Comment by brown9-2
16 years ago
There is actually some controversy over using the term "concentration camp" to refer to the internment. From wikipedia:
"Concentration camp" is the most controversial descriptor of the camps. This term is criticized for suggesting that the Japanese American experience was analogous to the Holocaust and the Nazi concentration camps.[90] For this reason, National Park Service officials have attempted to avoid the term.[88] Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes each referred to the American camps as "concentration camps," at the time.[91] When the nature of the Nazi concentration camps became clear to the world, and the phrase "concentration camp" came to signify a Nazi death camp, most historians turned to other terms to describe Japanese internment.
Of course there is "some controversy" about anything that might make our politicians look bad. Sure, the severity was not the same, but it looks like they tried to skip the implications altogether. Internment is not nice, especially when the reason for it is simply hysteria.
Well, going back to the British use of them in the Boer War, I define them as "camps where significant numbers of people die of disease (or worse)." As far as I know, these camps didn't fit that definition, and they most certainly fit the time of war internment word of art.
Note that seizing the property that they were forced to abandon has been said to be another motivation.
It's funny how they have trouble with the word "concentration" when the word I would have trouble with is "camp". Makes it sound like a weekend getaway or fun for the kids.
Concentration "prison" is more accurate. Try leaving and see what happens.
You're using a very restricted form of the word 'camp', in fact a connotation that only arose in the last century or two.
They were most certainly camps. A camp is basically just a temporary shelter.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Calling all flowers roses would undermine the attributes that make a rose special.
Not the same. No one is trying to take a flower and call it a rose. They're trying to take a rose and say it's not a rose because it doesn't have as many thorns as some other variety of rose.