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Comment by MRSallee | Hacker News Reader

We've been worse than modern Canada and China since at least the 1930s. Wild.

Don't confuse yourself and your fellow neighbors with particular people with particular political power. You and a policeman carrying a gun are two different persons with different agendas. It is in interest of those in power to make you think that it's some abstract "country" that is responsible for actions you don't like, not some particular persons.

For those who are saying America is worse than China or Russia, mind that the data of China and Russia's historical imprisonment data is not well-documented and they were more prone to using executions.

Estimates vary wildly on how many people were executed, starved to death, murdered, or imprisoned during all of the Chinese Revolutions under Mao.

I'm certainly not defending the America prison system.

"""For those who are saying America is worse than China or Russia, mind that the data of China and Russia's historical imprisonment data is not well-documented and they were more prone to using executions."""

Yes, but he also didn't add the massacres and concentration camps for Native Americans (of which, Hitler writes in his Main Kampf that it was an "inspiring" solution to the problem), or the enslavement (any different than prison?) of black slaves, and their executions, lynching.

Those atrocities happened quite a bit earlier than 1930 (for the most part, anyway).

There were also the camps for Japanese people during WWII: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment

These camps are not the same as state sponsored execution.

That's what concentration camps are. You concentrate a demographic into a camp - it's a concentration of that kind of person. 'Concentration camp' is not a synonym for death camp.

Canadians too: http://www.law.ualberta.ca/centres/ccs/issues/japaneseintern...

Doesn't make it any less worse does it.

It certainly makes it less-relevant to the comment that started this thread.

And, arguably, it is better, because it may mean that we have made some moral progress.

The concentration camps (for native americans) were still active well into the 20th century. And even today, most of native americans live in lands ("autonomous regions") that they were send by the government, not their actual land (that their tribes lived in), and there's a lot of wrong-doing and resource grabbing in those areas.

As for the blacks, the legal system offered segregation until the sixties and the infamous "Jim Crow laws".

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