Soviet Union did exactly that - they had gulags.

North Korea is doing exactly that as we speak.

Read up on the gulags sometime.

It’s not a competition, we’ll probably look back at prisons in the future and be like “wtf were they thinking?” the same way our generation looks at previous generations and the normalization of slavery.

However, the vitriolic response that people have to the very idea that we could possibly be doing the same things is worthy of some introspection today.

The White Sea & Baltic Canal was dug by hand by Gulag prisoners. You can't be serious?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag#Conditions

We have hard labor. That's why the 13th amendment makes an exemption to the ban on slavery for prisoners.

In the gulags that effort was at least spent on public works projects, here it's to make rich people slightly richer with next to free labor.

There's hard labor and then there's "Among the prisoners there are some so ragged and liceridden that they pose a sanitary danger to the rest. These prisoners have deteriorated to the point of losing any resemblance to human beings. Lacking food . . . they collect orts [refuse] and, according to some prisoners, eat rats and dogs."

Mortality rate.

Which rate are you using on gulags? Both the Gulag Archipelago and Black Book of Communism have been disregarded by modern historians due to blatant inaccuracies.

Let’s use the Gulag administration’s own numbers. One and a half million.

How’s the death rate in the US prison system, then?

You have to account for age and gender. Prisoners are younger than average and overwhelming male. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/msp0114st.pdf (prisons); https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db328.htm (whole population).

If you look at Table 8, the death rate for 45-54 year olds in state prisons in 2014 was 342 per 100,000. For the 45-54 age group as a whole, the mortality rate was about 400 per 100,000. Note that the figure for prisons is mostly men, while the figures for the whole population is both men and women.

Accounting for the gender difference, the prison population has a lower death rate than the general population at the same age group. The difference is especially noticeable among younger prisoners. In the 25-35 demographic, the death rate in prison is 1/4 the general population. This is not surprising. Prisoners eat a controlled diet, they don’t drive, they have limited exposure to occupational hazards, etc.

All causes mortality rate in US prisons is higher than Germany or France, but comparable to Sweden and Switzerland at around 27.5 per 10,000 (note difference in denominator). http://www.statewatch.org/news/2017/apr/coe-annual-prison-st... (table 13)

Most of today's elite countries have unspeakable atrocities under their belt, even if you only consider the post-1900 modern era.

As do plenty of non-elite countries. What's your point? The Aztecs, for example, were practising human sacrifice until the Europeans pitched up. And in Papua New Guinea they were still eating people within living memory. I could also mention Cambodia, Rwanda - but I suppose that's all the West's fault as well.

Eat a couple of “enemies” is way better than mass incarceration in my opinion. I mean it’s just meat and only a few dozen people were killed...

i think about this too. hell, if hitler hadn't invaded russia / western europe the nazi's might still hold central europe

I realize this might be wrong and based on not reading enough history about it, but I’ve always understood that the Holocaust was not well documented until after the war.

Obviously many people fleeing Germany and the occupied countries during that period, knew something bad was happening, but overall, it’s my understanding that before and during the war, the rest of the world really wasn’t aware, or at least not aware about how bad it was.

It was the invasion of other countries that was cause to fight Germany. It was much less of a humanitarian act, though after the war it’s easy to paint it as one.

We knew. FDR is even on record making statements about how we weren't there to save the Jews. The US had opportunities to bomb the train system being used to transport the Jews and didn't. I can't provide links right now (I'll try to circle back later), but we absolutely knew what was going on. We just didn't want to believe it.

A lot of intel was from ULTRA

It was more complicated than that: the Polish government in exile knew at least as early as 1940 and by at least 1942 those had been corroborated by allies and there were official reports presented to allied governments, the UN, and covered in major newspapers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mass_Extermination_of_Jews...

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1942/02/13/852...

The catch, of course, is that governments don’t act with a single voice: during war time intelligence agencies would be loathe to confirm anything if it revealed information about their sources, and there were enough anti-semites and Nazi sympathizers that all but the most conclusive evidence might be downplayed or lead to consequences (reportedly, concern losing support in Hungary was a factor in not leading with what was happening to the Jews).

There were rumours of the atrocities, but probably the first public testimonies were the Auschwitz Protocols, based on first-hand experiences of a few concentration camp escapees. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_Protocols)

Read the document which was the subject of my first link and ask whether rumor was an appropriate word to describe an official report to the UN with eyewitness accounts:

https://archive.org/details/TheMassExterminationOfJewsInGerm...

Thanks, I was not aware of this document. However, its wikipedia page mentions that it was not widely believed at the time. Heck, even Auschwitz Protocols after it did not seem to have much success in reaching the audience (western world) for quite a while.

> It was more complicated than that: the Polish government in exile knew at least as early as 1940 and by at least 1942 those had been corroborated by allies and there were official reports presented to allied governments, the UN, and covered in major newspapers:

I had no idea that the "United Nations" was a thing during WWII (though it appears to be more of a synonym for the allies than the body we're familiar with today).

There’s more truth to this statement than I am comfortable with.

That is unfortunately most likely true. Stalin is a case in point.

yep, what Stalin did in Ukraine was comparable, while helpful idiots in Western press were praising him for education and healthcare

At least during Nazi Germany there was some interest in helping Jews escape. Yes, instances when ships of Jewish refugees were turned away from e.g. the USA have gone down in infamy, but there were still things like the Kindertransport. When it comes to the plight of the Uighurs, even fellow Muslim countries are loathe to provide any big public help due to the fear of alienating China.

If there's no support for Uighurs, who leaked the documents?