The tinder is dry and will explode with the slightest spark. One more major terror attack in the US that can be traced back to Muslims, and the purge will begin. Look for Muslim concentration camps in the US and guys like Michael Flynn will happily make plans for the final solution.
Native Americans just in the last month stopped (or at least suspended) the building of an oil pipeline near NA lands. That’s exactly the kind of thing they did 150 years (although not quite so peacefully all the time) that caused genocidal policies to be enacted.
Past performance is not indicative of future results.
What would it take to get major powers to commit genocide? Given their track record (the United States toward the American Indian populations, the Russian and Chinese toward minorities within their own countries), I would say: the opportunity to get away with it and maybe a few weeks to build the necessary infrastructure.
So, Trump seems to be assigning collective guilt for these attacks on “humanity”, attacks that didn’t even happen in the US. He takes advantage of any attack (even those that have not yet been linked to terrorism) to advance his race- and religion-based objectives. I’m not saying we’re on the express train to Genocideville, but when an authoritarian leader says that those other people are a threat to humanity, and the leader doesn’t draw a clear distinction between actual perpetrators and innocent people who happen to belong to the same religion (and remember this is a guy who advocated attacking the families of terrorists), that’s not a good sign. Those are dangerous ideas that should be opposed by other political leaders, by the media, by religious groups, by everyone. And that’s not happening.
I’d say that the main thing that we’d need in order to see genocide would be some kind of clear and present threat serious enough to make a large majority of the people think that murdering all the followers of a religion or of a region of the world was a good idea. In other words, extremely unlikely.
However, I think it’s not at all unlikely that we could see a series of encroachments on a group’s civil rights, possibly including expulsion from the country and/or imprisonment/sequestration.
Have something we want?
I think it’s bad, but not quite that bad. There would be intermediate stages (as there were before WWII.) Registration, restrictive laws against head-scarves, travel restrictions, other ugly stuff. Those would be our warning signs, and maybe they would be enough for us to stand in the way of further escalation.
“First they came for the Muslims, and I said…
‘Not this time, you son of a bitch!’”
How many nuclear explosions on American soil would it take for you be OK with straight up murdering Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?
I don’t think there would ever be a de Jure genocide such as a declared government policy of genocide but I could see a de facto genocide take place in the Middle East or some such after the five nukes scenario you proffered.
Well first, anything that’s going to be done along those lines will happen in Europe first. They’ve got a bigger problem by far.
The US is more likely to just restrict Muslim immigration, which some would like to call a human rights issue but just isn’t. We get to decide who comes here, no one has a right to come here.
I think one thing that could cause genocide among major powers would be a combination of 1) very high population and 2) suddenly deprivation of resources. In that situation eugenics might kick in and major powers might say, “We have too little food for too many mouths. Some folks just must die. Let’s start with the old, the mentally ill, the low-IQ, the handicapped, etc…”
Nowadays all you would need to do is sell the perception that these things are going on.
Actually, not have something that we already did - namely resistance to diseases like smallpox and measles. 75-90% of the deaths of native Americans were from that, not genocide.
Regards,
Shodan
PS - the urban legend about the smallpox-infected blankets didn’t really happen.
They didn’t do it alone. And one pipeline…suspended. Whelp, that about balances out the Trail of Tears, then…
Ho-ly shit, talk about victim-blaming…
Oh, I was unaware there’d been a completely revolutionary change in US relations with Native Americans, and that their lives are nowjust peachy-keen. *Present *performance is not giving hope for future anything.
“First we came for the Muslims, and I said nothing because I was the one coming for them.”
“First they came for the Muslims, and I said nothing because I wasn’t a Muslim.”
If we get to that point, I think it will be more like the former scenario than the latter for some of Trump’s supporters. Five nukes would most likely be enough for the country of origin of whoever was responsible to be on the receiving end of a genocide. One nuke would likely be enough for significant civil rights violations but not a full on genocide.
I think the event at Kittanning, PA is well documented. British officers during the French and Indian War, and the Natives were not warlike. At other times, Brits and Americans took revenge on whatever Natives were available, even the ones who they were completely friendly with before another tribe killed some whites.
Indians did resist, and some resisted by killing white settlers who ventured out too far. Or evangelists who were dumb enough to preach against the local Shaman’s beliefs. White response was always disproportional.
The same thing that nearly killed the Japanese: an intolerable enemy which will not back down. An enemy which can rightfully be given an ultimatum of “surrender or die” that would choose “die”. Islam as a whole does not meet that standard, but some branches of Islam probably do.
Ahem. Here’s what you posted (that I was responding to), emphasis added
This thread is asking, “what would it take to get the major powers to commit genocide”. I’m not interested in silly semantic games.
At any rate, it’s your thesis. Given recent events it seems to have no predictive value.
Uhm, yes there is a revolutionary change in US relations with Indians compared to how things were 150 years ago*, which is the foundation your thesis is based on.
*Which was when the US did take genocidal action against Native Americans
Primo Levi, I believe, had a quote which encapsulated this feeling succinctly:
“It happened, therefore it can happen again.”