Any such weaselwording and equivocation done in that regard is being used to minimize and even excuse this deliberately harmful moral abomination of a policy.
If the term “concentration camp” makes you feel uneasy, good. Because the actuality of them on US soil being used to lock up and systematically abuse (and sometimes kill) children makes me furious beyond belief. It is the point where I feel an obligation to consider conservatives the enemy of the decent parts of civilization I hold dear.
BTW the term concentration camp began in the early 1900’s with the Boer War. Places to lock up swaths of a population in what is invariably inhumane conditions who are not combatants nor criminals.
Your criticism was on semantics here and it is used primarily to downplay and minimize the morally and legally repugnant nature of what is currently going on.
I agree on all levels. The children deserve better.
Those who could change the law about separation don’t do anything.
The employees are overwhelmed and grossly underpaid. They are also unscreened for violent tendencies. Beacuse of the work environment/low pay it’s hard to find qualified people. And it takes a long time.
We know what should be done, but the devil is in the details.
They tested the waters with the Guantanamo Bay detention camp 2002. Torturing muslims was A-OK (even when one or the other was innocent). We had 4 elections since. I don’t/didn’t see strong opposition - the exact opposite in fact: George W. Bush was re-elected 2004.
Now we have detention camps for children. Opposition? Meager. The current version (there were similar ones under Obama 2014 btw) started a year ago FFS.
Concentration camps are no death camps but they present another step in the escalation of methods and target groups.
Let’s hope we don’t get to the point were future generations of USians ask their grandmothers/-fathers: “What did you do when they put people into camps?”.
It’s also strongly associated with the internment camps run by the British during one of the Boer Wars: so much so, it’s often said that the British invented the concentration camp (though the term was apparently used earlier to describe similar Spanish camps in Cuba).
