A Brief History of US Concentration Camps

Those who are not students of history may be unaware that America has had bona fide concentration camps twice in its history and almost on a third occasion.

The first "Indian reservations" were fields where Native Americans [who had survived slaughter by pioneer settlers from back East, professional "Indian fighters" and the US Cavalry] were herded together, fenced in, and left exposed to the elements without food, clothing (except smallpox infected blankets) or shelter during the brutal North American winters. These were concentration camps before that term had been coined.

The Japanese-American internment camps during World War Two were the second concentration camps in American history. Documents have been declassified from the National Archives that show, during the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, the US government made plans to round up its black population. This would have been the third era of American concentration camps.

If you wanted to argue that the slave pens and slave prisons in which slaves newly arrived from "seasoning" (code for torturing African culture and languages out of African abductees) in the West Indies of the Caribbean after the Middle Passage from Africa were incarcerated were concentration camps, then I would be prepared to accept it as the first era of concentration camps. Guantanamo and the CIA prisons around the world could be seen as the most recent concentration camps.

There is no point in lecturing you the reader about how it demeans America to be seen as a police state. But aside from how non-Americans see America, do we Americans want to live in a police state? Hasn't the Patriot Act essentially abolished the Bill of Rights?