undefined | Better HN

0 pointsars9y ago0 comments

I know you are trying to be objective and disinterested, but reading you combine the German and American camps as somehow comparable is utterly horrifying.

You make it sound like they were both more or less the same, just some people were killed in the German ones.

The goal of the German camps was to torture and kill, the American camps was to segregate.

The "camps" part is an unimportant detail - yet you write as if it's the main thing.

0 comments

semiel9y ago

They are comparable, though, and that's exactly my point. They're not the _same_ by any stretch of the imagination, but it's just a weaker reading of history to refuse to consider themes that were common to the time period.

The Nazi camps were started for the same reason as the American camps: to contain and control a population believed to be subversive. They were indeed later used as part of an organized genocide, which is very important and makes them far more horrifying on a moral/human level, but it's willful blindness to ignore the deep similarities between a policy of containing and suppressing a racial group, and a policy of containing, suppressing, and exterminating a racial group.

arsOP9y ago

These are not "themes that were common to the time period". These are themes that are common to human history, this type of camp was not invented then.

For example if you check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment#History_of_internme...

you will find examples going back more than 300 years, and I'm sure a historian can find even earlier examples.

Internment camps of various kinds happen by EVERY war, not just this one.

> it's willful blindness to ignore the deep similarities between a policy of containing and suppressing a racial group, and a policy of containing, suppressing, and exterminating a racial group.

No, it's willful blindness to think this was unique in any way to WW2. "Camps" is NOT the important or interesting thing about that war, it is an almost trivial detail.

Your framing it that way makes it as if it was something specially important. But in actuality it is a minor footnote compared to what they DID in those camps.

It's like saying "An important note about the 21st century is that humans lived in houses. People in both apartments and individual homes had wide access to cellphones."

You are focusing on the wrong thing.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse