Call them what they are: Concentration camps.
Even the phrase "concentration camp" is a bit of a euphemism. A better phrase might be a "political prison".
And yes it has a negative connotation, because it is a bad thing.
USA/NATO were the First World. USSR/Warsaw Pact was the Second World. Everyone else was Third World.
That definition includes countries like Switzerland, which sounds very strange today, because the meaning has changed to precisely the one you have in mind.
That said, "developing country" isn't necessarily the most precise phrase either, since many of those countries are either keeping the status quo or are actively decaying due to environmental disaster, war, famine, etc... Also, when you say "developing country" what a lot of people still heard is "shithole". Still, it's the preferred phrase and the inherent optimism built into it does count for a little.
Where the first world would be the US influence sphere, and the second world being USSR influence sphere.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/06/18/china-kil...
Wikipedia has a list of concentration camps, including the ones currently run under the Trump administration:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_and_in...
All of them are bad. Some are worse than others, with Nazi camps being a well-known and egregious example.
The obvious solution is to boycott Chinese merchandise and vote with our wallets. But will we be able to overcome the inconveniences it would cause us? Could enough of us actually go through with it collectively to make a dent?
I've always wondered the same thing. Why Germany didn't get away with it, but North Korea does? My only guess is because Germany started invading all of Europe and posed a legitimate threat to American interests, whereas North Korea doesn't. Added bonus of defeating the Nazis is we freed everyone in concentration camps, but I guess that wasn't why we mobilized the American war machine. It'll take more than crimes against humanity.
North Korea is holding a gun to South Korea's head. America already fought the Korean War, what else can America do?
Go to war with North Korea.
Germany was bombing London.
South Korea is an incredibly militarily powerful nation.
What we are saying is "the loss of life in a war is not worth the freeing of people imprisoned and tortured in North Korea," which is fine to say, and pretty much my point.
There are other ways to collapse a regime without that kind of collateral damage. The US is not in the best position to do it, however; China is.
https://nypost.com/2019/06/01/chinese-dissidents-are-being-e...
If you’re asserting that it’s equally bad to harvest organs from Falun Gong practitioners vs. political dissidents... yes, somewhat obviously, involuntary organ harvesting is about as maximally evil as a government can get. My comparison was saying that it’s arguably worse than just killing people, but the rank order doesn’t really matter.
a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution.
Seems like we have:
- Large numbers of people
- Persecuted minorities (Uyghurs)
None of the reports seem to indicate forced labor or mass execution, but those seem to be optional requirements for a concentration camp.
They are already part of Chinese society. And they don't want help. They want to be let out of prison and to return to their families.
Don't conflate concentration camps and death camps. Nazi Germany had both, and they are both different things.
Death camps operated very differently than the concentration camps. Specifically, people got off the trains and went into the gas chambers rather quickly. They didn't stay in the death camps for months or years awaiting execution. (This is in contrast to people who stayed in concentration camps.)
The death camps were also geographically isolated, so that it was very hard for civilians to learn that mass executions were happening. (The Nazis learned to do this when they performed mass euthanasia in hospitals in cities, because civilians would see people arrive in busses, then smoke come from crematoriums, and then more people arrive. They nearly got voted out of power because the churches started to turn against them.)
Honestly, as an adult, it's worth spending some time reading up on the holocaust. It's not that our history classes were wrong, it's just that the depth of understanding that we can get as adults is much more than when we learned about the holocaust in grade school or high school.
And it’s interesting to use phrase “indefinite detention and torture” as “helping minorities integrate”. The fact that we don’t know how many people are being killed doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Every time some country decides to do this they hide that they’re killing people. China is still actively trying to hide how many people are in these camps, and isn’t allowing anyone else to go in to verify that they aren’t just killing people.
Hell we can’t even get the from ICE.