No. There were no US Einsatzgruppen, there was no US equivalent to the nazi Backe-Plan.
The US occupation of Japan was remarkably benign, for a country concerned with "systematic and indiscriminate extermination". You may wish to contrast this with, say, the behaviour of the Japanese Imperial Army within the Asian-Co-Prosperity sphere, which, while not really engaged in genocide, had a habit of large-scale massacres, gang rape, torture and enslaving the local Asian population which they considered as inferior, for all the propaganda about freeing Asia from the white man's rule.
If you really want to see what a blueprint for genocide looks like, I invite you to read about the Nazi Hunger plan [1]. Nothing the US did was even remotely like this.
Why bother when you can just drop some atomic bombs to test on them (to "make them surrender")? Or spray them with agent orange? Or just help Suharto get rid of some millions and let him do the footwork?
>The US occupation of Japan was remarkably benign, for a country concerned with "systematic and indiscriminate extermination"
Or course it was. As was their post-war dealings of West Germany. It helps that there was a large competitor eyeing both regions, so they had to make friends quickly...
Why the scare quotes? It is still debated, and the fanaticism of the Japanese resistance (for instance, in Okinawa) makes a fairly compelling case that a land-based invasion of Japan would be extremely costly for both the invaders and the civilian population.
> Or spray them with agent orange?
It's pretty terrible as a weapon of mass destruction. Don't you think that if the US had wanted to annihilate the population of North Vietnam, they would have employed something a bit more direct?
Comparatively, I don't see the general disregard for civilian casualties exhibited by the Saudis in their ongoing bombing campaign in Yemen as a sign that they intend to wipe out the population wholesale.
> Or just help Suharto get rid of some millions and let him do the footwork?
Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely not condoning the US foreign policy. But I don't see the US involvement in the mass killings conducted by Suharto as something racially motivated against Asians. It was a case of "the only good communist/leftist sympathizer is a dead one".
It also completely ignores the historical context - events like the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, or actions of the Khmer Rouge were still casting a shadow over what people thought would happen if these countries were taken over by Communists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War_(1...
The US government did a lot of things to affect the way communism was viewed in the US, so I suspect there may have been some official spin involved here.
Its basically unknowable, lest we find some memoir of somebody who was present claiming one way or another, especially confounding is the fact that the meeting was planned before the bombings
Only as much as needed to clean-up a predetermined decision for a show of power for the post-war era to fit the official narrative.
(And even if it was "that a land-based invasion of Japan would be extremely costly for both the invaders and the civilian population" still wouldn't justify nuking civilians. War crimes are not excused when they make one win more cheaply).
>It's pretty terrible as a weapon of mass destruction. Don't you think that if the US had wanted to annihilate the population of North Vietnam, they would have employed something a bit more direct?
Why would they want to annihilate them? They wanted to win the war. So fucking their livelihood and health over AND still getting to use the hypocritical defense of "see, we weren't meaning to annihilate them" works even better when you need to maintain face.
If anything of the kind was done on their own soil of course, they'll still be screaming bloody murder for all eternity (like Pearl Harbor, even though they purposefully provoked Japan for months before it acted).
War crimes are not, in themselves, "programs of systematic and indiscriminate extermination" as claimed by OP, unless they are part of a wider policy. I'd argue if the US had the intention to conduct such a policy, the results would have been very different (as can be deduced by looking at successful genocides).
> Why would they want to annihilate them? They wanted to win the war.
Exactly.
> If anything of the kind was done on their own soil of course, they'll still be screaming bloody murder for all eternity (like Pearl Harbor, even though they purposefully provoked Japan for months before it acted).
I agree that Pearl Harbor needs to be seen in the wider perspective of the US-Japan relationship. And yes, most countries are a lot better at forgetting slights against them than the offenses they themselves committed (ironically enough, both protagonists of the conflict are an excellent example of this problem).
It seems to me that you are arguing that the US disregard the human cost of their foreign policy and have little regard for "collateral damage", not that they have been engaged in some bizarre extermination program of Asians, which is what OP was suggesting.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_cities_in_Japan_by_pop...
That logic completely ignores historical events like the mass starvation under Mao during the Great Leap Forward, the crimes of the Japanese during WW2 (the Rape of Nanking, Unit 731, comfort women etc), and millions killed in the post WW2 independence conflicts (partition of India etc).
Putting the blame on the US alone is some seriously inaccurate historical revisionism.
How is that categorically different than the firebombing of Germany?
I am not implying that what US did was a planned genocide.
I am just pointing out that above is not a rebuttal of it.
Of course. The US genocide of Native Americans did not lead to the Nuremberg trials.
> I am just pointing out that above is not a rebuttal of it.
It is about giving an example of what a policy of genocide lead by a technologically equivalent power looks like, and contrasting it with the actual behaviour of the US in the same area. Shoplifting and murder are both against the law, but there is a marked difference between the two.
Here is one much more subtle example of genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrian_Finns
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportations_of_the_Ingrian_Fi...
The deportations led to the rapid ethnic assimilation of
Ingrian Finns. After 1956, return to Ingria was officially allowed
but made unfeasible in practice;Genocide is not killing of people but killing a génos (nation, race, religious group etc).
As the author of the term Raphael Lemkin put
>Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.
So yes, what happened to the Ingrian Finns was a genocide.
> Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify…
Perhaps it would be possible to display such cases with indentation so that they would stand out more and look more like real quotes?
As for indenting block quotes, I agree it would be a nice-to-have, though I think it's unlikely that HN will update the formatting options, at least any time soon. The formatting on HN is limited, though workable.
I think Africans and Native Americans would beg to disagree. Heck, experiments like the Tuskegee Experiment were done not on foreign Africans but natural born Americans who just happened to have black skin.
Stuff like the Sand Creek massacre, Wounded Knee, and so many others just aren't part of our national (or international) consciousness. No body talks about the intentional sterilization of hundreds of thousands of Native American women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_of_Native_Americ...
Likewise, the north Vietnamese really practiced total war to an extreme, and well, it worked out for them at high costs they were will to pay.
Otherwise, you're saying "well Americans are fine because even though they killed loads of people, it still wasn't as many as the Chinese killed".
Though I agree with the US hardly being "the" aggressor in the world, the second part, that "war happens to be brutal", is precisely the reason starting one was declared the worst crime of all, encompassing all other crimes. You can't just say "oh well, it's war after all".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty857CeVM4M
> at high costs they were will to pay.
Defending such monstrosities doesn't leave a man's soul untouched, either.
Where does he say that he does no values the life of the "Orientals"?
From his experiences in the war between north and south vietnam or the chinese invovement in Korea it certainly seems that local actors valued the life of their soldiers or civilians less than most western countries would have.
I do not think that this would have been disputed by Ho, Kim or Mao.
Show me when the US "flattened" Laos and Cambodia: show me the specific, vast invasions, the war details, and the numbers of people that said US wars killed in those nations. You're inventing history. Pol Pot's regime flattened Cambodia, murdering millions of his own people.
The truth you're intentionally evading, is that Asian nations have done drastically worse to each other and or their own people in the last century than anything America has done in the three primary wars the US has been involved in there (all of which were wars of defense/response; defending South Korea, defending South Vietnam, trying to stop the wars of the Empire of Japan). Most of the deaths in the Vietnam civil war as an example, were Vietnamese people killing each other (witness what happened when America left: vast indiscriminate slaughter by the North of the South).
North Vietnam started the war of conquest on the South, which the US attempted to stop. Just as North Korea attempted to enslave South Korea under Communism by military means (and would still like to conclude that 'reunification').
The US expended vast sums of money and blood to keep South Korea from the outcome that North Korea has seen. While China was rotting under Mao, South Korea was being protected and economically nurtured, becoming a first world nation while China and most other nations of Asia were still third world economically (for these purposes, third world meaning the level of economic development, not the definition based on alliance).
The US has protected Japan for 70 years, while they maintained a pacifist constitution. We were far more civil with them post war (a war they started), than what your claims imply we would have been. We didn't hold them as a slave nation, instead they rapidly re-industrialized and ended up passing the US in GDP per capita by the 1980s. We should have nuked them in WW2; they started multiple wars of conquest in the Pacific that resulted in the genocide of millions, including aligning themselves with Hitler's Axis, declaring war on the US and attacking the US. The alternative was to lose hundreds of thousands of American soldiers invading Japan (and one nuke was not enough, they refused to surrender, which logically demonstrated their resolve). The nuking of Japan, or the fire bombing of Tokyo, was no worse than the fire bombing of Germany.
The US also shielded China from being nuked by the USSR [1]. Then we invested extraordinary sums of capital into their economy, providing the economic seed - through mutual trade - that has made their present outcome possible. It was, in part, Nixon's political efforts that helped to open China to the world as a society through trade. Further, given the extreme advantage the US held post WW2 (in every possible regard), it could have attempted to conquer China (or if it were consistent with your false premise: the US could have slaughtered China with nukes), using Japan as a launching point. The US did nearly the exact opposite instead.
The US didn't hold the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, South Vietnam, etc. as conquered territories (it could have attempted it).
Meanwhile, in America, Asians have the highest standard of living of any demographic: they have the lowest crime rates, the highest employment rates, the highest median incomes, the highest household incomes, the highest median net wealth levels, the highest education levels, the longest life expectancy.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7720461...
Pol Pot's regime flattened Cambodia
Coincidentally, Pol Pot was politicised/radicalised in France by the French communist party, received ideological training in Moscow, Beijing and former Yugoslavia. I imagine that at least some of those who organised Pol Pot's take-over are still alive in in France, the former Soviet Union, China and former Yugoslavia, and could be brought to justice.
[1] http://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/09/22/Reagan-to-meet-Cambod... [2] http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-07-18/news/900228054...
But that is all that it was.
The Khmer Rouge were already ousted and powerless.
Asian nations have done drastically
worse to each other
That does not mean that colonialism was great, or that anybody wants it back. Hopefully humanity has evolved towards better ways of dealing with each other.
This is just ahistorical nonsense.