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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37970 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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By today's standards, these camps would be a human rights violation. Of course, the state of the imprisoned had set a really low bar for human rights.

I would still argue that there is a difference in degree between Nazi soldiers who plunged Europe into war and genocided millions and homeless who shit in the streets of San Francisco. Sometimes you have to commit actions of dubious human rights status to stop more severe human rights violations from going on, and the severity of what you try to stop should be considered.

There are some more differences to consider, though:

  • The Nazi soldiers were used to follow the orders of their officers. Military prisoners can self-organize in a way that ideally limits the amount of prisoner-on-prisoner violence.
  • The people in these camps were selected only by their willingness to surrender instead of dying the Heldentod for their Fuehrer, and as such represented a normal cross-section of men in society. Granted, they were indoctrinated with Nazi propaganda, but it is not like they had any Jews or commies to victimize. By contrast, the people populating civil prisons -- or even homeless camps -- are heavily selected for aggression or mental health problems, respectively.
  • Most of the prisoners were there for a single summer. This would explain the exceedingly low death toll (6k over 2M, per Wikipedia). However, the Endloesung to the homeless question proposed in this thread was basically life imprisonment. Bad weather and infectious diseases and the inability to control food distribution would likely cause significant attrition even if no explicit violence took place among the inmates.

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