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I don't recall any US prison in the last 70+ years where people on the order of a million people, largely from a single region or ethnicity, were imprisoned on

I don't recall any US prison in the last 70+ years where people on the order of a million people, largely from a single region or ethnicity, were imprisoned on suspicion of mere affiliation. Every country probably has a signature few cases of prosecution that may provoke our indignation. That's not the same as putting people into prison because their religious beliefs make them enemies of the state.

blueflow 5y ago
Nobody wants China to get away with their camps, but no one wants the US to get away with Guantanamo Bay, either. > That's not the same as putting people into prison because their religious beliefs make them enemies of the state. Isn't this what some people ended up in Guantanamo Bay for? Edit: TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_detainees_at_Guantanamo_Bay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_detainees_at_Guantanamo...
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  No. It's not. In some instances people were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or treated poorly based on pretty minor actions, but even at it's height Guantanamo housed < 1000 people. If we were sweeping up any an all Islamists I'd expect a good deal more than that. Also, the U.S. didn't 'get away with' Guantanamo. It was a big news cycle and the prison is nearly shut down now, and operates with much more consideration for the prisoners, giving them access to counsel and repatriating then when able.
  - blueflow 5y ago
    > housed < 1000 people Normal numbers are zero. > Also, the U.S. didn't 'get away with' Guantanamo Who ended up in prison for it?
    - BobbyJo 5y ago
      > Normal numbers are zero. Name a government that hasn't abused it's power at one point. Not sure what your definition of normal is in this instance. > Who ended up in prison for it? I'd be ok if China simply stopped what they are doing without sending anyone to prison. To answer your question though, no one. It's hard to prosecute individuals for an organization's failings without dismantling the organization, which is the US military in this case. The best we can hope for is fixes to prevent such abuses inches future, which we got. Many Americans, myself included, wish some people were put away, and also sincerely hope that the perpetrators of abuses in Xinjiang find similar ends.
      - blueflow 5y ago
        I'd be okay if the US simply stopped invading some countries or toppling random governments every 5 years. Many people of the rest of the world wish for the responsible US politicians to be put away. I hope the American perpetrators find similar ends. Its an awful kind of mockery to see the US displaying themselves as the hand of justice in the Xinjiang situation. I wish countries like the Netherlands or Switzerland would do it instead, their hands are much, much cleaner. This is the same kind of mockery as having Saudi Arabia on the UN panel for womens rights.
        BobbyJo 5y ago
        > I'd be okay if the US simply stopped invading some countries or toppling random governments every 5 years. Me too, not sure what that has to do with anything. > Many people of the rest of the world wish for the responsible US politicians to be put away. I hope the American perpetrators find similar ends. ok? Not sure where that fits in though. > Its an awful kind of mockery to see the US displaying themselves as the hand of justice in the Xinjiang situation. I wish countries like the Netherlands or Switzerland would do it instead, their hands are much, much cleaner. If you consider doing nothing at all about bad things happening clean, then sure. Also, your diction leads me to believe you are Chinese yourself, so maybe a little bias? > This is the same kind of mockery as having Saudi Arabia on the UN panel for womens rights. The US doesn't have over a million people in a concentration camp right now, so I don't see the similarity.
- VictorPath 5y ago
  > Guantanamo Bay Other than that the US kidnaps people from various countries, often without approval of the country where the kidnapping happens, brings the rebel (patriot?) to Guantanamo Bay without even trial by US legal system and waterboards and tortures them and holds them indefinitely - although some are realized to be the wrong identity and let go - there is another point... ...Cuba has denounced the US military occupation of Guantanamo Bay for decades, and requested the US to leave. So this is happening against the wishes of the country it is happening in.
  - IncRnd 5y ago
    > ...Cuba has denounced the US military occupation of Guantanamo Bay for decades, and requested the US to leave. So this is happening against the wishes of the country it is happening in. It's not a military occupation in the sense you imply. It is a perpetual lease made between the US and Cuba. [1] [1] https://www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrse/installations/ns_guantanamo_bay/about/history.html https://www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrse/installations/ns_gua...
    - ATsch 5y ago
      See, it's not an occupation, it's a "perpetual lease". That I happen to enforce with my army. And we didn't steal that land, they kindly gave it to us. When we held a gun up to their heads and made them sign a document they did not understand. Oh, and these aren't slaves, they're workers. Who happen to be on an unbreakable contract. (and also, how could I forget, "these Uighurs aren't prisoners, they're just people who, realizing their mistakes, kindly happened to voluntarily come here for education")
      - IncRnd 5y ago
        Please quit trolling. Your comment is disconnected from anything I wrote.
        blueflow 5y ago
        Please quit your US newspeak.
lom 5y ago
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/japanese-american-relocation https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/japanese-america...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lr4444lr 5y ago
  Absolutely. I didn't pick "70" randomly.
  - fps_doug 5y ago
    Sure, you deliberately placed the goal posts as such that they exactly put the US on the moral high ground.
    - adventured 5y ago
      The US did have the moral high ground, which is a remarkable thing given what we're talking about: that's how horrific what China is doing is. Were the Japanese released from that internment? Yes. Were they genocided? No. Were they stripped of their culture, heritage, social lives, and tortured for decades due to their beliefs? No. Does the US today recognize the Japanese internment as a moral crime? Yes. That last one is a critical difference between cultures. In China today you can't even discuss what's going on in Xinjiang. You are of course lambasting the US, on a US website. Nothing bad will happen to you because of that. And in this thread you won't find thousands of bots attempting to say that the Japanese internment is ok, or otherwise justify that it should have happened; instead, most of the replies are fully agreeing that it was atrocious. Try that in China, see what happens.
      - joshuahedlund 5y ago
        > Does the US today recognize the Japanese internment as a moral crime? Yes. Not only is it recognized as a moral crime, but the US government passed a law to give restitution to interned people. Does that clean the slate? No. Does that make it ok? No, of course not. The point is not that the US is perfect or even good. The point is that the US system allows open discussion, criticism, protest, legislating, etc. It has built-in mechanisms to improve itself which it has done and continues to do. China has none of that.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
Japanese internment camps were first thing that came to mind.
grumbel 5y ago
- adventured 5y ago
  > The incarceration rate is around 5 times that of China You have no idea what the incarceration rate is in China in fact - part the charm of the zero human rights modern China, which is itself an authoritarian prison state - and their supposed official figure does not include millions of Uyghurs.
  - trasz 5y ago
    So you have no problem trusting statistics from a warmongering country with world's highest incarceration rate, and very obvious racial skew among those imprisoned (those fortunate enough to not be shot on the street by police), but you up front assume that it's the Chinese statistics that can't be trusted.
    - lr4444lr 5y ago
      Please, tell us all the FOIA equivalent in China, and the laws protecting freedom of the press to promulgate that data.
      - trasz 5y ago
        You mean, the mechanism that allows one to ask government for something, and for the government to deny that information for whatever reason? Okay, show me some example. US Air Force droning a wedding, where can I find information about that? Drone video recordings, perpetrators' names etc? Let me guess - that's "national security" and can't be public. And that's somehow different from how it works in China (if China was droning random civilians that is).
colanderman 5y ago
Whataboutism is a distraction from discourse regardless of the conduct of the target. As an example, if even Nazi Germany had held the US accountable for interment of Japanese citizens, that would still lead to a positive outcome. Their own acts of genocide wouldn't excuse the US's actions.
Synaesthesia 5y ago
I don’t recall China invading and destroying a successful Middle East country twice and utterly laying waste to the region and throwing it into chaos. One can debate over which crime is “worse” I suppose. What’s also interesting is that towards the late 80s and 90s the USA was really warming up to China at a time when they were carrying out pretty horrible atrocities, far worse than the USSR, but that was the political agenda of the time.
jxjabzb 5y ago
> Every country probably has a signature few cases of prosecution that may provoke our indignation. A “few signature cases”?? I completely agree that what China is doing is completely wrong, immoral and bordering on genocide but let’s not swing too far the other way here. The US has used the prison system to persecute black people en mass for the past 70 years. Look at differing rates of incarceration and length of sentences. On top of that, the reason that the US has the highest prison population is because of the war on drugs, which the US has long used as an excuse to persecute minorities, whether they are black, Hispanic, Chinese or Mormon.
- ATsch 5y ago
  > bordering on genocide It should be noted that it is only "bordering on" genocide by the very watered down defintion that the UN countries themselves were willing to approve such that their own actions (notably the native american genocide) were not considered genocides.
- Zababa 5y ago
  > The US has used the prison system to persecute black people en mass for the past 70 years. Look at differing rates of incarceration and length of sentences. Do you mean the absolute difference between rates (black people in prison for 1000, white people in prison for 1000) or relative to the crimes that people commit (X people getting a longer sentence on average than Y people for the same crime)?
modo_mario 5y ago
Given that in the order of million people were killed abroad as a result of certain escapades people on the opposite site of the fence are never going to view the west as sitting on a high horse. Hell the US openly accused china of purposefully not keeping extremism in check few years prior when some ended up flowing into Afghanistan. Fuck the CCP but I'm sure they have an easy time using the US's own actions in the domestic arena where they have the upper hand. As they can magnify every bit of hypocrisy and flaw just like happens here. Countless incarcerated? Still much less than in the US! Hell they too can probably make up some stuff on the go. Refer to the Tibetans that were armed and then paid by the US to leave and claim similar stuff is happening now. It doesn't take much for their people to align with em. Hell plenty were already mad about exemptions the uighurs got from the 1 child policy and such.
RalfWausE 5y ago
coughinternment of japanesecough
- tablespoon 5y ago
  >> I don't recall any US prison in the last 70+ years where people on the order of a million people, largely from a single region or ethnicity, were imprisoned on suspicion of mere affiliation. > coughinternment of japanesecough cough2022-70=1952cough That was also like three generations ago: there are a lot of things that happened in the US at that time that the US itself now roundly condemns. You may return with this comparison when the PRC makes a formal apology to the Uyghurs, pays reparations, and teaches about the Xinjiang camps in schools as a shameful event of Chinese history.
- joshuahedlund 5y ago
  When China shuts down their internment, officially condemns it, gives restitution to the interned, and stops censoring any education, discussion and criticism of their internment on message boards in their own country but instead welcomes it as part of the self-correcting mechanisms that allow a nation to continually bend towards greater justice and not repeat the old injustices, then the situations will be equivalent.
  - trasz 5y ago
    Let me remind you that a number of US states is fighting to introduce censorship of education, because apparently teaching objective truth is "anti-american".
    - joshuahedlund 5y ago
      And yet you can openly criticize those actions, mobilize people to fight against it, file lawsuits, create and distribute alternative resources to continue to educate about whatever is being censored, and no one will stop you.
      - 5y ago

blueflow 5y ago

Nobody wants China to get away with their camps, but no one wants the US to get away with Guantanamo Bay, either. > That's not the same as putting people into prison because their religious beliefs make them enemies of the state. Isn't this what some people ended up in Guantanamo Bay for? Edit: TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_detainees_at_Guantanamo_Bay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_detainees_at_Guantanamo...

BobbyJo 5y ago
No. It's not. In some instances people were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or treated poorly based on pretty minor actions, but even at it's height Guantanamo housed < 1000 people. If we were sweeping up any an all Islamists I'd expect a good deal more than that. Also, the U.S. didn't 'get away with' Guantanamo. It was a big news cycle and the prison is nearly shut down now, and operates with much more consideration for the prisoners, giving them access to counsel and repatriating then when able.
- blueflow 5y ago
  > housed < 1000 people Normal numbers are zero. > Also, the U.S. didn't 'get away with' Guantanamo Who ended up in prison for it?
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    > Normal numbers are zero. Name a government that hasn't abused it's power at one point. Not sure what your definition of normal is in this instance. > Who ended up in prison for it? I'd be ok if China simply stopped what they are doing without sending anyone to prison. To answer your question though, no one. It's hard to prosecute individuals for an organization's failings without dismantling the organization, which is the US military in this case. The best we can hope for is fixes to prevent such abuses inches future, which we got. Many Americans, myself included, wish some people were put away, and also sincerely hope that the perpetrators of abuses in Xinjiang find similar ends.
    - blueflow 5y ago
      I'd be okay if the US simply stopped invading some countries or toppling random governments every 5 years. Many people of the rest of the world wish for the responsible US politicians to be put away. I hope the American perpetrators find similar ends. Its an awful kind of mockery to see the US displaying themselves as the hand of justice in the Xinjiang situation. I wish countries like the Netherlands or Switzerland would do it instead, their hands are much, much cleaner. This is the same kind of mockery as having Saudi Arabia on the UN panel for womens rights.
      - BobbyJo 5y ago
        > I'd be okay if the US simply stopped invading some countries or toppling random governments every 5 years. Me too, not sure what that has to do with anything. > Many people of the rest of the world wish for the responsible US politicians to be put away. I hope the American perpetrators find similar ends. ok? Not sure where that fits in though. > Its an awful kind of mockery to see the US displaying themselves as the hand of justice in the Xinjiang situation. I wish countries like the Netherlands or Switzerland would do it instead, their hands are much, much cleaner. If you consider doing nothing at all about bad things happening clean, then sure. Also, your diction leads me to believe you are Chinese yourself, so maybe a little bias? > This is the same kind of mockery as having Saudi Arabia on the UN panel for womens rights. The US doesn't have over a million people in a concentration camp right now, so I don't see the similarity.
VictorPath 5y ago
> Guantanamo Bay Other than that the US kidnaps people from various countries, often without approval of the country where the kidnapping happens, brings the rebel (patriot?) to Guantanamo Bay without even trial by US legal system and waterboards and tortures them and holds them indefinitely - although some are realized to be the wrong identity and let go - there is another point... ...Cuba has denounced the US military occupation of Guantanamo Bay for decades, and requested the US to leave. So this is happening against the wishes of the country it is happening in.
- IncRnd 5y ago
  > ...Cuba has denounced the US military occupation of Guantanamo Bay for decades, and requested the US to leave. So this is happening against the wishes of the country it is happening in. It's not a military occupation in the sense you imply. It is a perpetual lease made between the US and Cuba. [1] [1] https://www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrse/installations/ns_guantanamo_bay/about/history.html https://www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrse/installations/ns_gua...
  - ATsch 5y ago
    See, it's not an occupation, it's a "perpetual lease". That I happen to enforce with my army. And we didn't steal that land, they kindly gave it to us. When we held a gun up to their heads and made them sign a document they did not understand. Oh, and these aren't slaves, they're workers. Who happen to be on an unbreakable contract. (and also, how could I forget, "these Uighurs aren't prisoners, they're just people who, realizing their mistakes, kindly happened to voluntarily come here for education")
    - IncRnd 5y ago
      Please quit trolling. Your comment is disconnected from anything I wrote.
      - blueflow 5y ago
        Please quit your US newspeak.

lom 5y ago

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/japanese-american-relocation https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/japanese-america...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lr4444lr 5y ago
Absolutely. I didn't pick "70" randomly.
- fps_doug 5y ago
  Sure, you deliberately placed the goal posts as such that they exactly put the US on the moral high ground.
  - adventured 5y ago
    The US did have the moral high ground, which is a remarkable thing given what we're talking about: that's how horrific what China is doing is. Were the Japanese released from that internment? Yes. Were they genocided? No. Were they stripped of their culture, heritage, social lives, and tortured for decades due to their beliefs? No. Does the US today recognize the Japanese internment as a moral crime? Yes. That last one is a critical difference between cultures. In China today you can't even discuss what's going on in Xinjiang. You are of course lambasting the US, on a US website. Nothing bad will happen to you because of that. And in this thread you won't find thousands of bots attempting to say that the Japanese internment is ok, or otherwise justify that it should have happened; instead, most of the replies are fully agreeing that it was atrocious. Try that in China, see what happens.
    - joshuahedlund 5y ago
      > Does the US today recognize the Japanese internment as a moral crime? Yes. Not only is it recognized as a moral crime, but the US government passed a law to give restitution to interned people. Does that clean the slate? No. Does that make it ok? No, of course not. The point is not that the US is perfect or even good. The point is that the US system allows open discussion, criticism, protest, legislating, etc. It has built-in mechanisms to improve itself which it has done and continues to do. China has none of that.

rubyist5eva 5y ago

Japanese internment camps were first thing that came to mind.

grumbel 5y ago

adventured 5y ago
> The incarceration rate is around 5 times that of China You have no idea what the incarceration rate is in China in fact - part the charm of the zero human rights modern China, which is itself an authoritarian prison state - and their supposed official figure does not include millions of Uyghurs.
- trasz 5y ago
  So you have no problem trusting statistics from a warmongering country with world's highest incarceration rate, and very obvious racial skew among those imprisoned (those fortunate enough to not be shot on the street by police), but you up front assume that it's the Chinese statistics that can't be trusted.
  - lr4444lr 5y ago
    Please, tell us all the FOIA equivalent in China, and the laws protecting freedom of the press to promulgate that data.
    - trasz 5y ago
      You mean, the mechanism that allows one to ask government for something, and for the government to deny that information for whatever reason? Okay, show me some example. US Air Force droning a wedding, where can I find information about that? Drone video recordings, perpetrators' names etc? Let me guess - that's "national security" and can't be public. And that's somehow different from how it works in China (if China was droning random civilians that is).

colanderman 5y ago

Whataboutism is a distraction from discourse regardless of the conduct of the target. As an example, if even Nazi Germany had held the US accountable for interment of Japanese citizens, that would still lead to a positive outcome. Their own acts of genocide wouldn't excuse the US's actions.

Synaesthesia 5y ago

I don’t recall China invading and destroying a successful Middle East country twice and utterly laying waste to the region and throwing it into chaos. One can debate over which crime is “worse” I suppose. What’s also interesting is that towards the late 80s and 90s the USA was really warming up to China at a time when they were carrying out pretty horrible atrocities, far worse than the USSR, but that was the political agenda of the time.

jxjabzb 5y ago

> Every country probably has a signature few cases of prosecution that may provoke our indignation. A “few signature cases”?? I completely agree that what China is doing is completely wrong, immoral and bordering on genocide but let’s not swing too far the other way here. The US has used the prison system to persecute black people en mass for the past 70 years. Look at differing rates of incarceration and length of sentences. On top of that, the reason that the US has the highest prison population is because of the war on drugs, which the US has long used as an excuse to persecute minorities, whether they are black, Hispanic, Chinese or Mormon.

ATsch 5y ago
> bordering on genocide It should be noted that it is only "bordering on" genocide by the very watered down defintion that the UN countries themselves were willing to approve such that their own actions (notably the native american genocide) were not considered genocides.
Zababa 5y ago
> The US has used the prison system to persecute black people en mass for the past 70 years. Look at differing rates of incarceration and length of sentences. Do you mean the absolute difference between rates (black people in prison for 1000, white people in prison for 1000) or relative to the crimes that people commit (X people getting a longer sentence on average than Y people for the same crime)?

modo_mario 5y ago

Given that in the order of million people were killed abroad as a result of certain escapades people on the opposite site of the fence are never going to view the west as sitting on a high horse. Hell the US openly accused china of purposefully not keeping extremism in check few years prior when some ended up flowing into Afghanistan. Fuck the CCP but I'm sure they have an easy time using the US's own actions in the domestic arena where they have the upper hand. As they can magnify every bit of hypocrisy and flaw just like happens here. Countless incarcerated? Still much less than in the US! Hell they too can probably make up some stuff on the go. Refer to the Tibetans that were armed and then paid by the US to leave and claim similar stuff is happening now. It doesn't take much for their people to align with em. Hell plenty were already mad about exemptions the uighurs got from the 1 child policy and such.

RalfWausE 5y ago

coughinternment of japanesecough

tablespoon 5y ago
>> I don't recall any US prison in the last 70+ years where people on the order of a million people, largely from a single region or ethnicity, were imprisoned on suspicion of mere affiliation. > coughinternment of japanesecough cough2022-70=1952cough That was also like three generations ago: there are a lot of things that happened in the US at that time that the US itself now roundly condemns. You may return with this comparison when the PRC makes a formal apology to the Uyghurs, pays reparations, and teaches about the Xinjiang camps in schools as a shameful event of Chinese history.
joshuahedlund 5y ago
When China shuts down their internment, officially condemns it, gives restitution to the interned, and stops censoring any education, discussion and criticism of their internment on message boards in their own country but instead welcomes it as part of the self-correcting mechanisms that allow a nation to continually bend towards greater justice and not repeat the old injustices, then the situations will be equivalent.
- trasz 5y ago
  Let me remind you that a number of US states is fighting to introduce censorship of education, because apparently teaching objective truth is "anti-american".
  - joshuahedlund 5y ago
    And yet you can openly criticize those actions, mobilize people to fight against it, file lawsuits, create and distribute alternative resources to continue to educate about whatever is being censored, and no one will stop you.
    - 5y ago