this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
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I'm not sure that's a bar you even clear, given the ice "detention centres" you set up domestically and places like abu ghraib or Gitmo you run on foreign soil. And as for criticising the government, what's the practical use if a felon and a billionaire can rig your election without any repercussions anyway?
"I can call trump a criminal online, that's freedom right there!"
"Will he actually be arrested?"
"Well no, but it feels good to say it"
I don't know who is this "you" person mentioned, but I'm thankfully not American and my country has done nothing of sorts.
Plus people are not tortured even in ice centers. Gitmo is another story, but those are war crimes, not genocide. I know, weird argument, but I like to be precise m
People aren't tortured with an iron maiden, but when you have conditions like under trump in 2020, and the suicide rate in ice detention jumped 11 times higher than the previous 10 year average, I don't think you can suggest ice detention is that far away from concentration camps.
Also, Gitmo isn't for enemy combatants - they can chuck anyone suspected of terrorism in there, even US citizens. It most definitely isn't exclusively "war crimes".
Negligence (and even cruelty) is different from literal torture and (allegedly) extermination of an ethnic/religious group.
Also, gitmo holds hundreds of people, not hundreds of thousands.
You're splitting hairs here for the sake of winning an argument. There's no practical difference between cruelty and torture to the people suffering it. "Oh and don't worry about it, because it's only hundreds, not thousands in this particular ~~torture~~ cruelty facility".
And as far as genocide goes, you're moving the goal posts here, but if we're playing that game, the native Americans might have something to say about that.
I mean, going back to the original argument here, my overarching point is really that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones and the US's track record of authoritarianism and human rights abuses is comparable enough to make them just as untrustworthy at the most and certainly not in any position to criticise a state who is trying to manage billions of people at the least.
There very much is difference between cruelty and torture, same as with 1st and 3rd degree burns and denying that is awful.
The native Americans are not being genocided today, Uygurs are. I don't know about you, but I cannot change the past.
The US track record is by no means clean, but miles away from the likes of China, specially in recent years. And you should be able to criticize both (or more) without whataboutism.