What counts as a concentration camp?

Concentration camps are spreading across the US today. Here's why it matters what we call them.

Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer's Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next Comes What and get Andrea's posts first: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Read the February post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/what-counts-as-a-concentration-camp

WATCH YouTube: https://youtu.be/W3aMgiR9mMI TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@degenerateartnews

This week's episode is a response to Jake Tapper discouraging the use of the term "concentration camp" on CNN while interviewing a bookstore owner describing people in his community being sent to concentration camps during ICE operations. Andrea Pitzer looks at Tapper's consistent stance and traces it back to at least 2019 in an interview with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in which he acknowledges she might be using the term "concentration camp" correctly on a technical level. But he points out that most Americans think of death camps when they hear those words. And he talks about the pain that overuse inflicts on those who suffered in Nazi camps and on their families.

Andrea looks at Dachau in particular, which was not a death camp, and wonders whether Tapper would consider it a concentration camp or not, and whether it only became a concentration camp nearly a decade into its existence, after the extermination camps were set up. If Dachau can be called a concentration camp, then what about the camps with similar conditions and similar functions that were operating in other parts of the world. She considers what actually constitutes a camp, at what point those camps can accurately be named, the uses of doing so, and the risks of not seeing what is happening before our eyes.