[Shaun]

Originally Posted by Livia

I'm not a supporter of these camps, they're a despicable way for one set of humans to treat another, it shames the USA. However, I uphold the idea that the Democrats have used the term "concentration camps" in a deliberately provocative and inflammatory way. Of course, I don't imagine everyone will agree with me, but I would urge you to google the pictures of the internment of Japanese people in the 40s taken by Ansel Adams (or any other photographer for that matter)... and compare those with any googled pictures of Nazi concentration camps and ask yourself if they bear any resemblance to each other.

Using the term 'concentration camps' may be semantically correct, but in my opinion it weakens the term and could give people the idea that those who suffered in Germany's concentration camps - and I don't mean just the Jews, I mean the gays, the gypsies, the disabled - went through no more than the Japanese internees did. Of around 120,000 Japanese internees, less than 2000 died while incarcerated and while I'm not saying that's acceptable, it's not indicative of what has become understood to be a "concentration camp". We can't let this stuff be minimised.

I agree with you in a sense but I would still argue that the extremity and the horror of the usage of concentration camps by Nazi Germany is more semantically appropriate to be labelled as "the Holocaust" more than a complete threshold over the concept of concentration camps itself. Whilst even the most shallow and uninformed observer of WW2 history would associate "concentration camps" with "the deaths of 6m+ Jews" it is still a grotesque situation for the US to find themselves in, especially with the knowledge and supposed wisdom of such horrific treatments of prisoners in the past.

Naturally it's a phrasing that is intended to provoke outrage and disgust but having seen photographs of some of their conditions I don't think that it's really being done falsely or with the intention of misleading people.

But to me it's a little like someone arguing that someone who's killed 10 people shouldn't be called a mass murderer because Pol Pot killed 2 million or so Cambodians. We don't need to witness the literal worst ever example of a phenomenon to label it that.