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by AnthonyMouse 2551 days ago
"Concentration camp" has a specific connotation. Calling this a concentration camp is like calling a terminal cancer ward a "death camp" because people go there to die.

Fault Trump with everything that's his fault, but suggesting that this is a precursor to mass graves and genocide is just hyperbole.
2 comments
HillaryBriss 2551 days ago
> "Concentration camp" has a specific connotation.

In my personal experience, "concentration camp" has been applied specifically to mean the camps operated by the German government in the 1930's and 40's, camps which intentionally tortured and murdered millions of innocent Jews, and certain other "undesirables" and enemies of the Nazi regime.

When I hear that term, I personally think of emaciated prisoners wearing striped uniforms, packed into cramped wooden shelves. I think of hopeless people peering out from behind barbed wire fences suffering under a regime of forced labor and starvation. I think of horrific death chambers filled with poison gas and choking, dying human beings and towering piles of dead bodies.

I personally can't get those images out of my head when I hear the term "concentration camp" and I would guess most other people in the US conjure up the same images specifically tied to Nazi Germany when they hear that term.

But NPR has an interesting article about the meaning and historical usage of "concentration camp." The subject arose when someone used the term to describe the sites where Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated during WWII.

https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2012/02/10/1466917...

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olefoo 2551 days ago
The use of concentration camps as part of a planned ethnic cleansing campaign originated with the American governments efforts to relocate and exterminate the indigenous populations of the Southeastern United States see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Removal_Act if you want to pick up the trail.
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danharaj 2551 days ago
> Calling this a concentration camp is like calling a terminal cancer ward a "death camp" because people go there to die.

No, it isn't. Concentration camps have existed throughout history and they haven't always been associated with genocide. But, you know, they do have a connotation of being associated with violations of human rights which is exactly what people are alleging about these detention sites.

The fact that it's not literally the holocaust doesn't mean it's not a concentration camp.

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neonate 2551 days ago
That's true. But post-holocaust, the term came to mean the holocaust camps. Growing up, I never heard it used any other way. For example I never heard the camps in which the US and Canada put their Japanese citizens in WWII called concentration camps, though in the original sense they were. Rather they were called internment camps, because by then "concentration camp" had come to be associated with the holocaust. So there's a semantic sleight of hand in people reviving the term for political use now. They're taking advantage of the extreme associations it now has, while protesting that they don't mean it that way.
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AnthonyMouse 2551 days ago
> No, it isn't. Concentration camps have existed throughout history and they haven't always been associated with genocide.

It still is, because a "concentration camp" even in that sense still isn't just any camp where people are concentrated. It implies internment without charges, which is exactly what isn't happening here -- there is every expectation that there will be a proceeding to determine their immigration status, resulting in either release or deportation and not indefinite internment in violation of habeas corpus.

> But, you know, they do have a connotation of being associated with violations of human rights which is exactly what people are alleging about these detention sites.

Then make that claim and not the other one. If they have no access to soap then assert that as the thing that needs to be fixed -- because at least that can be fixed. How do you make a detention facility not a "concentration camp" under a definition of "concentration camp" that just means any detention facility?

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danharaj 2551 days ago
> How do you make a detention facility not a "concentration camp" under a definition of "concentration camp" that just means any detention facility?

You might just have to accept that in order to enforce some laws you're going to have to put people in mass detention and you may as well own that instead of trying to get people to not call it what it is because the term for it makes you uncomfortable.

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