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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> equate concentration camp contidions to working in a factory

Oh no, not accurately stating history!

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

> The use of slave and forced labour in Nazi Germany (German: Zwangsarbeit) and throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II took place on an unprecedented scale. It was a vital part of the German economic exploitation of conquered territories. It also contributed to the mass extermination of populations in occupied Europe.

Titrating the nastiness of it from "will definitely kill you" to "will make you die miserable, broke, and broken" isn't, IMO, a great fix. People are not required to be satisfied with a tiny pittance just because it's more than their neighbor has.

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Not sure what you're talking about, I explicitly said those are concentration camp conditions, so obviously yes Nazis murdered many people while making them work in factories. Seems like you think I think they didn't.

But modern factory conditions are nowhere near what that regime did. If you want to know, work in a factory. That is what I mean by not equating concentration camp contidions to working in a modern factory.

> But modern factory conditions are nowhere near what that regime did.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53481253

> Reports by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the US Congress, among others, have found that thousands of Uighurs have been transferred to work in factories across China, under conditions the ASPI report said "strongly suggest forced labour". It linked those factories to more than 80 high-profile brands, including Nike, Apple and Gap.

> China, which is believed to have detained more than one million Uighurs in internment camps in Xinjiang, has described its programmes - which reportedly include forced sterilisation - as job training and education.

China is a different story altogether. They're not democratic so of course you'd expect to see things like that.

China is where all our billionaire companies have outsourced their factories to, to take advantage of those conditions for profit! They are an integral part of the story.

(We're not above doing a little bit of it ourselves, as a treat, either. We left slavery legal in the Thirteenth Amendment, even. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo...)

Do modern factories hire enough people to absorb the whole population as workers?

You seem to be missing a very important part of that history when you make this comparison, and it's a part that I can't imagine you aren't aware of. Not stating that is not "accurately stating history", it's lying by a vile glaring omission. The US also rounded up racial undesirables into camps and used them for labor, but there's a reason that Roosevelt is looked upon more fondly than goddamn Hitler.

> The US also rounded up racial undesirables into camps and used them for labor

This was also bad, yes.

> there's a reason that Roosevelt is looked upon more fondly than goddamn Hitler

Sure, but "less bad" isn't the same as "internment good", and the winners write the history. I am a fan of FDR! But he did some miserable shit to win a war that needed to be won, some of which we cringe at now.

A handful of Nazi war crime prosecutions fell apart because Allied troops widely did the same thing, for example.

This doesn't respond to my point at all. I tell you that it is ahistorical, dishonest, and disrespecful to equate subsistence farmers being forced into subsistence factory work by globalization and economic conditions with the holocaust, the mass deliberate extermination of Jews, Romani, Slavs, the disabled, etc. because one uses slavery and the other uses something that you consider comparable to slavery. Your answer is that less bad things are also bad? Sure, yeah, but they're nevertheless less bad and shouldn't be treated as equal.

Not to make light of poor working conditions, dirt wages, and child labor. They can be and should be addressed. But they're not genocide and throwing out a "Arbeit macht frei!" is gross here.

"It's fine if we mistreat this subgroup, they should be grateful for what we let them have" is a shared theme between the two.

And as noted elsewhere in the conversation, American companies are benefiting from actual concentration camp labor (https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/aug/30/revealed-major...) that some deem genocide (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55973215).

https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/poverty-and-pers...

> Jewish institutions sought to grapple with the consequences of a process of structural pauperization as driven by deliberate policy

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