Cable news people call them “prison camps” or “Trump prison camps,” but look in any dictionary: prisons are where people convicted of crimes are held. As Merriam-Webster notes, a prison is:
“[A]n institution for confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes.”
But what do you call a place where people who’ve committed no criminal offense (immigration violations are civil, not criminal, infractions)? The fine dictionary people at Merriam-Webster note the proper term is “concentration camp”:
“[A] place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.”
Curious as to why Common Dreams and others aren’t using the term “Internment Camp”? I’m not trying to whitewash the present, but it does seem to me that a large number of people might feel that term “concentration camp” is a dramatization of the current situation. “Internment” is also awful but less loaded, and might get more people on board and thinking about this seriously. Thoughts?
Edit: Upon looking it up, I have a few thoughts. One, some say “internment camp” was white washing in the first place. Two, “internment camps” might specifically refer to U.S. Army run concentration camps during wartime. I’m still not really clear, though, and would love some additional insight.
Upvoting simply because I love to see people challenging their own opinions
Multiple reasons.
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As is always the case when fascism, authoritarianism or similar takes over, things happen slowly, and there’s a reason for that: humans notice fast changes very quickly, but not necessarily slow changes. They didn’t start building these concentration camps yesterday. This has been going on for a while.
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Because at least right now, there isn’t the stated goal of keeping people there, but just keeping them there in the intermediate term. We all know where this is going, but it does make it a little more difficult to use that term.
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The Trump administration has a habit of suing the press. This has already had a chilling effect. See CBS, BBC, and I think ABC as well. They have decided that it does not make sense financially to fight it, and there are probably a number of lawyers much smarter than I who know what they’re talking about. And since most major news sources are profit-driven and public broadcasting is chronically underfunded, that’s all you get.
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The word “concentration camp” often gets confused with the word “death camp”, and we have failed to properly differentiate. How often do you hear about the Nazi concentration camps where they killed people on an industrial scale. No, those were death camps (they had concentration camps as well). But the term has been used wrongly for so long that when people hear “concentration camp”, they think “death camp”, so calling it a concentration camp, while correct, could make a fair number of people think the wrong thing - as of now, there is no systematic extermination, and I hope we get a handle on this before it gets that far.
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Anyone else just really impressed by how well “the boys” tv show predicted all this?
No, because I can’t shake the feeling that I’ll be watching a documentary in a decade or two and learn that these Nazis took multiple ideas from works of fiction meant to be a warning.
This was all predicted in The Newsroom 14 years ago. That was the start of media enshittification.
It was also predicted in House of Cards, where social media could be used to influence any opinion in the USA.
The next phase started for sure. Media enshitification happened before we even had a word for it.
I’ve been calling them concentration camps the whole time. It’s obvious that’s what they are. Fuck the media outlets.
Not only are people dying inside the camps (as the article correctly points out), but after they are deported as well:
Or they are offloaded to prisons that are notorios for human rights abuses:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/08/americas/el-salvador-cecot-prison-deportees
Because America is the Greatest Country in the World, and the beacon of freedom and democracy. A beacon of freedom and democracy wouldn’t build vast concentration camps, therefore we cannot acknowledge that that’s what America is doing. We need to keep acting like Trump’s biggest failings are liking fast food and stumbling over words.
and because big money controls the news agencies.
and Americans live a month of horrors every fucking week under Trump, both last term and this one.
and average americans are too poor to deal with their own personal healthcare needs
Or to buy food.
Who are facing very real possibility of being murdered in the streets for daring to speak up, and even if they dont get murdered today, its always been openly bragged about that facial recognition is being used to build vast databases of anyone who dare protest der fuhrer so that they might have to face the horror of some time, months down the road, gestapo thugs could kick in their door and send their underage daughters to oligarchal service camps while the rest of them are, at best, dumped in hostile countries or at worst disappeared and executed.
and despite all that, people are still fighting in the streets. People are still confronting this. They are doing everything they can, while NOT giving trump the excuse he needs to masturbate furiously over his war president fantasies by triggering civil war 2 and ordering the military in to purge everyone who doesnt share his every opinion.
But you keep sitting there, serving your masters agenda of trying to paint the opposition as lazy, and feckless, who are doing nothing more than making fun of what he eats.
It easily reveals who you really are, and what your real goals are.
Yeah, 100%. Just one little clarification. Once they are done with whatever they are going to do to those brown people, they aren’t going to close the camps and shrink their wealthy agency, they’ll just alter their mission…
Which will be slavery. The 13th Amendment allows prisoners to be used as slave labor, and PeeWee Himmler and Trump can’t wait to get into the slavery business. Imagine how supercharged the economy and the stock market will be, when 90% of the labor force can be replaced by AI, Robotics, or Federally-managed Slave Labor?
Except this time, they aren’t going to racist about it, the Federal government will be an equal opportunity enslaver. Anybody is welcome, all you have to do is be a political critic, or a Democrat, or even a MAGA, if you aren’t rich enough. The only ones who will be safe from enslavement will be Sociopathic Oligarchs and their Nepo-Babies.
Here we thought the Mexicans, et al, were going to take all our jobs, when in reality it will be Official Government Slaves.
They’ve literally openly talked about, for over a year, about wanting to send all the sick and mentally ill to “work farms”
and what are they trying desperately to say is a mental illness? Opposing trump.
We need to keep acting like Trump’s biggest failings are liking fast food and stumbling over words.
Please identify a single person who does this.
No one.
But him, and his masters, have never given care or concern to truth… Only to what serves their purpose.
Cause he has 70 million supporters. And the army. And ICE. And has captured federal institutions.
Because the people in charge of declaring national emergencies are the ones building the concentration camps
Because apparently only leftists - socialists, communists, anarchists, and even some liberalists, have been calling them that. And remember, we are Enemies of the State.
Because everything is on fire all at once, people are scared/exhausted/lack any actual leadership (Fuck you Schumer) and when that happens people hunker down, until something so atrocious happens it breaks through the fog of fear.
Couple that with every major media company being owned by facist Trump Cronies and well… yea
And before some asshat starts going “Then why don’t you do something?” Look out your front door. You willing to go murder your neighbor right now? Because that’s what it’ll come to, a massive civil war. So yeah, nothing is happening yet but the rumbles are there and we are all fucked no matter the outcome.
Saw this on here a little while ago
https://drstaceypatton1865.substack.com/p/the-slow-release-of-the-epstein-files
Seems relevant to the interests of a bot such as yourself
Quite so. Everyone lambasting Americans right now seems to forget it was the rest of the world that had to come save the Germans from the Nazis.
Statistically, it was the communists that saved Germany. Soviet and Chinese efforts in WW2 dwarfed any other contributions.
Edit: If you’re downvoting me, did you forget that the USSR lost 25 million lives fighting the Nazis, while the US lost only 100,000?
Would you care to explain the class some of the things that caused Soviet casualties to be so high?
People are probably downvoting you because “lives lost” is not an effective metric for contribution in a war.
Also, let’s be clear, “the US lost only 100,000” is only true if you are just counting mainlanders. Estimates of deaths in the Philippines, who were American, top 1,000,000.
If you are going to incorporate all the SSRs in the USSR casualty counts, you should be incorporating the Dutch east indies for the Netherlands, India for the UK, French Indochina for France, etc.
I think thats probably not a good thing to do, cause if you are a citizen of a current/former colony, you probably dont feel like your colonial masters should get to “claim” your death. This also holds for all the non-russian SSRs and internal minority groups in Russia, though.
Plus, the numbers for the USSR are sadly inflated because Stalin didn’t care how many of the soldiers died. They were completely disposable and treated as such.
Also, their methodology was sloppy and completely relies on inaccurate military records. They counted POWd as KIA, even after they returned.
I would extend this to say the Soviets contributed monumentally, after Operation Barbarossa started, to the eventual downfall of National Socialism in Germany…but I hesitate to say they saved Germany…based on what East Germany looked like following the war. USSR’s behavior prior to Operation Barbarossa was pretty despicable and highly enabling of Germany’s regional proliferation. But, the western democracies should have been much more open to early communications and treaties/pacts with USSR, so to some extent Stalin was just adapting to the geopolitical reality of his position on the continent.
Of all the nazis that died in combat, something like 4/5 of them were at the hands of the Russians.
The russians accused the americans of slow walking their involvement to maximize the pain on them, and accusation that may not be entirely without merit.
But the Russians had more men under arms at one point than any country every, the largest standing army every, last I recall, and at one point were fighting on 17 different fronts although I don’t know when that was exactly.
I’m pretty sure “rest of the world” includes the communists…
That is a wild take. Not saying you’re completely off target, but that framing is just wild.
In terms of overall effort, sacrifice, and suffering, they’re spot-on.
Although much of that monumental sacrifice is probably also due to the view of disposability, as well as poor coordination and support, USSR leadership had toward its troops. Plus Germany basically confiscated the fertile farming land upon which so many USSR citizens depended to avoid deadly famine.
Woe to the poor USSR soldier who became a POW under Germany. Their chance of survival in that state was very low, and their opportunity to be the subject of a cruel medical experiment was very high.
lack any actual leadership
people lack freedom not leadership
Because everything is on fire all at once, people are scared/exhausted/lack any actual leadership (Fuck you Schumer)
According to him, the people are “aroused”.
Wtaf? Please tell me this is some ai bullshit….
Fucking aroused? That’s insanity. We aren’t aroused, you fuck face, we’re pissed. And some of it is dorected at you, Chuck!
He’s meaning “aroused” in the dictionary sense, aka “Brought to a state of great psychological tension.”
However, it’d be nice if the dude was at least aware enough to know that it sounds very much like he’s downplaying the situation for one, and secondly, even though some Americans might know the dictionary definition of “aroused” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s about someone that has a boner…many do not.
I mean, exactly. Like I get that he doesn’t mean sexually or having a boner but I would have the same complaint if he used maybe… excited. It’s just a horrible word choice and to your point, does not meet the moment. Downplaying the fascist takeover, ice goons murdering and kidnapping people.
massive civil war.
We are decades from a “civil war” Tim Pool.
Yes, the problem is the media landscape is corrupted that the average liberal American thinks there’s some bad business going on with ICE but knows nothing about the world past that, because most people are just working 6 - 7 days a week and get their news from Facebook for a half hour every week. The exit polling from 2024 confirms all of this.
The thing we do is we build community and instead of thoughts of “murdering your neighbor” (where the FUCK did that come from) let’s start thinking about TALKING to our neighbors and getting to know them again so that we rebuild the thing that oligarchy is actively trying to take away from us, which is social involvement and community and locality.
The USA isn’t like the Philippines or Turkey or other countries that have been deposed by dictators or foreign powers, we still are made of 50 individual states and those states have a LOT of power. We need to stop looking at the Federal Government like a monolithic empire that can’t be defeated, YOU PAY THEIR BILLS.
Go on https://www.progressivevictory.win/ and find local progressive leaders who you can help support and we kick the legs out of the system that has empowered fascists. They helped get the recent wave of socialists and progressives like Mamdani and Katie Wilson elected among many others.
I hate your whole comment, it’s bad and wrong and gives people no hope of better outcomes.
Wow your entire post is bullshit. And Tim Pool? Fuck you.
You think our dollars now control the Govt? We have a group of billionaires that are able to use their vast wealth to destabilize democracy across the globe. And while doing it they are getting richer. they can spend more in a month than any dedicated group n the US and not even blink.
People like you have never picked up a damn history book. You don’t know anything about sociology or psychology. You point to some random website like we aren’t already at the point where people are getting fucking taken in the middle of the streets, where every fucking control and law is broken by the current administration and no one with power will do anything about it.
You think having a protest is gonna fix things. You think donating an extra 10 bucks to AOC is gonna be the thing stopping this train to hell. Read a fucking history book man. They’ve already said the next step is to have ICE at the voting booth, which is so fucking illegal and spelled as such in great detail that even saying that would trigger impeachment investigations. Instead all we hear are “OOOOH we’ll have a national walk out! That’ll teach them to overthrow democracy!”
Jesus fucking Christ, wake the fuck up
I’m actually delighted my pushback made you fly off the handle and spit incoherencies and ignore my points, it tells me I hit the right buttons.
If my efforts at reminding people that we still have a future, hope and community and ways to fight oppression made you this mad, then it tells me all I need to know about what you’re doing here and why. Have a good one.
We need to drop “our” traditional support for a strong federal government, and instead embrace states’ rights. Because the 10th amendment has been abused our entire lives, and there are a lot of people on the right that agree, even if their leaders are all in bad faith about it.
Every power not delegated to the feds in the constitution is reserved for the States. The document basically just gives them power over the common currency, relations with other countries, and regulating interstate commerce. Even so they are prevented from inhibiting the free movement of people and goods between states.
How they affect most of the things they’ve ursurped is with money, after the income tax was established and kept, in ww1, they had too much money, and they withhold it from programs/sharing/spending with a state unless they do what they want. That’s how they lowered the bac driving level, upped the driving age. That’s a good share of how the drug laws are promulgated with things like workers comp being cheated from anyone with any weed in their system, etc.
We need strong leaders all around, not the least in the States, seeing as our leaders are weak, we need leaders outside of government too, about now, and we need to reclaim a lot of the powers ursurped by the feds, that fully intend on fixing elections in our states.
Even maga supporters should realize after they fix elections those politicians won’t need them anymore, and become even less responsive to them. There is no one party state that remains responsive to their base after they achieve absolute power.
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And it gets all your white tshirts super white!
because at the national level it’s not an emergency. it’s the plan all along.
it’s a human emergency and the leaders need nuremberg trials.
but from all sides of the aisles it’s not at all an emergency to them.
Yeah, the leader of the GOP may have shit his pants on national television, but it’s the elected democrats that are shitting the bed.
We have outliers like AOC and Bernie constantly screaming into the void, but the ruling majority are treating this entire government takeover like a brain-dead parent who thinks their gay son is just going through “a phase” .
The grand majority of the democratic party desperately needs to be replaced with people who actually care about the people, and who actually see and acknowledge the problems we are facing as a nation.
Controlled opposition. They think the republican’s extremism is just performative and they are playing bad cop to the d good cop still, despite the fact the administration is clearly playing hitler.
If democrats were involved in systematic voter fraud for decades, they would have to be punished. It doesn’t matter what Republican power brokers, ivy league suits they went to school with when they both joined those secret clubs whereby they hire business and government leaders almost exclusively, have assured them, that they won’t persecute them. They would have to be punished. And they will be, the republicans are already gearing up for it, fixing elections, and projecting that on the democrats, and using the awesome power of the state to suppress the opposition.
One would’ve thought the democrats after 2020 at the latest would’ve realized that to save the republic, and themselves, they would’ve needed to change strategy, to not be good cop whose mission is crushing popular reform for the rich, but rather to offer popular reform, to win and set up a political machine that would dominate and prevent the republicans from getting in running as reform, and fixing the system.
I’m sick of arguing it, the cheerleaders don’t argue in good faith, they can’t, they can only obscure the issue with slander, personal attacks, misclassifying the situation. Yet we are grown, we can see what happened, it’s beyond dispute. These democrats leading the opposition is tantamount to surrendering to the Republicans. There is no scenario where we don’t end up in a fascist one party state under reigns of terror indefinitely with these democrats leading us.
That is step 1, we have to organize to get there, but we can’t skip ahead to other steps if that one doesn’t get completed. Get your fucking head straight America, we need real leadership.
That dude in the picture be like….
Every major media outlet is controlled by someone that is a member of the Epstein club.
And daily reminder for everyone: just because they caught Epstein doesn’t mean this sort of shit stopped. It just passed to new management.
You misspelled executed.
You might be right about that. There were only a handful or two before this recent round of consolidations already.
The NYTimes is fucked Israel broke their brain somehow, I don’t think they’ve broken a single story, probably too busy worrying about, antisemitism, as defined by opposing fascists pursuing a final solution.
Washington post is worse than before and they were quite bad already. WSJ is murdoch owned, none of the city papers are very popular and aggressive.
All the networks are garbage, seemingly half owned by Ellison now. The tech giants are all aligned with the administration. What else is there? There are some good periodicals, like magazines, that have integrity and are not sold out to the epstein club, but no major daily news outfit that I can think, no major network, none of the tech giants. None of the social media even pretends to not cheat for the administration, tik tok now being subordinated to Israel.
They’re coming. They’re coming for me. They’re coming for you. We all need to panic. This madness needs to end.
With nationwide injunctions forbidden people could be thrown in without habeous corpus and disappeared and there would be no way to stop them. They could stymie and challenge any court cases filed, they could drag out the proceedings, challenge standing, they could move the person around, and not tell anyone.
With the nationwide injunctions they would only be able to get a week or two grabbing people without cause, or hearings. Now the could keep it up indefinitely, each person having to seek relief themselves, if the administration allows them, and each at the mercy of the district they are in.
That decision was a huge betrayal, and we are at the mercy of the worst people in the world and will suffer irreparable harm before we will get a chance to challenge lawless government action, and our media didn’t see it, or tell us about it when they did, even media I like. Just further goes to show we have all the wrong people in charge.
