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Comment by helloindia | Hacker News Reader

And the re-education camps in China. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/opinion/china-re-educatio...

Of course we wouldn't mention CIA black sites, the possibility of more Abu Ghraibs, or even those in the US allowed to be beaten, killed or tortured at the hands of other prisoners, guards, or even police.

Communist dictators and other ideological authoritarians in political power (who demand assimilation) are orders of magnitude more murderous and deadly than US torture places, bad as those may be.

Yes that's absolutely true. We here in the US are nowhere near as bad as China or Russia, but we better keep an eye on it because we seem to be the exception--something special--in history.

The US is pretty bad, if you consider all of the wars from Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Iraq, Afghanistan, all,of the CIA activities in South and Central America, the impact of drug prohibition, Racist policing and slavery and de facto slavery via prison labor (and the largest prison population). I think you could strangle a gnat on the different in ruined and lost lives between Russia, China, and America.

All that may be bad, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Mao Zedong (49-78 million civilians killed) and Josef Stalin (23 million civilians killed).

Hitler himself ranks third behind those two, at 17 million civilians killed.

Not as bad as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao... could the bar be any lower? If the only way you compare favorably is considering the greatest mass killers of the last century, that should tell you something.

> ideological authoritarians

I wouldn't limit it to ideologues. Look at Mobutu, Suharto, and many other plain old right-wing authoritarians.

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