FDR's biggest mistake

[E-Dawg]

Not accepting Jewish refugees was likely worse than the Japanese internment camps in a consequential sense due to the number of lives that could have potentially been saved. But my vote here on a moral level still goes to the Japanese internment. It was actively persecuting and violating the rights of U.S. citizens whom the government had a responsibility to protect. As good as it would have been to accept more refugees, it was still simply not doing a good thing to people the U.S. government had no actual responsibility to protect, instead of actively doing a bad thing to U.S. citizens. In the same way, I would consider it morally worse to kill 5 family members in cold blood, than it would to not extend effort into saving 100 strangers who are dying due to the actions of others, even if the later action is worse consequentially.

[E-Dawg]

I hardly wish to be percived as defending Japanese internment, but I don't think it's pedantic to point out that American internment camps were not "concentration camps" in any sense of the word other than the most literal definition, which is completely meaningless these days.  Although they may technically have met that definition because they "concentrated" Japanese people in singular locations, the definition of "concentration camp" in a post-WW2 world has been fully replaced by camps meant as prisons for extreme abuse, forced labor and extermination.  It is trivial to argue that Japanese internment was a moral travesty without stooping to the dishonest emotional appeal of trying to draw a parallel between internment camps and Nazi concentration camps.

On a similar and perhaps even more controversial note, I wouldn't personally use the term "concentration camp" to describe the camps the British created during the second Boer war, since those camps were not intended for the intentional abuse, exploitation and extermination of their captives.  Although mass death, starvation, disease, and other appalling conditions were inflicted upon the imprisoned Boers, these were the results of abysmal management, neglect and underfunding, rather than an intentional campaign of genocide, such as that pursued by the Nazis.  In spite of this, though, the claim is often made that "concentration camps were first used by the British against the Boers" as though everything the Nazis did, the British did first.

Ultimately, Nazi concentration camps were unique in the respect that they were built explicitly for the purpose of exterminating the Jews and, other than temporarily detaining some Jews for the purposes of forced labor and rape, had no intent for their prisoners other than to kill them as fast as possible.  Since the term "concentration camp" now conveys the notion of such camps, it is not fair to other internment camps, no matter how deplorably evil they may have been, to cast the same aspersion upon them if they did not share that unique and emblematic characteristic. 

You made really good points here and I think you have shifted me off my idea that calling them internment camps is euphemistic. It probably was at the time, but after how the public imagination of "concentration camps" became defined as post-Holocaust, it probably is appropriate to be more specific than its technical definition when using that term. I removed what I said about this from my original response on this thread, as I don't think I stand by it anymore.