Chebucto Regional Softball Club

@futurebird @AnarchoNinaAnalyzes

The Nazis didn't do that even after they'd built their death camps, for two reasons.

First, shooting people isn't actually that cheap. You still need to dispose of the bodies. Killing a load of people in the same place makes it easier put them in mass graves.

Second, if you shoot people in the streets then, as you say, the optics are bad, but that matters for two reasons. People will be more likely to resist if they know that the alternative is death, and people are more likely to help people they know will die without help. If you keep up the fiction that they're 'just' being relocated, you can persuade a large portion of the population to not help them and convince them that resisting to the point of being shot is not worth it.

If you want to systematically exterminate people, letting them know that's what you're doing makes it harder, and having to do it where they are is expensive. Some of this has probably changed since the 1930s, because efficiency is no longer a priority for the folks who are trying to extract as much money from the government as possible without the constraints of basic ethical behaviour.

But my point is not that this isn't a concentration camp, it's that calling it one is historically accurate but in a way that can cause confusion due to over 80 years of intentionally ambiguous terminology. The good guys have internment camps, the bad guys have concentration camps.

@futurebird @AnarchoNinaAnalyzes

I suspect some of the mainstream confusion comes from the fact that the Nazis didn't have a strict difference between concentration camps (where they put people they didn't like without any kind of due process, and didn't care if they died) and death camps (where they put people they didn't like with the express intent of killing them all, in the most efficient way possible). Some of their camps were set up as the former but became the latter. And reporting, both academic and news-focused, often refers to both as 'concentration camps', which led to confusion about exactly what a concentration camp was.

For this reason, historians often avoid the term 'concentration camp' for things that match the wider definition (places where people were sent without due process and often died as a result of overwork, poor nutrition, poor sanitation, abuse by guards, and so on). If you use the phrase, people tend to conflate it with the death camps (where people died as a result of being pushed into gas chambers or other mass-murder machines).

Part of this is probably linked to colonialism. A lot of the colonial powers used concentration camps before the Nazis and wanted a clear distinction between their human rights abuses and systemic genocide.

If you say 'concentration camp', a lot of people hear 'death camp' and will note that there are no gas chambers, no firing squads, and so on. I don't know a solution to this that doesn't involve teaching Americans about history, which is typically not an easy thing to do.

@futurebird

Everything I know about Staten Island, I learned from reading The City We Became. Is it really that bad?