One of my pet peeves is the reference to the internment of Japanese-Americans as their having been put in concentration camps. They were not in concentration camps, they were in relocation camps. And this is not a matter of idle semantics. Relocation camps are where you lose many of your civil liberties, years of your productive life and a good deal of dignity. Concentration camps are where you are beaten, ripped away from your family, starved and either executed or worked until you drop.
Neither is a point of pride but there is a considerable difference. And it is not a distinction that should be forgotten. Equating what the United States did to its Japanese citizens with what the Germans did to the Jews is like equating abuses by Americans at Abu Ghraib with the abuses perpetrated by the Hussein family or the actions of the insurgents against the Iraqi population. There is simply no reasonable comparison.
