[flagged]
Edit: you've been posting a lot of flamewar comments lately (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18620146), and we've already asked you not to. If you keep doing it, we're going to ban your account.
> a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution.
The most famous usage was by Germans and is heavily associated with extermination, but the British just wish to deprive the Boer’s of support and to put pressure on them into surrendering. Hence the term “concentration” rather than “extermination”. Many Boers did wind up dying due to inadequate sanitation and food, but the point wasn’t to kill them.
Whether the camps in Xinjiang are concentration camps or not remains to be seen. Definitely some of the awful work camps in China in the 70s met the threshold.
The debate on the word is also well known, from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment:
> As a result, some[who?] say that today the term "concentration camp" may be conflated with the concept of "extermination camp" and historians debate whether the term "concentration camp" or "internment camp" should be used in order to describe other examples of civilian internment, such as the United States government's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II,[4] the Australian government's immigrant detention facilities,[25][26] and South Korea's detention camps for "undesirables" in the 1970s and 1980s.[27]
Yes they are.
> The word concentration camp has a specific connotation with the extermination camps build to eliminate (aka kill) Jews and other undesirable under Nazi Germany.
Those are the most well-known concentration camps to many people today, but the term is older, going back to Spanish practice in Cuba in the Ten Years War and popularized for British camps in the Boer War.
Extermination camps are a distinct subcategory of concentration camp, and have a unique name specifically because their nature is not fully captured by “concentration camp” (which in their case was—somewhat amazingly for a title that even before that was typically associated with things that by modern standards would be grave human rights abuses—was actually a consciously used as a deceptive euphemism.)
> To conflate the two here like many people conflate Japanese internment camps with “concentration camps” is so off the scale it borders on misleading.
“internment camp” is a synonym for “concentration camp” and those operated by the US for the Japanese were exactly concentration camps in the usual sense of the word.