We've banned this account for continuing to abuse the site with ideological rants (the kind that inexorably lead to inner-hell-circle flamewars) after we've asked you to stop. We're happy to unban accounts if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll post civilly and substantively in the future.
I really don't get the US hating all Asians part. Where does that come from?
Many of the cold war era wars were proxy wars with Russia to stop the spread of communism. A natural place for that to occur was where Russia was attempting to move neighboring governments to communism, which was Asia.
Also we were at war with Japan, they attacked the US after all, so I would hardly call them allies at that point in history.
> a horrific subset of people of whatever sort doing things like raping and killing at Nanking
We seem to have forgiven Germans for the holocaust. I don't detect any particular "Germans are less humane than us" sentiment in the U.S. these days.
> torturing and eating dogs, cats, monkeys, which just is entirely sacriligious everywhere else
We torture and eat pigs in the U.S., who are just as intelligent as dogs. I think you have the causality arrow wrong. We latch on to a few people in Asia eating dogs because we already decided they're lesser than and we're looking for an excuse.
> A few bad apples really do spoil the whole bunch, and that's reality.
I think it's much more complicated than that. Why do bad apples spoil feminism for example, but bad apples don't spoil the NFL?
> Every single time that the United States has engaged in conflict with Asian countries, it has waged not war but programs of systematic and indiscriminate extermination.
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.
>No. There were no US Einsatzgruppen, there was no US equivalent to the nazi Backe-Plan.
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 bother when you can just drop some atomic bombs to test on them (to "make them surrender")?
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".
> 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.
As a kid I remember learning that the atomic bombs contributed to Japan's surrender in WW2, but as a grown-up I also learned that Russia (a neighboring country) declared war on Japan two days after the first bomb was dropped, and I wonder which made more of a difference.
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.
Having done some light reading on the topic a while ago, I recall there is evidence that of the people deciding on the peace treaty, several were not actually aware of the atomic bombings, given it was only recently learned of by the military a few hours beforehand due to damaged communication infrastructure.
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).
> (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).
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.
Beyond saving hundreds of thousand of Allied soldiers, using nuclear weapons on Japan saved millions of JAPANESE lives. The conventional Allied bombing in preparation for invasion would have laid waste to the entire country. (Indeed the conventional firebombing raid on Tokyo killed more civilians than either nuclear strike). And the Imperial government was training civilian (women and children) suicide squads, and Japanese civilians had already conducted mass suicides in the face of capture in places like Saipan.
Out of available targets [1], even taking into account air defense, neither Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to fit the narrative of the US aiming for maximum civilian casualties. And especially given that Kyoto was struck from the Nagasaki target list as being too culturally significant.
> Or just help Suharto get rid of some millions and let him do the footwork?
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.
> You can skin a cat in many ways. For one case where the architects of the genocide did not get away with it there are multiple where they did.
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.
The deportations led to the rapid ethnic assimilation of
Ingrian Finns. After 1956, return to Ingria was officially allowed
but made unfeasible in practice;
That's not a genocide, that's a deportation followed by forced cultural assimilation. It's bad, too, but it's not the same thing as exterminating a population.
If we take into account how these deportations usually proceeded and what surrounded them then you can count also on murders, including torturing to death and dying due to extremely inhuman conditions. But this is not important because it would still be genocide without all of it.
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.
Thanks for taking the time to include the quote. However, please don't use code blocks (indentation) for quoting blocks of text like this as it forces side scrolling, which is particularly difficult on mobile devices. It's common on HN to prefix paragraphs with > to indicate a long quote. I also like to italicize block quotes to further set them off. For example:
> 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…
Thanks! I'm sure those on mobile in particular will appreciate you doing so.
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.
> America has reserved its most inhumane and destructive weapons to be field tested and then used without hesitation on Asian civilian populations.
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...
The outright genocide and outrages perpetrated against the indigenous and enslaved populations are incomparable, but also a separate topic. I am specifically referring to military munitions with that quote and post; without any diminishment of the grave effects of conventional weaponry and opportunistic germ warfare against Native and African Americans, they have not been nuked, clusterbombed, napalmed, and Agent Oranged to death.
The biggest killer of Chinese in the 19th and 20th century were....other Chinese, not to mention other Asians. I'm not sure why America is singled out when war just happens to be brutal. The PLA has been especially brutal in its treatment of their countrymen (e.g. The siege of Changchun).
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.
No that's stupid and not even thorough. Did Australia have a genocide campaign in Asia? We were involved in all the same wars. Of course in terms of sheer body count we probably killed more Turks then any other single nationality in the 20th century. But that's my guesstimate based on Gallipoli being a large campaign for us, and in turn brings us back to just how useless and stupid this type of reductionist historical metric is.
Semi-related, our (Australian) hands aren't clean of genocide either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_War is often considered genocide, though there is some debate on the matter.
> I'm not sure why America is singled out when war just happens to be brutal.
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".
"The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."
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.
You're obviously exaggerating and then some. Most of what you're claiming is fraudulent.
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.
Pol Pot's weapons came from China and North Vietnam. Pol Pot sent Cambodian rice to China in exchange for weapons, knowing full well that not enough food would be left for the cambodian population.
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.
Eh, it's a bit more complicated than that (like most things). When the Vietnamese removed the genocidal Khmer Rouge, the United States opposed the action (viewing it as Vietnamese expansionism). The Khmer Rouge joined with other factions to form a coalition that fought the Vietnamese and the new government, and the U.S. supported this coalition.[1][2]
I wouldn't call them powerless; they were waging a guerilla war in the countryside into the 1990's, and were able to retain their seat in the United Nations for some time (with the help of Western governments).
Asian nations have done drastically
worse to each other
Coincidentally, this is true of Africa as well: Mengistu Haile Mariam, Mobuto Sese Seko, Idi Amin, Samuel Doe, or the Tutsi/Hutu conflict were typically much more violent than almost all colonialist behaviour. (Naturally the natives have been colonialising and enslaving each other too.) It's good never to forget this.
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.
>Every single time that the United States has engaged in conflict with Asian countries, it has waged not war but programs of systematic and indiscriminate extermination.
Really, the US started the war with Japan when Commodore Perry forced Japan, literally at gunpoint, to begin trading with the US in 1853.
The first Opium War had already happened, and the second was about to begin. If the Japanese were to maintain their autonomy and avoid the disastrous fate China suffered as a result of Anglo-Chinese trade, colonial expansion was their only realistic option.
When they attacked Pearl Harbor it was mostly out of desperation, because the oil embargo ordered by Roosevelt placed Japanese imperial operations in imminent jeopardy.
For a less US-centric perspective on the US/Japan war, Noam Chomsky's 1967 essay [0] is worth a read. He doesn't excuse their violence, but he does point out that it was more justifiable than other US violence in South East Asia.
This is a hilarious, sock puppet-esque take on Imperial Japan, which is suitably foot-noted as fertilized by Chomsky's fever dreams of anti-Americanism at any cost. I think the Koreans and the Chinese have a slightly different take on the issue. And the Phillipines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam... "The Japanese are a hundred times crueller than the French. Even a worm or a cricket could not live under their brutal violence" (Elliott, 2016).
I'm sure I could improve your life by forcing you to do certain things at gunpoint: are you eating right, saving the maximum possible for retirement, using your time as efficiently as possible, gentle in your relations with everyone?
Whether some Japanese derived some benefit from the ultimatum doesn't change that it was a coercive relationship, enforced by a nation with a history of destructive exploitation of other nations and races, justifying its exploitation in terms of cultural and racial superiority over its subject people. Your argument is straight out of "White Man's Burden."
I think I know a bit more about he subject than you, having studied the Edo era academically and being a licensed instructor in the military techniques carried down by one family of Tokugawa bodyguards, including the oral history that comes with that.
That era was a shitshow ruled over by oppressive sociopathic samurai where life was short, domineering, and often brutal. They kept their country isolated from technology for the only reason of disempowering potential reformers. It is only looked back with fondness by those whose naïveté keeps them from knowing better, or who have nationalistic political agendas.
The gunboat diplomacy was frankly a move of liberation that benefited the people of Japan. And it was not an occupation either -- fair trading terms were what was offered, by the standards of the day, a far better deal than China had for example. Japan was enabled by the deal, turned into a prosperous trading partner and world superpower a mere 40 years later.
I don't know what lense you are looking at his through, but it is not refracting history correctly.
You are correct, but it's orthogonal to anything I said. The point I was making is that feudal Japan was an oppressive, nasty place and gunboat diplomacy, while not bloodless (see the internal conflicts of the Meiji Restoration), was a much smoother transition to prosperity for the inhabitants of Japan than alternative interventions being tried elsewhere.
I don't buy the line that coercive actions are necessarily wrong. Using force to remove a dictator that is oppressing its people (or an entire caste of brutal autocrats) is morally justifiable IMHO. And if you compare the American involvement in Japan with the other sorts of things that were going on at the time in East Asia, it was pretty tame.
Historians must restrict themselves to evaluating choices by the standards of the time under consideration. And by the standards of day, the Japanese got a pretty good deal, especially when compared with their neighbors.
The two are incomparable. A mere 40 years after Perry sailed into Tokyo bay, Japan went from backwater feudal island to an industrial superpower and unshackled itself from the unequal treaties, asserting its dominance on the international stage as an independent, sovereign nation. Nearly 70 years after the fall of the Dalai Lama's regime the people of Tibet are still largely poor and marginalized, with their cities and resources taken over by the occupying Han Chinese that claim the land as their own. The subsidies given to Han Chinese that relocate are straight out of the manifest destiny playbook. So I'm not really sure what point of comparison you are trying to make.
Go read about the China hands in the state department. The USG had a direct hand in abandoning Chiang to Mao and Stalin; setting up the genocides in China and the Korean War.
> the Korean War they dropped more bombs, including napalm and experimental bombs, on the Koreans than all of the bombs dropped in WWI and WWII combined
This seems like an extreme claim. I can't find any reliable source that claims that more bombs than the ones dropped in WWI and WWII combined were dropped to Korea.
> And these are two of the US' closest Asian "allies".
Not back then, Japan had sided with the Axis.
> The US simply hates the Asians
Some far-right people do probably hate Asians in the US, but my experience with the people from the US that I know as well as my experience here in the UK Asians tend to be quite liked.
> This seems like an extreme claim. I can't find any reliable source that claims that more bombs than the ones dropped in WWI and WWII combined were dropped to Korea.
General MacArthur: "The war in Korea has already almost destroyed that nation of 20,000,000 people. I have never seen such devastation. I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach the last time I was there. After I looked at the wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited [...] If you go on indefinitely, you are perpetuating a slaughter such as I have never heard of in the history of mankind."
General O'Donnell: "I would say that the entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed [...] There is nothing left standing worthy of the name."
General LeMay: "We burned down just about every city in North Korea and South Korea both [...]We killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes, with the inevitable additional tragedies bound to ensue", "We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too. [...] Over a period of three years or so, we killed off -- what -- twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?"
The US Generals were arguing that the use of nuclear weapons would have been more humane, and they might be right. Essentially, being more brutal to end a war quickly is better than holding back to fight for years.
>as well as my experience here in the UK Asians tend to be quite liked.
Worth pointing out that "Asian" in the UK would normally refer to South Asian people - i.e. Indians, Pakistanis, etc. If you meant Far East Asian people, you'd specify that, or the actual country.
> In the Korean War they dropped more bombs, including napalm and experimental bombs, on the Koreans than all of the bombs dropped in WWI and WWII combined.
> The Korean War, a “limited war” for the US and UN forces, was for Koreans a total war. The human and material resources of North and South Korea were used to their utmost. The physical destruction and loss of life on both sides was almost beyond comprehension, but the North suffered the greater damage, due to American saturation bombing and the scorched-earth policy of the retreating UN forces.1 The US Air Force estimated that North Korea’s destruction was proportionately greater than that of Japan in the Second World War, where the US had turned 64 major cities to rubble and used the atomic bomb to destroy two others. American planes dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea -- that is, essentially on North Korea --including 32,557 tons of napalm, compared to 503,000 tons of bombs dropped in the entire Pacific theatre of World War II.2 The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached three million, ten percent of the overall population. The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South; although the DPRK does not have official figures, possibly twelve to fifteen percent of the population was killed in the war, a figure close to or surpassing the proportion of Soviet citizens killed in World War II.
Doesn't quite live up to the parent's exaggerated claims, but still not a pretty picture.
