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Comment by _ylmx | Hacker News Reader

> concentration camps

This does nothing, but underplay the significance of the holocaust.

But they are literal concentration camps. Concentration camps have existed before and after the Nazis; that's not some idea they invented. The horror of the Holocaust is focused around the death camps more than the concentration camps.

Concentration camps were used very effectively by the British against the Boers (farmers) in South Africa at the turn of the previous century. They killed more women and children than men on both sides [1].

During the first World War, they renamed New Berlin to Kitchener here in Canada. They may as well have named it Hitlerville. The scale of evil wasn't as horrible as the Holocaust, but it was pretty damn awful. It's true what they say, that the victors write the history books. So few people know about that story.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_concentration_camps

The phrase "concentration camp" in the English language no longer has any literal meaning that is simply composed of "concentration" and "camp". It refers strictly to the WWII Nazi concentration camps.

Anyone using the phrase and then insisting that the literal meaning was intended is thoroughly disingenuous. That speaker or writer is deliberately using the loaded term in order to troll the intended audience with a crystal clear Nazi reference.

Ideologically there is no difference to previous uses of the term. Historically it refers to concentration camps of the second Boer War where over 150,000 people died in camps which concentrated specific settler populations in a manner that made the thinning of their population a foregone conclusion.

If it evokes the use of the concept you dislike, rethink your moral stance on it. Not the phrasing of the concept.

It doesn't evoke; it denotes. Like "rain" refers to "water falling from the sky". Not a moral stance whatsoever.

The word for non-murderous concentration camps is "internment".

Not only is that historically incorrect, but it's also a confession of a tolerance for detaining a specific population on ideological, non-criminal pretenses.

"It's different when we do it."

Is that so? So by this amazing reasoning, we should refer to both types of camps using the same term. Since the correct term is evidently "extermination camps" (see surrounding thread), that's what they should be called.

"Historically incorrect" is just a way of saying "presently correct". For instance "sensibility" is not a historically correct way of referring to a rational disposition. Historically, it meant what we today call "sensitivity".

Fuck historically correct; I live today, not in history.

I'm totally confused by your argument here. The simple fact that myself and others posting here don't treat "concentration camps" totally equivalent to "Nazi extermination camps" seems like ipso facto proof that this is not a disingenuous distinction.

The Nazi camps pertaining to the Holocaust are correctly called extermination camps, not concentration camps. Although e.g. Auschwitz is commonly referred to as a concentration camp, this is a euphemism, and the term is not considered correct by anyone writing seriously about the Holocaust.

That may be so, but you're referring to pedants and historians, not common usage.

It is not a euphimism; everyone knows that it refers to starvation and horrific murder and aren't using that word for the sake of masking this.

The term is a euphemism because "concentration camp" just means a camp with a high density of people. The fact that people know what they're really referring to doesn't mean that the term isn't a euphemism. After all, the whole point of a euphemism is that people know what is really meant.

It's quite well known that "concentration camp" is not the correct term for the Nazi extermination camps.

Just like it's quite well known that "hacker" isn't the correct term for someone who breaks into computers.

All that remains is the small detail of convincing the public at large that they are using the word wrong.

As I said, it's pretty well known that Auschwitz and the other camps like it were extermination camps, not (merely) concentration camps. I mean, I'd count myself a member of the "public at large" in this context (I'm certainly no expert on the Holocaust or the surrounding history), and yet I still know what the correct term is. Anyone who has so much as looked at the Wikipedia article for Auschwitz or one of the other camps will know the correct term.

Technically true. Also technically Holocaust could refer to the Armenian Genocide, or the USSR genocide against Ukraine or whatever other catastrophe and yet it doesn't and comparing what is absolutely aweful to one of the worst genocides in human history shouldn't win you any points.

Yes, but the word was clearly chosen in an attempt to liken them to Nazi concentration camps, which they have little in common with, besides being places where people are temporarily kept.

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