Gov. Pedro Pierluisi: ‘Puerto Rico will be the first truly Hispanic state’

[Dill]

(03-07-2021, 12:51 PM)Forever Spinning Vinyl Wrote: Hollodero referred to Puerto Rico as a colony.
Jason comically added that we prefer to call them a territory probably because it sounds less imperialistic to what Hollodero was implying?

Then I added how slave labor in WWII is bad when the Nazis did it but if worded differently it takes on a whole different meaning when we, the supposed good guys, did the same thing. Kind of like one man's Inheritance tax is another man's Death tax.

It had little to do with Puerto Rico and more to do with a play off of their word usage.

Lol way to go Vinyl. You just triggered an off topic digression. Let's look more closely at the differences between Nazi and U.S. "slave labor" in the example of WWII.

The U.S. treatment of prisoners of war was based upon U.S. and international law, both founded upon the liberal conception of universal human rights, with its implied universal equality of humans.

Enemy soldiers, not civilians, could be imprisoned if  taken in war but were not "property" of the victor. They could be held until hostilities end, e.g., with the destruction of the opposing state, at which time the prisoners revert to the status of individuals with the same rights to freedom and dignity as everyone else--provided they don't take up arms again and are not guilty of war crimes. Their private property returned to them, along with that of civilians. Prisoners were sometimes forced to labor, in part to keep them busy, as are civilian prisoners in peacetime. (E.g. German soldiers worked on sugar beet farms in Montana during WWII.)

Nazi treatment of prisoners was illiberal, not based on a conception of universal human rights. Excepting "Aryans," civilian populations were enslaved along with military prisoners, their property permanently confiscated by the Reich. There was no plan to free them after the war. Treatment of prisoners was partly race-based and partly pragmatic. British, Norwegians and Danes were treated well. Russians and Poles were worked to death and used for lethal medical experiments. Where burdensome or a drain on resources, they were simply executed. (The diets of Russian prisoners at Buchenwald, as with Jews in Auschwitz, were calculated to produce death by attrition after 5-6 months of labor, making room for new prisoners.) Americans were treated well (Malmedy excepted) to insure that German prisoners in the U.S. and Great Britain were treated well.

There are indeed ironies with U.S. definitions and application of wartime law during the great world war against fascism, starting with our use of a segregated army to defeat the racists. But I don't think, in the case of prisoner treatment, it's just toMAYto/toMAHto.