The Cherokee are also familiar with this sort of camp, having been herded by the thousands into many of them in Georgia and Tennessee just prior to America’s first great experiment in “ethnic cleansing,” the Trail of Tears.

Yes, I think you playing it a little loose when you say – hey the concentration camp term was created during the Boer War therefore its use for both the German lagers and for the camps the US hamefully put Japenese citizens in is accurate. Why not the Soviet Gulags? The point is, does it make a proper distinction so that people understand the differences? Let’s add an example – was Andersonville just a POW camp during the Civil War? Or a death camp like what the Nazis put Russian soldiers in to starve them to death? The American Jewish GIs captured and sent to Belsen were in a death camp, a work camp, or a POW camp? Yes, the distinction matters. Everytime I hear some idiot say even Hitler supported the Geneva conventions I want to puke.

Looking for disctinctions in terms is not to belittle anyhting. “Ethnic cleansing” as opposed to “genocide” mean very different things. I think language matters and when you try to say everything is equal, and start emliminating language, it sounds to me like a call to laziness. Let;s not be lazy. Let’s be better.

while it’s a very dark episode in US history, thankfully it failed. But the scars remain.

So bringing back concentration/internment camps also gives these sickos an extra rush in mocking and undoing efforts of only a few years ago to elevate consciousness so that this would never again happen on American soil …

A visit to the Pipestone Natl. Monument in MN will also tell the tale of the same kind of school. There, the kids were stolen from their parents, taken to the school, de-loused, had their hair cut short (a real desecration for Native Americans) and had english beaten into them as well. I can’t tell you how somber and shameful it felt to see the pictures and read the stories.

I wonder if our country has ever been what we like to think it is. Having trouble finding the ideals we keep trying to export to more “backwards” countries.

These camps are, of course, part of the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt and Earl Warren. The only difficulty I have with calling them “concentration camps” is that that term has come to be associated with camps where people were tortured and murdered by the millions, subjected to ghastly medical experimentation, and literally worked to death. The use of such a loaded term to describe FDR’s own abomination seems a bit farfetched. They were awful in their own right–why import a terminology that seems deliberately calculated to mislead?

The author addressed that very question in the previous post, one thread back.