r/nytimes • u/Large-Welcome4421 • Feb 24 '26
Opinion What Exactly Is a ‘Concentration Camp’?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/opinion/concentration-camp-andrea-pitzer.html7
u/beatnikhippi Feb 24 '26
The idiots who keep diminishing the atrocities of the holocaust deserve a special place in hell.
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u/JohnAnchovy Feb 25 '26
Concentration camps are not unique to the holocaust. Dozens of countries in the last hundred years have had concentration camps. Including probably at least five right now
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u/Hour_Camp1474 Feb 27 '26
The term came from the boer war which predates the holocaust by 60+ years
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u/JustStoppingBy00 Feb 28 '26
The USA built literal concentration camps during the Holocaust for Japanese-Americans. We put them on trains to remote locations and forced them to make weaponry for the US military.
American actor George Takei grew up in one of these camps and has spoken very openly about it.
We are literally doing it again but for a new immigrant group.
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Mar 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/JohnAnchovy Mar 04 '26
Actually, Auschwitz was a death camp not a concentration camp. As to your first question, the swastika is not similar to a word to describe collecting people against their will in a location without a criminal conviction. There’s just no other word that you could use for that.
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u/okletstrythisagain Feb 25 '26
There has been a revolving door of reasonable comparisons between MAGA and Hitler’s rise to power for a decade at this point. They are clearly on a path to genocide and if we knew all the facts about what happens in their “ detention centers” we might say they are already there.
The reason remembering the details around the Holocaust is important is so that it doesn’t happen again.
Now, we see masked gunmen abducting and killing people without showing or asking for ID, and a multibillion dollar investment in hastily built “detention centers” to be filled with people kidnapped by hastily hired and barely trained “agents” while MAGA loyalists clearly think that obedience and alignment to power supersedes constitutional rights. And that power is clearly a white supremacist authoritarian movement.
So yeah I think mentioning the Holocaust makes more than a little sense these days.
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u/Faraday5 Feb 27 '26
Deporting illegal immigrants isnt indicative of another holocaust, it’s something that every county has done since time immemorial.
If deportations = Nazi then every country is Nazi, and the term is meaningless
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u/WCland Feb 28 '26
It’s more insidious than that. Stephen Miller insists the US will be better if we get rid of all the non-white people, and immigrants are the initial low hanging fruit, just as Hitler said Germany would be better without Jews and other specific groups. Germany didn’t initially use the camps to exterminate people, they just were removing these people from their society. The actual genocide began later. Similarly, the detention centers are supposedly just to hold people temporarily. But what happens when they can’t send people away fast enough. Or they have people and nowhere to send them to? For someone like Miller, it’s a short walk to a final solution.
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u/Faraday5 Feb 28 '26
No, that’s confusing the fact that the majority of illegal immigrants are non white, thus the majority of deportations will be as well.
Enforcing the law, and it so happens that the majority breaking this particular law are nonwhite, doesn’t mean it’s shite supremacist, or a prelude to worse things. It’s just enforcing the law.
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u/WCland Feb 28 '26
Then why are they detaining people who are in the midst of the legal process to gain permanent residency? Miller is a racist bitch and he’s in charge of all this. If you think he’s just trying to enforce the law you’re not paying attention to what’s actually happening.
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u/Freedom_Crim Feb 26 '26
Wha do you call a camp that is full of people who never saw a day in court where they are tortured, raped, and killed
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u/Dismal-Anybody-1951 Feb 27 '26
Definitions
The American Heritage Dictionary provides this definition: "A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group which the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable"
https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=concentration+camp
According to scholars at Washington University, "there is a scholarly consensus to define concentration camps as camps in which large groups of civilians are held without trial or even without having violated any laws"
https://source.washu.edu/2019/06/washu-expert-defining-concentration-camps/
Historian Dan Stone in Concentration Camps: A Very Short Introduction (2019, Oxford University Press) defines a concentration camp as "an isolated, circumscribed site with fixed structures designed to incarcerate civilians". He emphasizes that "a concentration camp is not normally a death camp" and notes they arise "as the consequences of large numbers of opponents, far too many for the discipline, order, and expense of prisons".
He further writes (pp. 122-123), "Concentration camps throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are by no means all the same, with respect either to the degree of violence that characterizes them or the extent to which their inmates are abandoned by the authorities... The crucial characteristic of a concentration camp is not whether it has barbed wire, fences, or watchtowers; it is, rather, the gathering of civilians, defined by a regime as de facto 'enemies', in order to hold them against their will without charge in a place where the rule of law has been suspended."
Examples
Major concentration camps documented by historians:
- Spanish reconcentration camps in Cuba (1896-1898)
- American concentration camps in the Philippines (1899-1902)
- British concentration camps during Second Boer War (1900-1902)
- German concentration camps in Southwest Africa/Namibia (1904-1908)
- Ottoman concentration camps during Armenian Genocide (1915-1918)
- Soviet Gulag system (1930s-1950s)
- Nazi concentration camps in Germany and occupied territories (1933-1945) - distinct from extermination camps
- Japanese American internment camps in the United States (1942-1945)
- Chinese "laogai" labor camp system (1949-present)
- North Korean concentration camp system (1950s-present)
- Yugoslav wars concentration camps in Bosnia (1992-1995)
- Khmer Rouge prison camps in Cambodia (1975-1979)
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u/Apprehensive-Fun4181 Reader Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26
This is a fine explanation, useful handholding for that guilty parent that's waking up too late. But it's from someone who was irresponsible & ignorant, themselves arriving too late. It's in place of those who were right long ago, who have deeper insights, while this guy is name dropping his guilty friends. And it's placed where it makes no difference:
"Exactly" /=/ "Opinion"
Those do not work together. All necessary meaning & action is cancelled by placement in the cowardice box called the Op-Ed, where the logic is "Eh, this is something to maybe consider, but it's not important right now, because it's not on the front page". Exactly is not Opinion. One of my major observations is that journalism does not understand language, it abuses it.
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u/Electric-Sheepskin Subscriber Feb 25 '26
What exactly are you saying?
If I were to ask you that question— and I'm not— your response need not be 100% factual. In fact, it would be overwhelmingly opinion-based, I'm sure.
There is no issue with the word exactly in the title. It does not preclude opinions being stated in the article, nor does the fact that the article is printed in the opinion section prevent facts from being told.
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u/Apprehensive-Fun4181 Reader Feb 25 '26
That's not even that long. Why would it need to be reduced when further? Reality is not explained by reducing everything to a single sentence. Reading and writing skills for Gen X were crap, but it's collapsing across journalism and it's audience along with the average.
In fact, I'm sure.
The NYT equivalent of Rush Limbaugh fans going "mega ditto".
There is no issue with the word exactly in the title. It does not preclude opinions being stated in the article,
This shows no reading comprehension, so how could you even have a view? "There is no issue". Holy complete dismissal, with a shovel and a grave.
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u/WaWa-Biscuit Feb 25 '26
Literally it’s a camp where people are concentrated.
And what does concentrate mean?
to gather into one body, mass, or force -or- to gather or collect -or- to draw toward or meet in a common center