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by 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.