Web page.
(iv) Joseph Farwell Glidden. New Perspectives on the West, PBS, undated.
www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/d_h/glidden.htm

(d) For concentration camp, see internment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment
("The term concentration camp saw wider use during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), when the British operated such camps in South Africa for interning Boers [Dutch for 'farmers']. They built 45 tented camps for Boer internees and 64 for black Africans. Of the 28,000 Boer men captured as prisoners of war, the British sent 25,630 overseas. The vast majority of Boers remaining in the local camps were women and children, over 26,000 of whom died there.