Hacker News Reader

Comment by dizzystar | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

"""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).

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".

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

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

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com