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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Are you suggesting China is on track to commit genocide against an ethnic minority because they established reeducation camps? A better example of the next tier is the gulags, you know, actual work camps... mass murder is quite the leap.

I know it's popular today to call everyone Nazis whenever they show the slightest signs of analogous behaviour...but isn't re-education bad enough as it is? Shouldn't we focus on the issue at hand and challenge it's merits? Just saying "hurr-durr China = Nazis" is a big distraction that ignores the context of how this came about (ie, under a pretext of suppressing terrorism) and glosses over the countless other ways this is distinct from historical death camps.

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> Are you suggesting China is on track to commit genocide against an ethnic minority because they established reeducation camps?

I'm pretty sure the upthread poster is saying (and I'm not endorsing every element of this, only my understanding of the message) that China is in the process of committing genocide against the Uighur population, and the “re-education” camps are a component of that operation with a thin pretext.

> A better example of the next tier is the gulags

The gulag was not, as whole, specifically targeted at resisters against an ethnic displacement policy targeting a particular ethnic group; it was a tool in political repression, but it wasn't narrowly targeted at repressing political resistance to policy targeting a particular ethnic group on the basis of core elements of the shared identity defining the ethnicity.

So, while both are manifestations of authoritarianism, they are arguably different in fairly critical ways as relates to the inference that I've it the other is part of a genocidal strategy.

OTOH, the gulag was, very early on, integral in the anti-kulakization effort that, while notionally targeting an economic class, apparently also had political and ethnic aspects and was arguably directly tied to a Soviet-directed genocide in Ukraine (the Holodomor), so I'm not sure, even if one accepts the analogy with the gulag, that's historically a justified argument against the camps being a leading sign of imminent genocide.

Most historians agree that the Holodomor was not a genocide, just a famine.

Why would you see something like that? Not only not true, but in defense of mass murder? I can’t even fathom the agenda - defense of Russia’s reputation?

Soviet history is very tricky subject to study.

Russian State aka Kiev’s Russia started in Ukraine, so saying Russia starved Ukraine is like saying USA starved California, if somehow California got independent and the rest of country blocked food stuffs.

> Russian State aka Kiev’s Russia started in Ukraine, so saying Russia starved Ukraine is like saying USA starved California, if somehow California got independent and the rest of country blocked food stuffs.

That's ridiculous, almost like saying World War II was a civil war between two Germanic tribes (the Germans and Anglo-Saxons) or between Roman ones (French, Spanish, and Italians). You can't honestly and accurately claim a modern union by pointing back at an ancient political union. You also have to account that many political unions, until recently, were empires, that dominated many distinct nations of people.

What do you mean not true? And no I'm not trying to defend Russia's reputation. Millions of non Ukrainian soviets also died in the famine.

Here is a wiki page with several different scholars positions. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Holodomor_genocide_question

Holodomor is literally Nazi propaganda.

According to history, odds are yes

How many examples besides the Nazis are there really? There have been plenty of internment camps, communist re-education camps, and political imprisonment which didn't involve mass genocide (including in Canada and US during WW2 of Japanese).

Genocides/mass murders have almost always happened during the anarchy of war. They have almost never been done formally by an established state during normal civil life. The Nazis (and Turkey) started theirs in the stateless fringes of their warzones, after the local governments were razed.

Again, I don't see how any of this helps the conversation or our understanding of the issue.

> There have been plenty of internment camps and political imprisonment which didn't involve mass genocide

Very few, if any, not tied to detention of those with some connection to a specific external enemy power in an interstate war; which is, to be sure, not to justify, say, the WW2 detention of those of Japanese descent in the US, but there are critical differences from the Chinese policy at issue.

> They have almost never been done formally by an established state during normal civil life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag

Does it matter if there is one step or ten steps if the final step is genocide and China is confidently walking down the path?

> Are you suggesting China is on track to commit genocide against an ethnic minority because they established reeducation camps?

Yes.

> A better example of the next tier is the gulags, you know, actual work camps... mass murder is quite the leap.

And the Nazi camps weren't actual work camps? Well, okay, two of them were gassing facilities with nothing else, but all the others were built to extract labor from prisoners. Most started as quarries.

Once you've rounded up people into camps crowded enough that they are unable to protect themselves from their own shit, they will die in large numbers. It's that simple.

> Are you suggesting China is on track to commit genocide against an ethnic minority because they established reeducation camps?

Genocide doesn't require physical extermination. I believe some definitions consider forced assimilation and policies of cultural destruction to be genocide, and these camps are definitely tools to accomplish those things.

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