Weren’t there quite a few Native Americans in North America at one time, too?
The reason this won’t happen is the USA is because we have plentiful food, land, and wealth. We have a mostly respected form of government, no dictators. What is there to kill about?
Western Industrial nations. At the time of the Westward Expansion, we didn’t really qualify. Besides, that was more of a war of conquest rather than a genocidal policy carried out against our own.
But of course, that’s the key to a genocide. They aren’t “our own.” They’re “the others.” It percolates just below the surface in all of us. “Get rid of them and the problem is solved.” Any time the majority of us can agree on who “them” is, the knives will come out. Fortunately, in this country, ask any 10 people who “they” are and you’ll get 15 mutually exclusive answers.
Unlike Argent Towers, I have no illusions about stopping the government and all its might from killing me if they wish. But I remain more than capable of stopping any lesser group from attempting the same.
In Collapse, Jared Diamond puts forth an interesting, if controversial hypothesis:
Genocide and other mass murders by government/tribal agencies are far more likely to take place in areas that are under ecological stress and have more population than they have resources to support it.
He went into detail with Rwanda, citing the practice of families to break up the farm among their many sons, how difficult it was to buy land of any kind, how many young men had no work and no way to support them. The land there was overfarmed, erosion was a huge problem, and clean water sources were extremely hard to find.
From the numbers he researched, the majority of those killed in the Rwandan genocide (and I’m blanking on which was which, Tutsis and Hutus) were landowners. With the exception of a few old women accused of witchcraft, nearly all those murdered had resources the killers wanted - land for growing crops, access to clean water, housing, and money.
I think the same could be argued for the Holocaust. After World War I, Germany was bankrupted, and common people couldn’t pull together enough money for bread. While the Jews living there may not have been any better off, on average, there were enough Jews with the money and resources to live comfortably, they were a very easy scapegoat to grab hold of. The people of Germany benefitted both by the wholesale slaughter of Jews - freeing up more resources like homes and land - and the ramping up to a war economy.
I think blaming the Jews for being passive is a little simplistic. The Jews survived the past 4000 years of persecution by putting up with governments that came and went. Destroy the Temple? Well, okay. Move the Jews hundreds of miles from their homeland? They’ll survive. Sell them into slavery? A couple of hundred years, and they’ll be free again. I think many of them saw the beginnings of the Holocaust as yet another diaspora. After all, the Nazis didn’t advertise the Final Solution. They talked of internment camps, work camps, and relocation, not of wholesale slaughter.
Of course, thanks to the Holocaust, the entire culture of Judaism has shifted. No more passivity, thanks very much. Israel has held its spot in one of the most contentious areas on the globe. And it could be argued that because they’ve done so much to improve the land they’ve taken, they’ve guaranteed their own people won’t be involved in another such event.
It’s depressingly Malthusian, but under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that where a group of people had previously lived quite peacefully suddenly explodes into violence, and a large portion of the population is killed. Once the population can live within the limits imposed by its environment, things get peaceful once again.
I would say–and I think the U.N. definition backs me up–that genocide involves a the destruction of some sort of definable group, ethnic, cultural or religious, say. Chile was a military coup with brutal repression of dissidents. Nicaragua was a brutal civil guerilla war. Both were awful, but I don’t think they count as genocide. Even forms of ethnic repression don’t count as genocide, unless the repressed group is targeted for destruction or expulsion.
I thought of that and added the “20th/21st century” caveat to my post. I think the treatment of American Indians definitely counts as genocide, particularly the treatment of the Cherokee.
Western, industrialized nations work (more or less). The abundance and personal liberty seem sufficient to explain the lack of genocide in such places. How would a genocide actually occur, in nuts and bolts terms, in such a country?
A group without state backing wouldn’t get far. Suppose the skinheads made some big announcement that they were going to kill everybody not up to their standards of racial purity, and then actually started doing it. We’d call them terrorists (fair description), then the cops and the army would come out and it would end like Waco and they wouldn’t accomplish much in the way of ethnic cleansing.
Even with state backing, I don’t see how it would work. Imagine if the president held a press conference to announce that the army was going to round up group XYZ and send them ‘away’, and that regular citizens could help by pointing them out or detaining them personally, if they want. Congress would impeach and people at all levels of the state and federal governments would hold their own press conferences to tell everybody to not comply.
Even if the genocide party could find a way to pack the entire government with their own people and filled the air with propaganda, it wouldn’t work. None of my friends and family with military or police experience would have gone along with transporting ‘undesirables’ to concentration camps, much less gassing their fellow citizens or shooting them in their homes. Aside from a few widely denounced morons (like skinheads), nobody would lift a finger against their neighbors. Why would they? The only upside would be thrill of killing people for no reason without consequences, and I can’t see many people in the West getting into that.
Personal liberty takes no time at all to wither away. Especially under economic pressure.
I think it is a little absurd to say that the Nazis were a fluke of history, but Rwanda was a natural result of how they did things. Both those things happened, and both have their reasons.
Why not? Because we aren’t blood thirty savages?
You really need to stop getting your ‘facts’ about military operations from 'Eighties survivalist films; keeping Red Dawn on constant loop is great for Reagan-era kitsch, but it is going to skew your sense of reality. The examples thus far cited–the Viet Cong and the Mujahedeen of Afghanistan–were hardly small groups of partisans equipped with IEDs; the Viet Cong were an organized force with both regular infantry, artillery, and guerrilla units, and were supplied by the PAVN which itself was exceptionally well equipped by the Soviet Union. (PAVN had, at the time, the most extensive SAM network in and around Hanoi, including SA-3 and SA-6 SAM installations and the effective and widely exported SA-7 MANPADS, as well as artillery, armor, jet aircraft, et cetera.) The Vietnamese also had long experience fighting in the mountainous jungles of northern Vietnam and repelling invaders from time immemorial.
The Mujahedeen were being equipped with East Bloc weapons for at least a yearsprior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as part of a three-cornered deal between Egypt, Pakistan, and the United States, later supplemented by arms transferred CIA-backed dealers including the infamous Stinger missiles. While closer to being a true insurgent force, they were hardly successful in pushing out the Soviets; while they held the mountain regions, the Red Army had very strong garrisons in what remained of all major cities, and maintained an occupying force in the country for a decade, before withdrawal due to the unpopularity of the war both at home and the international front, and the economic impact on Gorbachev’s attempts at market reform of the Soviet Economy.
The United States pulled out of Vietnam because we had no plan, goal, or indeed, a clue as to what we were doing there. American casualties were a fraction of what was suffered by the VC and PAVN, not even including the massive civilian loss of life by the Vietnamese. If there had been an actual, clear military objective the United States military could likely have achieved it. The current difficulty the United States is experiencing in Iraq isn’t because insurgents are so effective and mobile that the military can’t catch up with them; it is that they are blended in with noncombatants which the military is, under the cameras of the world media, taking great pains not to kill. It would be a nearly trivial exercise to level Baghdad, if that were considered an acceptable solution.
From a technical standpoint, an IED isn’t going to significantly damage a modern tank. Aside from damaging a tread linkage or the exhaust ducting, there just isn’t much that an improvised sapper charge or even a MANPADS can do to a modern main battle tank like the Abrams or Challenger. The threat from IEDs in Iraq comes to soldiers in Humvees and LAVs. And a rocket propelled grenade would be a nearly hopeless weapon to use against a helicopter gunship unless it is sitting inert on the ground. Partisans and insurgents can be a real pain in the ass to small groups, but they’re rarely a genuine threat to a main battle force.
This is complete bolsh. Genocides in sub-Saharan Africa have been occurring almost continuously over the last decade with all parties well-armed. Ditto for ethnically-driven mass murders in the former Yugoslavia. Certainly possessing weapons gives the wielder some measure to defend himself against a small number of attackers, but this does not translate into the ability to indefinitely hold off an organized force, except in John Milius films and bad apocalyptic science fiction novels.
As for the question of the o.p., the sine qua non for an effective genocide is that you have to break people into two definitive groups–“Us” and “Them”–and then give a pressing reason to persecute ‘Them’ (i.e. hopeless economic inflation, resource deprivation, starvation, et cetera). This is, as phouka notes, the impetus and justification for all recorded genocides. Even the poorest demographics in the United States have it all too well to get up in arms, and as silenus notes, even though a lot of people hate somebody, practically nobody agrees who to hate, or at least not enough to get more than a half-hearted White Power Militia group together for a boozy Saturday afternoon of “training”.
I can imagine that it is pretty difficult to hear over your own boorish braying, but you might consider turning off Fox News and getting a bit of sunshine and fresh air.
Stranger
So there.
Because otherwise the logic of everybody owning guns is non-existent. How else can you counter the obvious fact that hundred of thousands of people in this country have been killed by guns except by making up an imaginary claim that millions would have been killed without guns.
If somebody tries to kill me, I’ll just punch him in the nose. That’ll work - unless he’s got a gun.
We most certainly are bloodthirsty savages. People kill each other all the time. But, in western, industrialized countries we typically kill individually, usually friends and family out of anger (the most common murder in the USA, I am told) or strangers during commission of other crimes, or because of mental illness. We rarely kill our countrymen due to political ideology, ethnic hatred, or competition for scarce resources. Our governments do that to people in other countries and we largely ignore it. Which is part of my point. The vast majority of people in prosperous countries have what they need to live a very good life by global standards and don’t care enough about ideology to get engage in mass killing over it or to pay attention when it happens to someone else.
Also, I never said the Nazis were a fluke of history.
Stranger, I usually agree with you, but honestly, I can’t imagine what kind of universe you’re living in that you would dismiss my assertion that people should try to stand up to genocide as “boorish.” I just flat-out can’t understand.
I could be wrong, but I think he was referring to your dismissal of anyone not down with armed insurrection as “sheep”.
Anyone who wouldn’t stand up to genocide is a sheep. Unless they had an easy way of escaping to a safe place, their only other alternative is to let themselves and their family be killed. They could put up a fight and possibly die trying, or they could just die, period.
Because you’ve been changing your assertion.
Your original assertion was, if I may paraphrase, “The sole (or principal) reason that there hasn’t been an attempted genocide in the United States is because of the number of privately owned firearms.”
This statement is nonsense on its face.
How do you know it’s nonsense?
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Because you haven’t analyzed and eliminated other factors that are likely to influence a societal breakdown that would lead to attempted genocide.
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Because the United States is not the only country where ownership of firearms is common.
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Because places where attempted genocide has occurred have not shown any pattern of ownership/non-ownership of arms. As has been pointed out, in Rwanda, the genocidaires and the genocide victims were matched as far as arms were concerned.
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Because you have not offered any statistics on the real distribution of firearms in the country. If is the case that ownership is dominated by one identity group or that another identity group is notably unarmed, that would be no bar to attempted genocide at all.
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Because, fundamentally, if a majority or ruling group is worked up enough to attempt genocide, the private ownership of arms by a minority (because that’s who genocides target), while it might cause some contravening casualties and might result in an earlier end to the attempted genocide, would not be enough to prevent a large number of casualties.
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Becuase, so far, your examples have been bullshit. Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam – none of those involved attempted genocide. In any case, as has been pointed out, the Vietnamese suffered far heavier casualties than the U.S. did. Do you think if the U.S. military had actually embarked on a deliberate campaign of genocide that it wouldn’t have achieved some rather fantastic results? Iraq and Yugoslavia are, in fact, pretty good examples of successful ethnic cleansing. Heavily armed Shiites have not been able to prevent being pushed out of Sunni neighbourhoods, and vice versa.
Why don’t you support your assertion with either facts or arguments by recognized experts?
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.