[_pi]

This is a semantic argument that I have no real interest in arguing.

Call it genocide, call it ethnic cleansing. Genocide as a criminal charge is mostly a political matter.

California literally admitted that they targeted citizens of Mexican descent for the explicit purpose of illegally cajoling them into emigration and enforced deportation. You learn about it euphemistically as "repatriation" (if at all because almost no HS curriculum teaches this) because oopsie.

If the USSR rounded up all the Japanese and put them in a camp, you wouldn't hear the end of it in the West. Roosevelt himself used the term concentration camps. You learn about it euphemistically as "internment" because "they had a good reason to do it, and sometimes you know we get things wrong!!". An argument that can really only be used if you prelabel good guys and bad guys.

The main difference between US camps and USSR camps is that the US camps were nicer and had food.

The quality of repression scales with the wealth to some degree. The USSR couldn't support the same quality of life for their prisoners that the US could.

Today the US refuses to provide the same quality of life for their prisoners that less wealthy OECD countries do provide.

[dragonwriter]

> Roosevelt himself used the term concentration camps. You learn about it euphemistically as "internment" because "they had a good reason to do it, and sometimes you know we get things wrong!!".

“Internment camps” and “concentration camps” are historical synonyms, the latter has subsequently taken on additional negative loading because of euphemistic use of the term for German extermination camps.

> The main difference between US camps and USSR camps is that the US camps were nicer and had food.

That's... A fairly substantive difference. Detaining people without just cause is bad. Doing so without food is murder.

WW2 era ethnic (primarily, but not exclusively, Japanese) internment in the US was definitely a violation of moral human rights, as were numerous post-WW2 efforts targeting people in the US of Hispanic/Latino ancestry, often on the pretext of illegal immigration. Neither was genocidal; not all bad things are genocide.

[_pi]

> “Internment camps” and “concentration camps” are historical synonyms, the latter has subsequently taken on additional negative loading because of euphemistic use of the term for German extermination camps.

This is completely wrong.

The term concentration camp was invented in the Second Boer War. It described a tactic of war used by the English against to Boers and native Africans. Because Boers and Africans did not have centralized cities and lived off the land rather than having industrialized farming the developed tactics of disrupting the supply lines didn't work on them. The supply lines were too horizontal.

So first they burned and salted the land so that Boers and Africans could no longer subsist. Then they forced the people whose lives they destroyed into what they called concentration camps.

~50k people died in these concentration camps essentially every 3rd person that went in.

The forcible population transfer at gunpoint is what differentiates concentration camps from internment camps which were used by the Spanish in Cuba in the Ten Years War.

Unlike the English who simply treated humans like cattle and forced them to move the Spanish evicted Cubans and killed those who did not comply after 10 days. The US took the English route for the Japanese, while using the Spanish name to differentiate themselves from Nazis who also ran concentration camps.

Likewise it's really funny to say that GULAGs were genocidal while US internment wasn't, because literally there's less intent (in the Western legalistic sense) of genocide in the GULAG case. GULAGs were equal opportunity in terms of ethnicity. Japanese internment wasn't. GULAGs were a problem because the USSR got addicted to slave labor relations that it recreated from a previous era, the USA of all countries has no real standing to criticize it on those grounds because the US still does this to this day, which is why the old Sovietologists were grasping at straws to ideologically differentiate between two similar systems. The big 4 western theories of the function of GULAGs (Solzhetsyn, Consquest, Applebaum and Bauer) literally do not include ethnic cleansing. That's a neologism.

There's no point in continuing the discussion since you literally do not even know the history of what you're talking about.

Edit: To make it crystal clear.

The difference between the GULAG system and the Soviet population transfers and the US internment and deportations that gives more creedence to US commiting ethnic cleansing is the ethnic composition of the material benefactors of those actions and their victims.

The people who were victims in the US were targetted minorities who were disposessed of their wealth by their fellow white citizens.

The people who were victims in the USSR were not targeted minorities, and the benefactors were not an ethnic majority whose main benefit was taking their victim's property.

[kelnos]

Thank you for the history of the term "concentration camp"; I'd always wondered where that came from. I got that they "concentrated" groups of people in smaller locations, but it always seemed weird to me to focus on that aspect. Makes a lot more sense considering the Boer's & native African's (previous) way of life.

Regardless, though, I feel like you aren't really arguing the salient question anymore: did Japanese internment during WWII constitute genocide? As I understand the term -- mass murder and extinction of an ethnic or cultural group -- no, Japanese internment was absolutely not genocide. Jewish (and other) internment in Europe during WWII absolutely was, though, given the intent (and unfortunate amount of success) at killing large numbers of the people imprisoned.

Words have meanings, and those meanings matter. Otherwise we're just flinging around emotional charge without talking about anything real.

> Likewise it's really funny to say that GULAGs were genocidal while US internment wasn't

I believe you're the first person to bring up gulags, so that's a bit of a straw man.

The person you replied to upthread acknowledged (a bit late for my taste, but acknowledged) that what the US did to native peoples in the 1800s was genocide, so I'm not sure why you're still arguing that point. I don't think you can make a case that the Mexican Repatriation was genocide, as this was about forced migration, not murder and extermination. (The atrocities around Native Americans were also partially about forced migration -- which was more of an excuse than a goal -- but the end result was indeed genocide.)

Again, all of these things are bad! But (as another poster said), just because something is bad and is targeted at a particular ethnic group, that doesn't mean it's genocide.

[underlipton]

Your understanding of what constitutes genocide is mistaken. It's not just murder. Any widespread or systematic attempt to remove an ethnic group from existence in a particular region counts, even if it's not successful or doesn't result in massive loss of life, if the intent is to disrupt that ethnic group's ability to sustain itself. Forced removal falls under this, as does ethnic reeducation. Japanese internment during WWII was arguably a genocidal act because its character as an act of ethnic cleansing (even if temporary, in hindsight) is often a first step to outright extermination. Thankfully, the war went well for America, and we felt no need to succumb to dangerous impulses; however, should Midway or other engagements have not gone well, or had the war been drawn out, putting a strain on resources, you would have seen starvation rates rise in the camps, at the very least.

You're making distinctions in service of, "Well, we weren't THAT bad," but generally, I would think the nominal international champion of freedom and justice would want to stay away from even the whiff of such things.