FDR's biggest mistake

[GeneralMacArthur]

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. 

[GeneralMacArthur]

If we'd rolled through Eastern Europe after WW2 and defeated the Soviet Union before they had the chance to develop nuclear weapons, we would have just ended up in a Cold War with China anyway.

It's ultimately for the best for humanity that the first two nations to find themselves in a nuclear showdown were both fairly pragmatic states led by level-headed and rational men, and quickly led to the precedent, still respected today, of nuclear weapons being only a deterrent to be used as a last-resort defensive measure.  Imagine if America had held nuclear hegemony for seventy years or so, only to be finally tested in its first nuclear showdown against an eschatological Iranian theocracy led by an ignorant and irrational ayatollah.  Perhaps with President Trump on our end of the telephone line.