The two terms are interchangeable. In the context of learning about WW2, swapping the wording seemed like an attempt to demonize the United States by linking the internment camps with the Nazi concentration camps.
> In the context of learning about WW2, swapping the wording seemed like an attempt to demonize the United States by linking the internment camps with the Nazi concentration camps.
Even worse (though not intentional), this minimizes what the Nazis did. Let's hope no one comes out of that class with the idea that Hitler was no worse than FDR.
> Perhaps your conflating death camps with concentration camps.
I would wager most Americans would not even be aware of that distinction. In popular discussion, they're the same thing.
So if school kids are being taught "the WW2 era American internment camps should be called American concentration camps," they're actually being mislead. The lesson can't be oblivious to popular understandings or less precise popular usage.
It's also worth noting that strategic obliviousness to the difference between popular and technical definitions is a time-tested and effective way to lie and mislead, because it lends itself to a fallacious but effective motte and bailey defense, which also exploits embarrassment over not wanting to seem ignorant and prejudice against people who appear ignorant to silence challenges.
>So if school kids are being taught "the WW2 era American internment camps should be called American concentration camps," they're actually being mislead.
Internment is for foreign nationals. The implication is there is a loyalty conflict (foreign citizenship) that requires them to be controlled. Concentration camps is the correct term.
If people are trying to gatekeep the term "concentration camp," a term that existed before WW2, they should stop.
>The lesson can't be oblivious to popular understandings or less precise popular usage.
No sane person equates the Japanese-American experience with the Holocaust so I'm not sure exactly who you think is actually trying to "lie and mislead." For decades, the vast majority of the community (led by the JACL) preferred to say nothing about it in the interest of integration.
The renaming is about stopping the use of anodyne terms ("relocation center" and "internment camp") that literally did, and do, nothing but make a few people feel better about the armed imprisonment of US citizens. Roosevelt, Truman, and several of their secretaries called them "concentration camps."
They are called Nazi concentration camps, if you google Nazi death camps the top results will all include the words "Concentration camps", that is what we have called them for years, whether technically accurate or not that is what they are called.
Your response should have been: "calling them internment camps is as misleading as equating them to Nazi 'Concentration camps'". But you didn't want to use the word concentration because you knew it would make your argument look silly.
> No, because people know what the term "internment camps" means in this context.
I disagree, because the topic is very intentionally glossed over. Most people couldn't tell you what internment means and will not associate it with anything bad.
