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Comment by seppin | Hacker News Reader

> Let me spell it out for you: Pretty much no one advocates this.

Oh I'm well aware (almost) no one will come out explicitly and endorse concentration camps. What they do is almost more insidious, they justify them. They rationalize them. They spin them as something they are not.

I'd rather someone be an open Nazi than to perform their mental gymnastics in public to avoid challenging their world view on something as simple as "mass interment camps are bad." "Well you see they aren't interment camps...they were criminals anyways...how dare you compare a work camp to a death camp?"

It's sickening, all of it. Your spin of "it's not the same as the holocaust" (no one said it is) and "yeah but whatabout the US!" is sadly par for the course.

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The US put japanese people in in concentration camps and most US citizens supported it. Does this put most US citizens on par with Nazis who gassed and experimented on Jewish people? No. It does not. Americans did it out of fear, not out of evil.

There is a huge difference here. When you say genocide, it is equivalent to holocaust. When you say concentration camp it's equivalent to gitmo at worst or the japanese concentration camps. Both could be happening but one is drastically worse than the other and genocide needs confirmation.

> Your spin of "it's not the same as the holocaust" (no one said it is) and "yeah but whatabout the US!" is sadly par for the course.

> The US put japanese people in in concentration camps and most US citizens supported it.

Amazing, your lack of self-awareness. Your deflection and whataboutism can't even let up for a second. In case you need yet another reminder, this thread is about Chinese camps.

> There is a huge difference here. When you say genocide, it is equivalent to holocaust

You are saying this. You. You are pushing the argument to the extreme ("everything is a holocaust") to discredit what is actually being said ("these are mass interment camps with systemic violence and arbitrary punishment"). It's an argumentation technique that doesn't work when the other person knows what's happening.

What's going on here is you're misusing the word genocide. See the comment in the other thread.

Genocide is mass killings, not mass sterilizations. If you get very technical you can call a sterilization a killing but that's just a deliberate misuse of the term.

When someone hears the word genocide they hear slaughter. They don't hear oh that population was sterilized. Let's not be stupid about this.

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