General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: It was seventy years ago today that America sent Japanese Americans to our own concentration camps. [View all]Confusious
(8,317 posts)Unless you want to correct me and tell me how it was as bad as a German "concentration camp," seems extremely arrogant of you to suggest I don't.
Were there gas chambers?
Were there ovens for cremation?
Were there mass graves?
Were there prisoners starving to death?
Unless you want to make the case, the usual word is "interment camp." That's what all the history books and papers I've read in the past 25 years have used.
"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.[106] For this reason, National Park Service officials have attempted to avoid the term.[103] 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.[107] 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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment#Conditions_in_the_camps