"Influenced by Arendt and by Wolfgang Sofsky's... The Order of Terror... Giorgio Agamben... [defines] the camp as a paradigmatic state of exception and symbol of totalitarianism... Agamben defines "modern totalitarianism... " as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who... cannot be integrated into the political system." ...[T]he state of exception, embodied by the proliferation of the camp, constitutes a pillar of modernity's exclusionary strategies and forms the basis of universal history. There is a... road not quite taken in Agamben's... camp as... exception. Noting the debate about modernity's first... camps... the Spanish campos de concentraciones in Cuba in 1896 or the English concentration camps designed for the Boers... Agamben writes: "... both [represent] extension to an entire civilian population of a state of exception linked to a colonial war." But... critics have observed, despite his emphasis on "the camp as the 'nomos' of the modern," [he] ignores colonialism, even Italy's... Implementing spatial control, surveillance, and mass violence, Italy's concentration camps in interwar ... manifest all the features that define bare life for Agamben, but... elude his representations as state of exception. A fog cloaks Mussolini's brutal invasion of Ethiopia... If the omission of these presumably peripheral iterations of the totalitarian "promulgates the myth of... the Italians as 'good' and 'decent' colonisers"—it also forecloses a truly universal account of the camp as the fundamental biopolitical space of modernity that Agamben gestures toward."