Splitting hairs between "death camp" and "torture camp" doesn't change the rhetorical meaning of their post, so they didn't score any additional "points" (who is keeping score? Is this a game?); systematically torturing people is just as depraved as systematically murdering them.
>systematically torturing people is just as depraved as systematically murdering them.
Going back to my previous comparison, does that mean you think Gitmo is basically Auschwitz, and the US (under Bush/Obama, when Gitmo was active) was "just as depraved" as the Nazis?
The conversation was about essence, and yes I think a torture camp has the same essence as a death camp.
Between Gitmo and Auschwitz, there's an obvious difference in magnitude, but there's no difference in direction; Gitmo evolves into Auschwitz. If you want to stop the next Auschwitz from happening, you have to stop the current Gitmo. The path to Auschwitz runs through normalizing Gitmo as "not that bad because it's just a torture prison. At least it's not a death camp".
One does not need to meet the bar of Auschwitz to be considered a death camp. A smaller death camp is still a death camp. This isn't a contest where only the worst one counts, we should be comfortable saying the holocaust was a uniquely horrifying evil thing and that also, other governments are doing horrifying things at a lesser scale that should still correctly be labelled a death camp.
