After a couple news articles suggested it, Melissa McEwan of Shakesville got out the encyclopedia to check the definition of “concentration camp.” It is a term we associate with the Nazi regime in Germany, though it also applies to the internment of Japanese in America during WWII. Some of the key phrases of the definition from Encyclopedia Britannica:
* The people in the camps are there for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment.
* They are there usually be executive decree or military order.
*They are there because they are of a particular ethnic or political group rather than because of what they did as individuals.
* They are usually there without indictment or fair trial.
* Concentration camps are not prisons holding people lawfully convicted of crimes. They do not hold captured military personnel. They are not refugee camps for the temporary holding of displaced people.
McEwan adds that in a refugee camp they are residents – they can come and go as they please.
McEwan mentions all this because of three recent articles.
First, Jonathan Katz of the L.A. Times wrote an article saying the immigrant detention centers are concentration camps and we should call them that.
Second, W.J. Hennington of Time wrote that the nasty guy administration is holding migrant children at a former Japanese internment camp.
Third, Robert Moore at Texas Monthly describes an area where Border Patrol is detaining migrants near El Paso as a “human dog pound.” At least 100 migrants are detained outdoors in the 100F Texas heat with minimal makeshift shelter.
Yes, concentration camps. Here. In America.
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