Do you think there is/are any possible action(s) that radical Muslims could do to get the American people / government / military to say “f*** it, just kill them all” and actually set out to systematically eliminate an entire religion from off the face of the Earth (or at least trying their hardest)?
For example, if they managed to steal five nuclear bombs and simultaneously detonate them in DC, NYC, LA, Houston, and Chicago? Do you think they’d get their apocalypse then? Or do you think America’s “genocide threshold” is higher than that? Lower?
I think that the U.S.'s genocide threshold will decrease significantly on January 20th…hopefully, not enough to actually cause such actions to occur, but it will take vigilance on the part of concerned citizens to be sure of that.
What do you think it will be under Trump (what’s the minimum set of actions that you believe it would take to have him order a genocide and have the US military follow through)?
What do you think that level ought to be? Or do you think the answer is “never, even if it were to mean our own extinction”?
I think probably every country is closer to embracing genocide than they think. Millions of Germans knew about the Holocaust and cheered it on. Thousands of Rwandans took up weapons and carried out a genocide by their own hands. What would it take for the US to go off the rails? Probably not as much as we’d like to think.
I don’t really believe in crystal balls and would prefer to think about what we as citizens should do to prevent what are clearly Trump’s authoritarian instincts and propensity to overreact and to scapegoat people.
Yes…Never is a good start. After this election, I am having a hard time believing that humans going extinct is such a bad thing.
Seriously though, why would you ever try kill all the members of one religion for the actions of a few nuts? Do you advocate circumstances where we did the same to Christians? For example, why should the international community not exterminated all the Bosnian Serbs (who are at least mainly Christians) after what they did there?
No shit. We are at present 99.9999999999999999% likely not to commit a genocide. Once the Donald is in office we are 99.9999999% likely not to commit a genocide.
EVERYBODY PANIC! WE ARE ONE BILLION TIMES MORE LIKELY TO COMMIT A GENOCIDE UNDER TRUMP!
p.s. don’t check my fucking math. I hit the 9 key a pseudo-random number of times. This post is obvious hyperbole.
Let’s maybe set aside religion for a moment. Let’s talk about a genocide of an entire nationality.
Hypothetical scenario: Obama does something on Tuesday to really piss off Putin. On Wednesday, the Russians launch a full-scale nuclear attack (targeting our population centers). Americans are going to be effectively wiped out in the next 30 minutes. Do you:
A) hope that President Obama retaliates in kind, thereby ensuring that our last act as a people is the genocide of the Russians?
OR
b) hope that President Obama does not retaliate, thereby allowing our murderers to ‘get away with it’?
I suspect that most Americans would choose option A, depending on how you worded the survey. Which one would you choose?
It would certainly lead to grossly over-the-top retaliation – God have pity on anyone living in the capital city of the nation that did it – but not to genocide itself. It might lead to internment camps in the U.S., which is bad enough, but not to the killing of everyone of that particular nationality.
Russia and China are probably slightly more likely to get into that game, but it would take a hell of a provocation. If Chechens or Armenians or Kazakhs did the 5-nuke thing, that might do the trick. For China, if the Tibetans did it, it could trigger that kind of reaction. (China is already practicing cultural genocide in Tibet.)
The US will never set out to commit genocide, but genocide could be the result if the enemy doesn’t surrender and the people they live among don’t give them up or kill them. During WWII, the Japanese were threatened with total annihilation if they didn’t surrender. In the face of a significant enough attack on the US by a nation, or sponsored by a nation, powerful enough to resist us militarily, the result would very likely look a lot like a genocide with millions dead in the offending country. Perhaps all of them if we got the sense that they would never truly surrender unconditionally.
Of course, for a fairly weak nation we’d just invade them, put up a government we liked in the place of the one that hurt us, and treat any insurgency with the brutality it would deserve, and if the insurgents would rather see their people die than surrender, then that’s on them. If the Japanese had continued guerilla resistance, do you really think we’d have treated it like a Vietnam situation? Hell no. We’d just continue the destruction of Japan until they actually gave up, and if the people of Japan and the remaining military wouldn’t help us root them out, then they would have been treated as complicit.
What you describe wouldn’t “look a lot like genocide”; it would in fact be genocide. It would be genocide adopted as a tactic or strategy to achieve some other end, rather than for its own sake, but it would still be genocide.
Who are these “Muslims” that would do this? Are envisioning some grand alliance between every Muslim majority country in the world? So, we have Indonesians working with Turks and Iranians and Albanians along with Saudis and Somalis…?
I think it makes more sense if one particular country sent 5 nukes at the West, would the West respond with total annihilation via nuclear weapons? I think it’s possible if there was some thought that more nukes were on their way.
Basically, you’re asking if we’d commit genocide in order to prevent being victims of genocide ourselves. Probably yes.
I think the problem with this OP is that you’re trying to figure out what sort of precipitating event could “rationally” lead a culture to committing genocide. But historically, genocide isn’t really a rational act. Consider: what did the Jews do that triggered the Holocaust? Nothing at all. What did the Tutsis do to trigger the Rwandan genocide? Nothing. What did Bosnia Muslims do? Nothing. These sorts of genocidal outbreaks seem to be irrational responses to economic and political problems that don’t have obvious or easy solutions.
Genocide is the intent to wipe out a people. When a nation won’t surrender no matter how much damage they take, and they get wiped out as a result, that’s just war. Genocide takes place with or without significant resistance on the part of the victims. A war that was fought fiercly and led to one side getting totally wiped out would just be a war.
No, when you “wipe out one side” that’s genocide. It was genocide when the bible advocated it, and it’s genocide now. It doesn’t matter whether there was a war or resistance or not. “Wiping out” an entire religion/race/nationality is genocide, regardless of the circumstances.
If the West ever did engage in genocide, it would be cultural genocide. Meaning they would Conquer unfriendly people and abolish their culture by force or at least try. I do not see the West killing 1.6 billion Muslims to punish a few hundred terrorists.
I could see Russia engaging in wholesale genocide in Chechnya if they set off nukes in major Russian cities. Kill everyone and fill. It with ethnic Russians. That is about it though.
Well, that might seem more common, yes, but it’s not universally the case. What did Carthage do to get Rome to wipe them out? Had three wars with them over the course of about 80 years. That’s the obvious example that comes to my mind, but I expect there are at least a few others throughout history where one side is sufficiently fed up of this war repeating itself that it decides to simply end all possible future conflict by making the other side no longer exist.
Genocide on the part of world leading countries is so common in history that the question is better, “what would it take to keep major countries from committing atrocities, including genocide?”