History's forgotten atrocities?

[cckerberos]

@Lynwood Slim

Max Hastings, in his book Armageddon, describes the last year of WWII in Europe. He details the Soviet invasion of eastern Germany, where an estimated one million civilians were killed.

Antony Beever also covers this in his excellent book The Fall of Berlin, 1945. In general, I think there is ignorance of the post-war fates of ethnic Germans outside Germany (a group most aren’t inclined to symphatize with).

[Euthanasiast]

@Evil Captor

Good point. IIRC, the Old Testament has passages where the Hebrews, presumably acting under God’s command, attacked other tribes and killed all the men and enslaved the women. It was apparently commonplace enough to go in the Holy Book as Business as Usual for God’s chillun at the time.

Numbers, 31 and beyond…

They were ordered to kill all men and women who weren’t virgins, but to keep all virgins for themselves.

It’s the kind of stuff they never discussed all those Sundays where I went to church.

[Blake]

@raz

What about the Aboriginal people from mainland Australia? They were hunted, treated like animals and sold into slavery.

Since this is GQ can we please have a reference that any Aborigine was ever sold as a slave?

We are supposed to be discussing factual points here, not outrageous overstatements.

[raz]

Okay, maybe not sold into slavery, but definitely treated as such. I may have gotten a little ahead of myself there, I apologise.

From Wikipedia
As large sheep and cattle stations came to dominate outback Australia, Aboriginal women, men and children became a significant source of labour (primarily as domestic servants or station-hands), sometimes on a voluntary basis, but often under conditions that amounted to virtual slavery. For European workers, life in the outback was harsh, dangerous and ill-paid; for Aboriginal workers it was usually worse yet. Most indigenous labour was unpaid, instead indigenous workers received rations in the form of food, clothing and other basic necessities. However many indigenous workers were never paid for their work. Thousands of Aboriginal workers across several generations lost an estimated $500 million because of the Queensland Government’s negligence, through diverting withheld wages to raise government revenue, and through misuse of Trust monies. There has been a similar scandal in New South Wales, where ‘stolen wages’ have been estimated at between $64 and $80 million dollars.

A quick search turned up this page about “blackbirding”, but I can’t vouch for its authenticity.

World Wide Words: Blackbirding

[Grim_Jaa]

Re: Japanese Textbooks
There is a huge flap going on now here in South Korea precisely because Japanese school books gloss over Imperial Japanese atrocities especially in reference to thousands of Korean women forced into prostitution, known as “comfort women”.

Also the sickening activities of Japan’s Unit 731 based in Harbin China. They performed experiments on humans (mostly Koreans and Chinese which they referred to as ‘logs’) that made what the Nazi’s did look benevolent in comparison.

Is it completely ignored? No, but the whole reason the Chinese and Korean governments are upset over the new Japanese textbooks is because they significantly white-wash these topics.

[Blake]

@raz

Okay, maybe not sold into slavery, but definitely treated as such. I may have gotten a little ahead of myself there, I apologise.

The big thing to realise is that a lot of people were ‘treated as slaves’ by that standard before the advent of widespread effective unionism. Talk to the Chinese workers on the US railways or governesses in British homes. Maybe that makes it an atrocity and maybe it doesn’t, but the thing to realise is that such treatment was normal and in no way restricted to Aborigines in Australia, it was applied to almost any socially disadvantaged individual anywhere in the world. And such “atrocities” can scarcely be considered forgotten, talk to any ardent unionist to get a detailed description. Maybe a US unionist wouldn’t know about exploitation of station hands in Australia and an Australian Unionist wouldn’t know about exploitation of gangers in the US nor would a British unionist, but insofar as the above labour relations behaviour is an ‘atrocity’ it is well remebered soclailly and verbally and heavily documented.

This is where this thread inevitably slips into GD territory. Some things are indisputably atrocities simply because they led to numerous deaths or permanent physical disablity, however many people are going to want to consider things like unfair labour relations to be atrocities of an equaivalent type, which hardly seems warranted IMO.

[clairobscur]

@Stranger On A Train

The carpetbombing of Vietnam and the rampant use of defoliants in that conflict don’t speak too highly of our inate aversion to atrocity, either.

Stranger

By the way, the carpetbombings of Cambodia during the same war are rarely mentionned, despite having killed many Cambodians. I didn’t know the number of victims, so I googled quicly and the first figure I found gave a estimate of 200 000 victims (but I don’t vouch for its accuracy).