China! Reform those Things that We Can’t Call “Gulags”.
Yesterday was the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. For those of you who don’t remember, the Chinese government cracked down on anti-government protests using their military. In the two days, June 3-4, 1989, the Chinese military killed somewhere between 400-800 of its own citizens (though the protestors claimed as many as 7000 were killed).
Amnesty International issued a press release commemorating the anniversary and condemning the Chinese government for its human rights abuses. Unfortunately, the condemnation was so weak that it almost earned the Quotation Marks of Sarcasm.
The report, for one, lowballs the number of people killed – noting only a third of the way into the report, the number of 126.
The most notable ommission, though, is this one. Here’s a quote from the press release.
EU ministers specifically pointed to the need for the release of individuals still held in prison for their involvement in Tiananmen, along with other improvements in human rights such as reform of the Chinese system of detention without trial known as ‘Re-education through Labour’.
“Detention without trial” and “Re-education through Labour”?
Okay, folks, what do we call a series of facilities where people are thrown into work camps without trial, are held there indefinitely, or until they are “reeducated”?
We call them “gulags”.
How did Amnesty International actually manage to pefectly describe the Chinese prison system as gulags yet entirely avoid using the word?
I suppose they thought that they could only use the word once a week and since they had spent it describing Guantanamo Bay as “the gulag of our times”, they couldn’t use it here.
Even if it meant using to word to describe an actual gulag.
Michelle Malkin has thoughts and related links here.
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Category: Moonbat Nonsense
What bothers me the most about this is that they don't even realize how ridiculous they look. They've obviously lost all contact with reality.