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Miners hauled in hydraulic equipment to dig and dredge and strip the mountains, polluting the runoff so badly that in 1874, the flatlanders who depended on that water went to court to stop the despoiling.

“These logics oppose nations or peoples to a racialized threat — enemies from without or within — that are said to consume or despoil the resources that belong to the natives,” Callison added.

“We are on the trail of a gang of international thieves who came to France for the purpose of despoiling our museums,” a police spokesman announced.

Picturesque rolling hills, verdant pastures and golden fields of grain provide a deceptively bucolic setting despoiled by greed, treachery and murder.

Metaphors may have no place at a concentration camp, but it’s hard to look at this beautiful enclosed space and not see it, perversely, as the most despoiled of Edens.