For. The. Love. Of. Christ.
Look, people, words mean things, and, Humpty Dumpty notwithstanding, they mainly mean what they are understood to mean by the people who create and employ them. Wittgenstein also notwithstanding, we mostly don't have trouble agreeing about most of the things that fall into most of the categories we choose to assign to the phenomena we observe.
Somebody posted a link to a very clear definition of "concentration camp" as the term is employed by people who spend their whole damned lives talking about, thinking about, and teaching about things like concentration camps. Nonetheless, there are people on this site who continue to insist on disputing the definition. Well, nobody gives a flying fuck if you think "concentration camp" means "A place where people are rounded up and murdered," or in fact, means anything other than what it does mean, which is this: A place where civilians are collected and kept, normally without evidence or even suspicion of a crime, nevermind an accusation, so that they can be controlled. The "concentration" being referred to has nothing to do with whether they are overcrowded or underfed or gassed or raped or anything else -- it just means, they are put together, in one place, so that whatever power put them there can keep an eye on them.
The original concentration camps were a colonial measure for rounding up a dispersed population so that they could easily be policed and kept separate from insurgents. That's the "concentration" in question: Rather than having them scattered around the landscape on farmsteads and in rural villages, they were all in one place, gathered up and put behind fences, where they couldn't lend aid to insurgents -- couldn't feed them, or hide them, or give them information. That was the whole deal.
There is simply no disputing that the internment camps in which the US placed people of Japanese ethnicity were concentration camps. They were practically definitional concentration camps. Anybody arguing that these internment camps were not concentration camps might as well be arguing that the buildings in which NHL teams play their games are not "arenas". Or that American high schools aren't "schools". Or that Kroger's venues are not "grocery stores". You don't get the choice. You don't get to argue. You don't get to have a contrary opinion on this, anymore than you get to have a contrary opinion on whether grass is a plant or bats are mammals. It. Is. A. Fact. Live with it.
Your own (or anybody else's) emotional response to the most horrifying exemplars of concentration camps does not somehow overrule the perfectly functional definition of "concentration camp", which subsumes the Nazi death camps and a lot of other appalling instances as well. Concentration camps existed before the Nazis. They have existed since the fall of the Nazis. They are likely to exist for as long as our civilization teeters along. Himmler and Speer didn't invent concentration camps, and their "innovations" didn't change the definition of the phenomenon.
Note finally that people who know what the fuck they're talking about generally don't include PoW camps as concentration camps -- though in some instances they might be thought to meet the definition. Similarly, prison camps (such as prison farms) where people have been sent to serve out sentences under much different conditions than, say Leavenworth, are usually not considered concentration camps. Pay no attention to Solzhenitsyn. He was a bigot, a religious fanatic, and an idiot. (That said, in casual usage, some people might extend the definition of "concentration camp" to include those categories, particularly under certain circumstances -- but that is (or should be) casual usage, and when done it degrades and blurs the more precise and accurate definition, to the overall detriment of our language.)
Is Gaza a concentration camp? Yes, we can debate that question. It sure fucking looks like one. The fact that people come and go does not violate the definition. Internees in concentration camps often come and go. How else are they to earn their keep? Even in Nazi Germany, inmates came and went from the camps -- marched off to work in factories as slave labor, then marched back to their fenced-in barracks. Arbeit Macht Fucking Frei, and all that.
I can't believe we even have to argue about this.
Christ.
Comments
It's frustrating.
The latter-day brainwashing of groups used to police political thought in the US has become cartoonish and buffoonish. They will not be tolerated endlessly, as they grow more obvious.
Carry a burning candle and share the light.
.
I just can't stand it.
BTW, it may be that the earliest analogues of the concentration camp would be the ghettoes of Europe. They don't quite fit the modern model, not least because they weren't actually camps, and they probably initially grew somewhat organically.
Whether earlier civilizations had anything similar, I don't know. Did Genghis Khan do anything similar? Beats me.
It's more than just arguable that Indian Reservations were a form of concentration camp. Certainly, there were "facilities" to which Indians were ordered to report, at various times during the re-ordering of the American west.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
I've always referred to the Reservations
...as concentration camps, because that's exactly what they were and are today. This predates the current poison pill of the Thought Police lobby.
Carry a burning candle and share the light.
.
Thank you UT. For an opportunity to discuss this rationally.
And...yes to your thoughts and comment.
A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. Allegedly Greek, but more possibly fairly modern quote.
Consider helping by donating using the button in the upper left hand corner. Thank you.
Americans
Are so trained to shift the narrative on anything by arguing based on emotion or their "side" it's no wonder we "debate" this stuff. Thanks for this clear, concise, factual essay.
Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur
Hey look.
A whole year ago, some guy wrote an editorial in the WP titled, Yes, you can call the border centers ‘concentration camps,’ but apply the history with care. He introduces some very, very interesting historical examples. A. Whole. Year. Ago.
But what the fuck would he know about it? According to his bio, he is
EDIT: Here's a non Wapo source for that editorial.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Let me be the first
to note here that even the author of Godwin's Law, one Mike Godwin, commented that AOC was right to call them concentration camps. (per today's Thom Hartmann Live program)
I recall seeing even one Holocaust scholar concurring w/AOC. And there have been enough name analysts and commentators out there also in agreement to make me feel I'm not off base in finding her description apropos.
AOC continues to impress by not tiptoeing around delicately to avoid essential harsh truths. I wish more lefties had her cojones.
Very helpful thread post commentary by UR.
Yeah, the editorial I cited just above your comment
opens with this:
Further in the article, he observes that with respect to Auschwitz, at any rate, Hayden was mistaken:
Which is not something I have read before.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Women, men were separated when they arrived per cattle wagon
at the camps, their children were separated from the mothers. And one should may be aware of that not all the KZ = concentration camps at first had the same 'set-up'.
May be this link will help to get a picture of what it meant to be in a "Concentration camp" (= KZ = Konzentrationslager) during the end of wwII.
If that is propaganda or the well known images most elderly Germans have in their memory when speaking about the concentration camps is propaganda, I think some people should check in themselves to somewhere...
The fate of the children
Excerpted from another link that somehow I can't get to post here:
Photos: Children of Auschwitz share stories of survival
A KZ is what an average German thinks about when he/she hears the English term 'Concentration Camp' and that was all I was trying to say. This is specific and not comparable to what happened on most reeducation camps or forced labor camps or POW camps in other parts of the world.
You can look at the original photos taken from the KZ in Germany and compare them with the photos snoopydawg posted from the Japanese internment camps in the US. I would say the differences are visible and can't be denied.
https://www.euronews.com/live
AOC: her mouth often goes where her brain does not
She's right about concentration camps, a concept in which conflation with Death Camps has become almost inevitable.
But she also does air-headed things like propose a ridiculous Green New Deal which would ban airplanes, unless atomic powered ones, I suppose. AOC is a ticking time bomb for the Dems--actually one of many. How many Bathroom Bookers and non-Cherokee Liz Warrens have before people realize the current iteration of the Democrat Party are escapees from a looney bin?
I'm not feeling the hysterics about airplanes.
I'm seeing a serious plan for the future based on technologies that exist today. Serious people with something worthwhile to contribute to society will consider all solutions in their intended context rather than allow right-wing hysterics to do their thinking for them.
Carry a burning candle and share the light.
.
For the planet's sake, I hope you are correct.
But the quote, which constitutes the totality of your content, strikes me as pure propaganda. How, for instance, would replacement of fossil fuels guarantee full employment? What are the mechanisms by which the touted yellow-mixed-with-blue produces such an economic miracle. Give me some facts, please. In the meantime, those of you GND-believers, please reduce your carbon footprints so that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, et. al. can whiz around in their airplanes.
The link in my post above
...leads into the longer discussion. That is followed by links to the specific and underlying science and intelligence. I posted the link so that we could have an informed discussion.
Carry a burning candle and share the light.
.
A link too far
Heh. Well, there we are.
Carry on as before.
Carry a burning candle and share the light.
.
Okay, Pluto, I give up
I read your prime link but after reading the whole Intercept article, I failed to see the mention of "full employment". I know that as a lowly swamp dweller, the intricacies of GND financing are beyond the level of my understanding. But where, do tell, is the link to the magic full employment? All I saw were continuous references to trillions of dollars.
A different link, actually...
At this link in my post to you, above:
You're a good sport, Alligator Ed. The best sort of chap to think with.
Carry a burning candle and share the light.
.
Thanks, Pluto
I value your input. Your comments are most fitting, even if occasionally some differences of opinion occur.
@Pluto's Republic
Love it. My #1 grandson "Adams" was quoted in this article in the Intercept. Paying for climate change is his specialty. He works for Swedish Environmental Institute.
WE HAVE TO FINANCE A GLOBAL GREEN NEW DEAL — OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES
"The Green Climate Fund’s ability to handle that level of investment is another question. “The Green Climate is good at upscaling ideas, and it’s crucial that the approaches it is developing are closely linked to the principles of the Convention, but you’d have some practical issues to it handling that much funding,” said Adams of the Stockholm Environment Institute. “While the replenishment is currently ongoing, scaling it up 200 times to $2 trillion would be an enormous institutional challenge.” Indeed, the Green Climate Fund’s capacity to review projects is limited, and it can only distribute money to countries that apply with a robust project to pursue — not a quick or easy task.
Adams said industrialized countries should “do more and contribute more” toward the effort of climate finance, which is more important than a focus on the exact figures needed. “While $2 trillion might be in line with the scale of the climate challenge, it is so far beyond the $100 billion goal currently enshrined in the Paris Agreement and which contributor countries are struggling to meet, it’s hard to see that figure gaining much political traction,” he said."
He's speaking to the Green Climate Fund, a project that SEI is operating to "supplement" and not "supplant" climate change efforts in various applicant countries. I've read several articles on why we need to transition to the MMT. Paying for climate change would be one of them. IF the American public was ever lucky enough to get leadership that wasn't corporate and corrupt, they would demand health insurance and education before they'd give up a dime to anyone but themselves for anything.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
Your grandson, really?
That is impresssive! Important work.
Carry a burning candle and share the light.
.
Yes it is my grandson. He will be 26 in January.
Just got a full 3 year scholarship to the London School of Economics to get his PhD in his field. He's done some work for the UN, travels the globe working on climate projects, what a fantastic life he's had for someone so young. Long future ahead of him if the planet doesn't die.
Just have to brag a minute. He deserves it. Works his behind off to reach his goals.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
Glad, so glad to hear of this.
Made my spirit soar to know there was such a person amongst us. Thanks for producing him
my friend.
Carry a burning candle and share the light.
.
If AOC may have been right about concentration camps, so was
this article. It may have occasioned her remarks, but I am too tired to compare dates.
https://www.gq.com/story/us-border-concentration-camps
Did someone say
Atomic powered airplanes?!
We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg
Is Gaza a concentration camp?
Coming and going under guard surely doesn't count.
Did Israel round these people up and place them there and not allow them to leave FREELY OF THEIR OWN VOLITION from any side at all?
I'm asking an honest question. I don't know the answer. I think they are free to leave to the West into Egypt, but I don't know. If they were rounded up and forced to remain there, then yes, it is a concentration camp. If the CHOOSE not to leave unless it's into Israel which is forbidden, then "no" it does not meet the stated definition.
EDIT: I see your answer downthread. If I understand it correctly, you are saying Israel does not let them leave into Egypt either. That is a very foolish policy. Even England let Irish dissidents leave to go to the USA.
EDIT2: So why aren't the other countries demanding that their "Arab brothers" be allowed to leave and receive succor in their Arab countries? Because, like the DNC, they get more political mileage by leaving them suffer? Couldn't KSA say that they won't sell oil to any nation that doesn't take an allocation of refugees? BTW, where does Israel get oil? Does KSA's concern for their "brothers" bow before the mighty shekel?
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
If any other nation on earth attempted to do what
the Israelis are doing with Gaza, regime change would be immediate and ugly.
At least, that's my belief.
As to the motivations of any of the nations involved, or more particularly, the motivations of their elites, I can't even speculate. I'm sure there are others who would be happy to assert as fact what is actually unknowable, but I am not such a one.
All I know is that the whole thing is a horror show. Somewhere in Israel there is probably some elder statesman, one of the founders of the nation even, who looks at this, and reflects on Jefferson's contemplation: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." When the time of reckoning comes, the Israeli powers that be will not greet it with humility, they will greet it with fire and spite and hate, and they will take down as much of humanity with them as they can.
Or maybe not. Maybe in a 150 years, when nobody living has ever heard a horror story from the Holocaust from anybody who heard it from anybody who suffered it ... maybe by then the people who live there, exhausted by living in a country whose founding sentiments were fear and hate, will rethink the arrangement. Neither you, nor I, nor our children, nor even our grandchildren, will be there to see it play out.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Deleting my reply because I'd rather UR respond.
emigrate to where?
mind you, that's ultimately what the Israelis want. they can't force the Palestinians out of occupied territories, but they can "induce" them to leave -- only assuming there's somewhere that will take them, though to my knowledge for the most part there is not. regardless, it becomes a devil's bargain for the palestinians: abandon their claim to their homeland, or live in a blockaded, poverty-stricken war zone.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
I guess I'm missing the relevance of your question
and comment to the question whether what we are calling Palestine is a concentration camp or not, according to the definition you respect.
The answer to your geographical question, though, is "to various countries." Until relatively recently, emigration information was not available. Or so one of my sources said. But, I did post a couple of links to information about emigration by Palestinians on the thread about the Laos concentration camp. Here they are:
https://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Palestinians-reveal-emigration-statist... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_diaspora; https://hcef.org/106-report-on-christian-emigration-palestine/
There are more available, but, for my purposes in the other thread, those sufficed.
How the ability to emigrate fits in (or not) to the definition of "concentration camp" that you respect, I don't know. I have not looked for the definition yet, nor have I been able to read your OP yet. I'm more tired than I was a few hours ago and it now looks like sleep is not a possibility. Oh well.
I'm sorry I deleted my response to Voice. I didn't want to get in the way of your reply to Voice. I didn't realize that you had already replied to me. If I remembered what it said, I'd recreate it.
Gaza appears to be a very peculiar animal.
The relevance of my question is simply that it doesn't matter whether the Israelis will allow Gazans to emigrate, if nobody else will allow them to immigrate.
The current reality of emigration from Gaza remains mysterious. The links you provide are several years old, and they lump together Palestinians in Gaza and Palestinians in the West Bank, so they don't necessarily inform us about what's happening today. Generally, though, very few Palestinians historically emigrated from either Gaza or the West Bank. They're not for the most part welcome elsewhere, but also most of them prefer not to be driven from their homeland by the occupying Israelis who are slowly but surely piecemeal "settling" on the Palestinians' land.
Gaza certainly has some of the qualities of a concentration camp, in that most of the people are stuck in there, and are not allowed back out into the territory they inhabited before the Israelis fenced them into Gaza; and certainly they represent a particular class -- an ethnic class -- of individuals who are kept there for no reason other than that the Israelis won't let them back into Israel, which is where most of them once freely moved about.Some of them might enjoy the option to get up and get out altogether, but they probably wouldn't then enjoy the option to come back and visit their families. Moreover, they must pay an enormous price to leave: They must surrender their claim to a right to live there.
In conclusion, Gaza looks a lot like a concentration camp, but has some unique characteristics that make it something ... else. Perhaps something worse. Perhaps not. Certainly -- undeniably, really -- what the Israelis are doing to Gazans is a crime against humanity.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
The Terror season two will be about the Japanese American
Interment camps starring George Takei who actually lived in one when he was young. Here's the trailer for it.
Here's the write up on the show.
'The Terror: Infamy' brings creepy supernatural folklore to WW2
Season one was excellent if a bit confusing.
Here's George talking about when he was in the camp.
George Takei: At least during my internment, I was not taken from my parents
What life was like in the camps.
Scientists are concerned that conspiracy theories may die out if they keep coming true at the current alarming rate.
Thank you for this good discussion. I did bring up the
question of Palestinians. I fell into this subject after years of avoiding discussions on TOP. So on one hand I accidentally brought up a very fraught subject. But, OTOH it does seem to me the controlling of groups of people and their ability to or not to move about freely is a good portion of the basic definition.
This exchange encouraged me to look up what is going on. Wiki has an exhaustive history of Gaza. There are also entries on Palestinian Territories. The DNA portion of the discussion is interesting.
Maps on Google show various iterations of a map starting with 1948 to present. Many are subtitled in an inflammatory way. But there is some consistency of what has constituted Palestine and Israel over the last 70 years.
To me the whole situation is undeniably sad. There have been brief periods where some attempt at peaceful co existence was attempted, but short lived. It does appear there are more Palestinians living outside the Territories than within.
Other ethnic groups have had to leave their lands, e.g. Irish and Italians, usually because of poverty and promise of better life elsewhere. There is discussion of larger populations outside the countries of origin.
The use of Fort Sill for detaining children from South of the US border, is being protested by American Japanese. Fort Sill was one of the internment camps for Japanese during WWII. the water colors of the Japanese camp are 'awfully' beautiful.
Stubborn Twig
For the record, I was hesitant to publish this comment, because I do not want to cause fights here at C99. My feeling was at TOP and now here, that we can propose ideas, report research, discuss solutions without resorting to anger, labeling the writer of whatever thought on this subject. Self censoring unfortunately becomes an option.
I did however, go looking at all of this history on my own, now that I see the degree of concern these topics raise. So if anything good comes of all this, I personally, am more educated today.
And even sadder about the world we live in.
A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. Allegedly Greek, but more possibly fairly modern quote.
Consider helping by donating using the button in the upper left hand corner. Thank you.
Due to fatigue, I will have to return to read most of
your OP. However, my eye happened to fall on this.
But...
For purposes of this post, we can ignore the last sentence, which, unfortunately, would harken back to the incorrect position that concentration camps are so connected to Germany, and only Germany, that any use of the term references the Holocaust, etc. which is untrue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_and_internment_camps
Aside from the above definition, in every photo I've seen of inmates in a concentration camp, crowding has been evident. Also, one doesn't expect that nations that use concentration camps build commodious accommodations for that purpose.
However, I have not seen photos of the camps where the US "interned" US citizens of Japanese origin and descent. They may or may not have been exceptions in that respect. Those camps were built for the purpose of containing families, from the very elderly to newborns, no member of which anyone claimed had done anything wrong. Also, political considerations in the US were at least theoretically different in the US than in other nations with concentration camps.
In any event, facilities that are often inadequate for the numbers of inmates in any number of ways, including space, are a typical characteristic.
I posted a photo and a video of the
Japanese American camps above in case you missed them.
Ehh? The camps are facilities in which large numbers of people are being detained under overcrowded, inhumane conditions for political, nationalistic and ethnic reasons, in violation of national and international law. The temperature in buildings are kept very cold and the lights are never turned off. Children aren't sleeping in beds and they might just have one blanket and have to decide whether they place them on their bodies or on the floors. Sleep deprivation is considered torture and I've seen some reports saying that not only the lights are kept on all the time, but so is the music. This is considered torture.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are saying?
Scientists are concerned that conspiracy theories may die out if they keep coming true at the current alarming rate.
Thank you, snoopydawg. I did not question in the least
that the "internment" camps were concentration camps. I questioned only if they may not have been as crowded as other concentration camps. I didn't even say they were not as crowded as other concentration camps. I said I didn't know. However, I also speculated as to reasons that they may have been built differently than other kinds of concentration camps.
Sorry if I was unclear, but I was tired (and am more so now).
So, I don't know where that definition came from, but
I dispute it on a crucial point:
A concentration camp's purpose, again, is simply to concentrate in one place the members of a particular group, so as to be able control their activities. Often, an important part of that concentration and control is to separate them from another specific group, e.g., insurgent fighters. Even if the internees of some facility were housed in perfectly adequate conditions, it would still be a concentration camp. The reality, of course, is that they almost never are, for the simple reason that they have no recourse, no representation, no means whatever of petitioning for redress of grievances, and in general anybody with any authority will authorize the minimal amount of spending required to minimally carry out a particular mission that involves the wellbeing of other humans, nevermind humans towards which the governing authority has hostility. That, however, is a matter of the pragmatics of implementation, not the semantics of the label.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
"I can't believe we even have to argue about this."
update: I think I mixed up comments I made in Ban Nock's essay and this one.
me neiher, UntimelyRippd, and I feel put down, because obviously I was the user, that somebody, you were talking about.
(and did not teach about it and never will)
For whatever sophistication, intelligent knowledge and emotions you bring to the discussion, certainly it has nothing to do with "Christ".
Apparently it is not reasonable to mention, how other people feel what concentration camps mean to them and how they would use or not use the term.
To which I say, the "Lord" tells me otherwise.
Pfft ...
https://www.euronews.com/live
My remark about "Somebody" had nothing to do with you,
or with anything you wrote. It referred to a comment that Lookout had posted in ban nock's essay.
For that matter, I wasn't criticizing either Lookout or the source of the information -- to the contrary, I praised them as people who know what they're talking about.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
It's the difference between lower-case concentration camp and
Auschwitz. Those with an agenda to whitewash contemporary America will always point to Nazi Germany to absolve themselves of the charge that we, too, commit human rights violations and crimes against humanity.
Nazi Germany's Auschwitz justifies concentration camps when we do it, because the similarities get obscured by false or incomplete comparison. The US doesn't run concentration camps because we aren't Nazis, so this flawed argument goes. Because of this, we are virtuous, we try to convince ourselves. This self deceptive heuristic device has been the driving engine that continues to justify The Myth of American Exceptionalism many decades after it was laid bare.
Here's another example of ongoing justification and self deception by false comparison:
[See, http://www.unz.com/gdurocher/everything-madeleine-albright-doesnt-like-i... ]