If you would just extend your quote, like, a couple more sentences, you would see why I said it's a death camp.
That's a neat trick though, including a quote of just a tiny part to give the impression I'm talking out of my ass. Doesn't really work however, because I actually have eyeballs and I think most people here do.
We can just... you know... look, like, 2 inches up.
>It's a prison that we have no information on in a totalitarian country. We do know they routinely torture their prisoners. I would think Americans, of all people, would take issue with this.
I agree that americans should take issue with this, but as bad as totalitarianism and torture is, those do not make a death camp. By the same token, for all the human right abuses committed in Guantanamo Bay, it's not a death camp. Yes, totalitarian torture camps are bad, and so are death camps, but they're separate things and we shouldn't be in the habit of equating bad-but-not-death camps to Auschwitz just to score some rhetorical points.
What makes you think Americans take issue with this (other than it's done by leaders they didn't vote for). Gitmo has been operating all this time and neither party has cared enough to change that.
Splitting hairs between "death camp" and "torture camp" doesn't change the rhetorical meaning of their post, so they didn't score any additional "points" (who is keeping score? Is this a game?); systematically torturing people is just as depraved as systematically murdering them.
>systematically torturing people is just as depraved as systematically murdering them.
Going back to my previous comparison, does that mean you think Gitmo is basically Auschwitz, and the US (under Bush/Obama, when Gitmo was active) was "just as depraved" as the Nazis?
The conversation was about essence, and yes I think a torture camp has the same essence as a death camp.
Between Gitmo and Auschwitz, there's an obvious difference in magnitude, but there's no difference in direction; Gitmo evolves into Auschwitz. If you want to stop the next Auschwitz from happening, you have to stop the current Gitmo. The path to Auschwitz runs through normalizing Gitmo as "not that bad because it's just a torture prison. At least it's not a death camp".
One does not need to meet the bar of Auschwitz to be considered a death camp. A smaller death camp is still a death camp. This isn't a contest where only the worst one counts, we should be comfortable saying the holocaust was a uniquely horrifying evil thing and that also, other governments are doing horrifying things at a lesser scale that should still correctly be labelled a death camp.
