General Discussion

Amaryllis

(11,164 posts) Sun Feb 22, 2026, 12:00 PM Yesterday

What counts as a "concentration camp"? Well worth a read.

https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/what-counts-as-a-concentration-camp

What counts as a "concentration camp"?
Links to the podcast, along with some thoughts on and for Jake Tapper.
Degenerate Art
Andrea Pitzer
February 13, 2026

In this week’s podcast episode, I talk about ICE’s plan to double immigrant detention in the U.S. by acquiring warehouses and turning them into camps, how that accelerates the current concentration camp system, and ways to disrupt that plan. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the linked material or the written post from Tuesday, you can read it here.
(A YouTube screenshot of Jake Tapper interviewing the Moon Palace bookstore owner in Minneapolis on CNN.)

Today, I want to write about people’s frequent discomfort around using the words “concentration camp." Avoiding the term often rises out of an honorable impulse yet can have terrible consequences. I hope to come at the question from a different angle than the usual conversations, which sometimes fail to explore the issue in a deeper way.

Why look at this issue now? Yesterday, I saw a video from January, in which a bookstore owner in Minneapolis was interviewed by Jake Tapper on CNN. Asked about the planned walkouts and shutdowns that day, the bookstore owner dove right into the crisis.

“Well Jake, we can’t do business as usual right now anyway,” he says, “because our city has been invaded by masked gunmen kidnapping family members and friends and neighbors of ours, uh, to send them to concentration camps.” The bookstore owner talks about other businesses whose staff or customers are afraid to be out on the street.

Then Tapper jumps in. “Just one note. I’m not going, I’m not gonna defend ICE,” he says, “but, I’m, I’m not a big fan of people using the words ‘concentration camp’ to, to describe detention camps. It has a very specific meaning in terms of—.”

The bookstore owner doesn’t wait for him to finish, but interrupts:
Much more at link and well worth a read

4 replies

= new reply since forum marked as read

Highlight:

What counts as a "concentration camp"? Well worth a read. (Original Post) Amaryllis Yesterday OP

Well, Jake... Kid Berwyn Yesterday #1

this is one of those "16 isn't really a pedophile" questions rampartd Yesterday #3

The ones FDR used in WWII for Japanese Americans come to mind MichMan Yesterday #2

Let's not sanitize it with pretty words! JustKay Yesterday #4

Kid Berwyn

(23,906 posts)

1. Well, Jake...

Reply to Amaryllis (Original post)

Sun Feb 22, 2026, 12:18 PM

Yesterday

From OP article…

“Well they take people to—I understand that—but they take people to Fort Snelling here which literally was built as a concentration camp, and Alligator Alcatraz, which I think we can all agree is a concentration camp. I’m not saying they're Dachau. I'm not saying they're putting people in ovens yet, but these are concentration camps.”

Big snip…

Of course historians remembered; reality didn’t vanish. But with the general failure to remember that Auschwitz was literally part of the Nazi concentration camp system before the extermination camp at Birkenau was ever built, people lost sight of how such evil found its way into the world.

Those early Nazi camps made the extermination camps possible. They existed for years, as the cruelties inside them expanded, providing the bureaucratic systems, personnel, and tactics that led to the Holocaust. And those pre-death-camp German camps were in many respects very similar to other concentration camp systems that have existed around the world on several continents.

They were also very similar to the camps the U.S. is currently filling and building. Seamus Culleton, an Irishman detained for months in Camp East Montana in Texas, describes lack of food and violence, calling the facility a “modern day concentration camp.” Three deaths have taken place there so far—one already ruled a homicide—and the ACLU has reported sexual assaults and beatings.

The conditions of camp detention will always worsen over the long haul, and the conditions in U.S. camps are already terrifying. But the key thing to look at is less the starting conditions in them than how individuals arrive there.

Continues…

https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/what-counts-as-a-concentration-camp