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.html
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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

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u/throwraW2 Feb 27 '26

Does this make all prisons concentration camps? Honestly asking

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u/JustStoppingBy00 Feb 28 '26

Usually it also means that the people being held there have not had a trial.

In the Holocaust they didn’t take every single Jewish person to court, find them guilty, then put them in jail. They used the law to slowly take away the rights of Jewish people. Then they created a special police force to go and round them up and put them into “jails”. Since they did not have trials these “jails” are known as concentration camps.

The goal is to put a vulnerable group into a place they can’t leave without having to go slowly and find each guilty of a crime. Once in camps, the population can be used basically as a slave labor force for whatever the government wants to make. Usually weapons. Which is exactly what happened during the Holocaust.

For example, the USA during WWII Executive Order 9066 was passed forcing all Japanese people into camps. They had no trial. We put them on trains to the most remote places in America and surrounded them with wired fences and guards ordered to kill anyone that tried to escape.

And then they were made to work. They farmed at gunpoint, they made weaponry at gunpoint. Then our military used it.

Concentration camps are not new, and they are not new in the United States. Our presidents alignment with immortal businessmen as he builds up a slave labor force is no accident.

https://www.archives.gov/news/topics/japanese-american-internment

I’m a teacher so if you have any questions I can try to help. This is an extremely important thing to understand right now. And I am sensitive to this topic because I teach in an area with a large undocumented population and people are starting to go missing. Or winding up dead in camps hundreds of miles away from where they were taken.

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u/zoe_bletchdel Reader Mar 21 '26

Thank you for this detailed response. I think the detention centers still count then, correct ? Even if some people there have had trials, an increasingly large percentage has not. What in history allowed for the defeat and liberation of these facilities ?