Regarding concentration camps

[zarq]

Received a couple of emails this morning complaining that I had improperly used called Guantanamo Bay a "concentration camp". I've explained why I call it that before, so I thought I'd make a quick separate entry about it that would be easy to link to.

From Wikipedia (they quote the OED)

An internment camp or concentration camp is a large

Comments

[bernmarx]

When people compare the current administration to Hitler, I say not hardly -- YET. But it's only through our willingness to call a spade a spade, such as calling Gitmo a concentration camp (Roosevelt's Japanese interment camps are also sometimes called concentration camps, for that matter) or criticizing the Mexican wall as so much scapegoating (since the reason is because all them Latinos are destroying our economy -- see: 1930s Germany), that we avoid going there.

[quixotickitten]

120 others have been approved for transfer to countries willing to take them.

Take them... and... do what with them?

[krmtdfrog]

I'm a fellow heeb. I have no problems calling it a concentration camp.

[windswept]

The rounding up of Japanese in WWII is called internment camps, not concentration caps. I think your use of language is unnecessarily inflammatory, given that the term "concentration camp" has not only a denotation but far more serious connotations.

[zarq]

We have prisoners who are being being held without trial or due process of law. This sole criteria would make Guantanamo an internment camp. But they're also being subjected at least one (and probably a variety of) torture techniques, which makes Guantanamo a concentration camp.

If the term is both accurate and inflammatory, doesn't that say something about what we're doing?

Our camps for Japanese & Japanese-Americans during WWII were referred to by three terms both at the time and in subsequent years: "Relocation Camps", "Internment Camps" and "Concentration Camps". A PBS documentary website and several other websites refer to but don't cite a specific instance of President Roosevelt calling them 'concentration camps'. Perhaps they show him doing so in the film? Obviously, I can't speak for the documentary filmmakers' bias

[xiphias]

I'm a Jew. Gitmo is a concentration camp.

Auschwitz wasn't a concentration camp; it was a death camp. There's a difference. The United States had concentration camps in WWII for the Japanese. The Germans had some concentration camps, but they also had death camps.

We, baruch Hashem, do not have any death camps.

That I know of.

Yet.