Gulag inmates were sentenced by courts to the gulags for fixed terms (e.g. 10 years). As far as anybody knows, nobody ever gets out of CECOT, and many confined there have never been taken before a judge or received a penal sentance. Inasuch as the El Salvador government does intend to keep the men it has imprisoned in CECOT as slave laborers for the rest of their lives, I think comparisons to the camps of the Nazi regime are not out of line.
If the detainees are forced to do hard labor unto death, that would be identical to Nazi slave labor camps, but putting people in harsh prisons without parole is not an extermination camp. It's like the cheapening of the word "genocide" to mean any kind of brutality, human rights violations or war crimes someone wants to use the word for. If "trying to wipe out an entire people by killing them off" isn't what "genocide" means anymore, we need a different word that does mean that.
Probably not a conversation I want to go along with very far but there are acts of genocide that don't involve immediate murder: "Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. " This is from the UN in 1948 I think but it covers adopting children out to erase their language and culture and forced sterilizations.
Right. But if the word doesn't mean an attempt to wipe a people out, we need a different word for that. And if harsh prisons are "extermination camps," we need another term for places where people are gathered to be murdered.
How many years has it been in operation? Also, during Stalin's reign, millions and millions of people were shot dead. So I don't know in which context the gulags were better. Not in Stalin's time, at least.
Not an extermination camp. But it is a concentration camp. Or, more accurately, a gulag.
Yes a prison with forced labor, thrash conditions and a medium death rate i.e Gulag.
Gulag inmates were sentenced by courts to the gulags for fixed terms (e.g. 10 years). As far as anybody knows, nobody ever gets out of CECOT, and many confined there have never been taken before a judge or received a penal sentance. Inasuch as the El Salvador government does intend to keep the men it has imprisoned in CECOT as slave laborers for the rest of their lives, I think comparisons to the camps of the Nazi regime are not out of line.
The police officers are also given arrest quotas which have been known to cause innocents to end up in the gulag.
If the detainees are forced to do hard labor unto death, that would be identical to Nazi slave labor camps, but putting people in harsh prisons without parole is not an extermination camp. It's like the cheapening of the word "genocide" to mean any kind of brutality, human rights violations or war crimes someone wants to use the word for. If "trying to wipe out an entire people by killing them off" isn't what "genocide" means anymore, we need a different word that does mean that.
Agreed - I really don't like the overuse of the word "genocide" that we've seen so frequently recently.
Probably not a conversation I want to go along with very far but there are acts of genocide that don't involve immediate murder: "Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. " This is from the UN in 1948 I think but it covers adopting children out to erase their language and culture and forced sterilizations.
Right. But if the word doesn't mean an attempt to wipe a people out, we need a different word for that. And if harsh prisons are "extermination camps," we need another term for places where people are gathered to be murdered.
"As far as anybody knows, nobody ever gets out of CECOT"
That's a pretty good point; has anyone ever been recorded actually getting out of there? If not, in many ways it's WORSE than the gulags.
How many years has it been in operation? Also, during Stalin's reign, millions and millions of people were shot dead. So I don't know in which context the gulags were better. Not in Stalin's time, at least.
I'm fine with "gulag," not extermination camp!