the.com/internment
Internment imprisons people for their identity or origin, not for any crime, under the guise of security.
means The forced confinement of people—often an entire group—not for crimes committed but for who they are or where they're from, usually justified as wartime or national-security precaution.
from Comes from French 'interner,' meaning to confine within limits, rooted in Latin 'internus,' meaning 'internal' or 'within.' The sense of 'keeping someone inside' borders — a nation's borders, a camp's fences — slid by the 19th century into the specific meaning of detaining foreigners or suspect groups during conflict, a bureaucratic word that has since attached itself to some of history's grimmer chapters.
- legal basis
- no crime required, just ancestry or suspicion
- us example
- 120,000 Japanese Americans jailed in WWII, zero convicted
- courts said
- Korematsu upheld it in 1944, repudiated decades later
- modern echo
- camps still called detention centers for optics