Genocide in the U.S. -- Now -- Why Not?

Great Debates
101

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Not really. Organization is more important, followed by numbers. Genocides have occurred long, long before guns. And as the saying goes, an army is never outnumbered by a mob. Even a mob that’s defending itself.
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That’s an allusion to a saying, “He who has the guns makes the rules.” It applies equally well to all weapons and all times.

Vikings didn’t allow thralls to have any weapons, including knives in most cases. European peasants were forbidden to possess bows above a certain draw weight, were not allowed to have armor, swords, or spears. In some cases, even the length of staves was controlled. The further up the social ladder you went, the fewer the restrictions on arms. Yeomen for example were allowed to have stronger bows and, depending on the time and place, could have simple arms.

One of the reasons Japan was relatively peaceful during the Tokugawa era was because no one had weapons. Not just muskets, but swords and pole arms were taken away from virtually everyone who didn’t have direct approval from the top to have them. The Shogun went through a few rounds of disarming the populace to make sure there wouldn’t be any armed uprisings. While nominally peaceful, this was one of the most brutally repressive regimes in Japan’s entire history.

People have pointed to Saddam’s inability to disarm the Kurds as a reason that he resorted to chemical weapons against them rather than directly engage and take losses among his regular armed forces and security. After the first Gulf war, the availability of weapons to the various factions that he’d been keeping more or less in check led him to use more and more repressive tactics in an attempt to maintain control when he didn’t have an overwhelming armed superiority over them.

I wouldn’t dispute that organization is important, but you are again discounting the importance of weapons. It matters, it matters a lot.

102

That seems to me a difference of “degree”, rather than a difference of “kind”. In both L.A. and Rwanda, members of one ethnic group attacked members of another ethnic group. L.A. had a lower mortality rate, but it was the same basic behavior.

103

[QUOTE=Really Not All That Bright]
it isn’t necessarily true that being armed would be useless if some hypothetical evil government decided to do you in
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The trouble I have with this concept is that in a genocide situation it’s not just the government who are trying to do you in. Its the government plus the rest of the population. So if you are armed, all your neighbours are armed too, and they know where you live, and they hate you and want to burn down your house with you and your family in it. They can go to the same stores you went to and stock up on weapons and ammo just as easily as you did - except they’re more likely to get a bulk deal or a special price because they’re going to “scrag them dirty dope-readers” or whatever.

Whether you and the mob of 50 people are all armed with sticks or all armed with AK47s would seem to have little bearing on the likely result. They just need to get one person close enough to loft a molotov cocktail onto your house and it’s all over.

Guns seem to have this weird fetish-object status. They’re not Opression-Repelling™ or TheSourceOfAllEvil™, they’re just fairly simple devices used by people. If they are universal in the population, they confer no particular status or advantage to any one individual relative to another, so I can’t see how they make any difference.

[QUOTE=Sleel]
People have pointed to Saddam’s inability to disarm the Kurds as a reason that he resorted to chemical weapons against them
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But now you are talking machine guns, mortars, RPGs, artillery, SAMs, landmines - all the stuff which is virtually impossible to obtain even in the US. If that’s your definition of ‘armed’ then even the US population is unarmed.

The closest hypothetical I can think of is the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW2. If in a fit of revenge-fuelled xenophobia the government had decided that the best solution to the problem was to dump them all in a barbed-wire enclosure at the end of a railway line into the Mojave desert and let them all die of thirst, what exactly could they have done about it? Would guns, or organisation, or anything in particular have helped them in the face of a hostile government and population?

I stick by my original opinion, that safety from genocide lies in NOT having a larger part of the population hate you coherently enough to mobilise themselves, and subvert the government, into killing you. Fortunately, in the US hating people to the point of wanting to kill them just because of what they are is pretty much regarded as evidence of insanity at this moment in time, hence genocide seems almost inconcievable. However, never say never.

104

[QUOTE=mbh]
That seems to me a difference of “degree”, rather than a difference of “kind”. In both L.A. and Rwanda, members of one ethnic group attacked members of another ethnic group. L.A. had a lower mortality rate, but it was the same basic behavior.
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A fair point, although I’d argue that the difference in degree is all-important. It’s not like African-Americans in LA County are normally engaged in ethnically cleansing Asian storeowners.

Genocide is systematic; rioting is anything but.

105

[QUOTE=Really Not All That Bright]
I heard numerous anecdotes about Jennifer Love Hewitt having three vaginas, you know…

Anyway, you do understand that “genocide” does not equal “rioting”, right? And that “looting x-owned businesses” does not equal “ethnic cleansing”? Well, maybe you don’t. But they don’t.
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If you’d bothered to check anywhere, you would have found that bdh’s comment was correct. They weren’t just anecdotes, there was news footage (relevant portion starting at about 1:00 in) of impromptu militias in the area defending barricades. This was in response to the targeted violence of the rioters and the lack of protection from the government. Things didn’t start to calm down again until both the police and the National Guard were out in force. Until sometime around the third or fourth day, people dealing with rioters were essentially on their own.

The violence was racially charged. Whites were attacked first, and later the stores of primarily Koreans and other asians were targeted, apparently out of resentment for the relative success of the immigrant community. The main thing that kept it from turning into an actual ethnic bloodbath was probably the overall lack of organization among the rioters. If there had been any kind of leadership of the kind that would grow up under a totalitarian government, it would have been even nastier than it was. There is a difference between ethnic cleansing and widespread racial violence, but it’s a difference of degree, not kind. What we saw there was a microcosm of larger conflicts.

What keeps it from happening more in the US is that there’s a lot of cultural mixing and so a lot less tribalism than many other societies. There is a general rule of law; the American government doesn’t make a habit out of continually and habitually repressing specific minority groups. I think the most important thing is that — while it may not always happen in practice — in principal virtually all Americans value fairness. In places where your in-group is more important than laws, or shared cultural values like justice and equal treatment, the imbalances never get corrected, resentment builds up, and when the violence happens it goes until one or the other group is gone because there’s nothing to stop it before then.

106

[QUOTE=Sleel]
If you’d bothered to check anywhere, you would have found that bdh’s comment was correct. They weren’t just anecdotes, there was news footage (relevant portion starting at about 1:00 in) of impromptu militias in the area defending barricades.
[/QUOTE]

Er… actually, they were just anecdotes, because that’s what he posted. This thread is now in Great Debates. It’s not my job to find his evidence for him.

In any case, if you read the rest of my response, you’ll see that I took his claims at face value.

107

One for you, one for me, one for Argent Towers. :slight_smile:

108

[QUOTE=bump]
Hmm… change M16 to AK-47 and forest to Baghdad and things look a little different, huh?
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Except the US military isn’t engaging in genocide in Iraq.

We could eliminate the insurgents if we simply shot every human being we could find. If genocide is the goal, then shooting everyone is the way to accomplish this goal. And a couple of guys hiding out in the rubble might be still alive, but they aren’t exactly going to bring their families back from the dead, are they?

What do the insurgents in Iraq hope to accomplish? To cause so many American casualties that eventually the American public gets sick of it and goes home, and to make the Iraqi populace afraid to cooperate with the Americans. What do American troops in Iraq hope to accomplish? To prop up the pro-American government, stop the fighting, get the oil pumping, and set up bases where American forces can “influence” the surrouding region.

The insurgents aren’t going to kill all the American troops in Iraq. They can’t hope to win open battles against American troops. What they’re trying to do is harrass American troops, not fight them.

Now imagine the parallel situation of an American civil war. Is the fascist government going to get tired of taking casualties and head home? No, because they are already home. You’re never going to harrass the fascists into quitting. And since they’re fascists, they aren’t going to have many qualms about killing your family when you head out into the forest, are they? And you know how American forces typically find insurgents? When Iraqi civilians get sick of the insurgents and point them out to American forces. You can hide out fairly effectively if the civilian population is sympathetic to you. What happens when they get sick of you? What happens when the sympathetic local population doesn’t exist anymore?

109

Here’s my opinion on why there is no genocide in the US and it has nothing to do with being armed: in the US there is too much to lose if one attempts genocide.

In Rwanda, where people were scratching out a living, people made the decision that it was worth risking the life they had to kill their neighbors. If they succeeded they could expect (in their minds) to live better by removing the competition.

In the US this is rarely true, mainly because almost all of us have too good a life to risk it by attacking someone else. The risk of dying or going to prison is too great when compared to any perceived benefit an attack on one’s neighbors might have.

If the US economy were to completely collapse and law enforcement break down (and I am in no way suggesting that it will) then the chances of genocide will go up and I don’t care how well-armed the population is. More guns will just mean everybody dies quicker.

110

[QUOTE=Quartz]
Tell that to the Afghans who drove out the Soviet Union.
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They had some help.

111

I guess none of you were around for 1967-8 when we had riots. Stores were busted into and wealth was rapidly redistributed. I was in Detroit and it looked like Baghdad when the looting started there. It was black against cops and looting , not really black on white. We went to sleep with the sounds of gun shots ringing over and over. The booms when gas stations blew up. were unmistakable. It was clear that it was possible for a segment of our population to demonstrate their unhappiness in a violent way. Many were afraid that it would spread to the suburbs. But they only acted against what they saw as neighborhood exploiters.
We have the largest prison population in the world by far. That would belie that we have a peaceful society. In many places America is a dangerous place to live.

112

[QUOTE=gonzomax]

We have the largest prison population in the world by far. That would belie that we have a peaceful society. In many places America is a dangerous place to live.
[/QUOTE]

It is more likely that other countries just shoot the people who break the law…or have such brutal penalties that people actually FEAR to break the law. Steal a candy bar in the US and get a slap on the wrist. In some places they just cut the wrist off of the offending arm.

113

[QUOTE=ManiacMan]
It is more likely that other countries just shoot the people who break the law…or have such brutal penalties that people actually FEAR to break the law. Steal a candy bar in the US and get a slap on the wrist. In some places they just cut the wrist off of the offending arm.
[/QUOTE]

Cite correlation between low prison population, low crime, and lopping off body parts as a judicial sanction.

114

duplicate

115

[QUOTE=ManiacMan]
It is more likely that other countries just shoot the people who break the law…or have such brutal penalties that people actually FEAR to break the law. Steal a candy bar in the US and get a slap on the wrist. In some places they just cut the wrist off of the offending arm.
[/QUOTE]
Of course. Legalizing brutality by the law and putting the people who would be criminals here in charge of the law DOES cut down on crime. Why be a criminal when you can assault and exploit and kill people as the law ? The Soviet Union also was like that; when it fell, plenty of former KGB went straight into organized crime from what I’ve heard.

However, I don’t think it’s an improvement to legally be beaten by someone, instead of illegally.

116

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
However, I don’t think it’s an improvement to legally be beaten by someone, instead of illegally.
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Well, you do get the proper paperwork, at least.

No, they cut the wrist off of the convicted arm, and if the wrapper of the ill-gotten candy bar turns up in someone else’s jeans pocket, you’re still short one upper extremity.