It was seventy years ago today that America sent Japanese Americans to our own concentration camps.

[CreekDog]

86. I keep trying to explain the difference between these camps as they explained them to us

This is not to take away any of the severity of what was going on. But some camps were used to essentially imprison and work people to death (it was quite an industry) and some camps were used to simply kill.

Dachau itself wasn't used as an extermination camp. They had a crematorium and a gas chamber that wasn't used to kill people --according to the museum there. I think they sent those to be killed elsewhere.

What I find frustrating is that you cannot accept that a place like Manzanar was a concentration camp, even though it was not the grisly place that Dachau was or a death camp like Auswicz. From wikipedia: 25,613 prisoners are believed to have died in the camp and almost another 10,000 in its subcamps.

If you're going to be pedantic about this, you should at least be right, which you aren't. Japanese Americans were put into concentration camps, yes. Though the outcome was better than at a place like Dachau, it was still a concentration camp, serving some similar purposes and fitting the definition of one.

The holocaust is the most monstrous thing I can think of. Saying the Japanese Americans were interned in concentration camps does not minimize that.

Make sense?