<a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-moral-complexities-of-bombing" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">The Moral Complexities Of Bombing A Concentration Camp Full Of Children</a> <bq>They’re dropping bombs on a concentration camp full of kids. Even shitlibs and pseudo-leftists who get every other foreign policy issue wrong are managing to get this one right, it’s that obvious. <b>Anyone getting this issue wrong can be permanently dismissed without any real loss.</b></bq> This is mostly true---except that you have to realize and accept that there are good, rescuable people out there who do not accept the reality of what has been going on in Israel for 50 years, a situations that has increased drastically in severity in the last 18, since Gaza was closed down. Many people simply do not accept that there is a concentration camp there because they've not been told, or they've told that there definitely isn't. <img attachment="image_(1).jpg" align="right" caption="Japanese Internment Camp in the California">Many do not understand the term. If they think about it at all, they think that "concentration camp" means "extermination camp" (or "death camp"), whereas it's actually a synonym for "internment camp", which is what the U.S. generously called its own concentration camps when it stored dozens of thousands of its own citizens of Japanese origin there during WWII. Wikipedia redirects the search for "concentration camp" to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment">internment</a>. It defines "internment" as, <bq>[...] the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges[1] or intent to file charges.[2] The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects".[3] Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment, it tends to refer to preventive confinement rather than confinement <i>after</i> having been convicted of some crime.</bq> We are likewise trained to think of "gulags" as concentration camps---or even extermination camps---when they are, by definition, much more like prisons. While many were sentenced on sham charges before kangaroo courts, the Soviets at least bothered to sentence them before interning them. In contrast, people in a concentration camp have never even been tried or accused of anything other than <i>being</i>. You could argue that going through the motions of pretending to prosecute someone for a few minutes or hours before you come to a foregone conclusion shouldn't cover one's ass in a just world. It seems to make a difference in this world, but ours is not a just world. By this logic, though, the Soviet gulags <i>were</i> concentration camps---but then so are most American prisons, which are full of people who've been railroaded into prison, and who are then leased out as slave labor, working for a dollar a day for U.S. corporations. People think that just because Gazans are shown walking around in rubble with clothes on, rather than as shirtless, emaciated, and half-frozen wraiths as in pictures from Dachau or Ausschwitz, that they couldn't possibly be in concentration camps. Citing from the article again, <bq>A huge amount of western depravity hides behind the unexamined assumption that killing people with bombs is somehow less evil than killing them with bullets or blades. By waging nonstop foreign bombing campaigns, <b>the west desensitized the public to the reality of what bombs do.</b></bq> It has also desensitized the public to the horrors of modern concentration camps---or even refugee camps.