this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
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We Americans would do well to remember how the Germans will never be able to clean off that stain.
We Americans would do well to remember that we already had concentration camps in the US at least twice already. Not to mention The Trail of Tears, and The Long Walk.
The Germans need a better PR.
The Nazis ran industrialized death camps. Concentration camps are horrific, but their purpose is mass imprisonment, not mass murder. There's a reason that the Nazis are remembered with especial horror, and it's not inferior PR.
So the trail of tears was less of a tragedy because it wasn't industrialized?
Industrialized death camps are an exceptionally bad form of ethnic cleansing, which, itself, is always bad, yes. I don't know why that's suddenly controversial.
Like saying that being crucified is a worse way to be executed than hanged. It should be evident that both are bad, and yet one is worse.
True, but it would be intellectually dishonest of you to imply they were equivalent in terms of horror or infamy.
Which it very much seems like you're doing.
The term originated here. We called the ones in Germany Death Camps.
The only reason they aren't as infamous is that we did it earlier, so there aren't pictures and movies documenting the atrocities we committed against the natives, Mexicans, Canadians, and whomever else gets in our way.
I still reject your assertion that the holocaust wasn't worse than the Trail of Tears.
The term originated with the Spanish in Cuba.
what
There absolutely are?
American use of concentration camps doesn't come into play until the Philippines and then Japanese-American internment in WW2, and both are well-documented. And prior atrocities against the Native Americans also have plentiful pictorial evidence.
There are plenty of photographs of stuff we did against the natives, sure. I don't believe for two seconds that the average high school educated American has ever seen them. We don't go out of our way to teach that shit.
Thanks for the clarification about the Spanish doing it earlier than we did.
I suspect it very much depends on your era and region of schooling. I was not exactly attending a top school or in top classes, and the most infamous atrocities of the Indian Wars were covered in US History in high school. But I was in a blue state.
That is certainly probable. I wouldn't expect the highschools in IN to have a particularly progressive curriculum
Don't worry, we're working on making sure Germany's past is tame by comparison.