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This kind of ignorance is such a problem right now. Even serious people don't know this history and then misread the current situation because they know so little about the past. washingtonpost.com/opinions/my-fa…
1) Scholars call those British camps in southern Africa concentration camps. It's not whimsy on a couple people's part. Some debate whether the earlier, Cuban example should be called concentration camps, but he's ignoring the vast majority of scholars regarding the British camps
2) The idea that "a concentration camp... is designed to serve only two purposes: slave labor and extermination of the unwanted" is untrue. Even if we go with the Nazi example, >95% of people detained in the first several years of the Nazi concentration camp system were released.
He's refusing to acknowledge or make any effort to learn that it took years of the existence of concentration camps very much like those open elsewhere in the world during the first decades of the 20th century before the Nazis weaponized camps as a tool of genocide.
It took years of the Nazis broadening their uses of their own concentration camp system, years of inaction on the part of the rest of the world--even after Kristallnacht--before the death camp system could emerge.
I can give you information--other people have written great books! I wrote a book! Koppel even mentions it! But I can't save you from your own willful ignorance.
)And by "you" here, I mean Koppel. I'm hoping the rest of you will be up to some reading. If you don't want to read my book, start with Wachsmann's "KL.")
