The moral differences between the holocaust and bombing Japan

The international community has not legally admonished the United States for genocidal acts against Native Americans, yet it is clear that examples of genocidal acts and crimes against humanity are a well-cited page in U.S. history. Notorious incidents, such as the Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek Massacre, and the massacre of the Yuki of northern California are covered in depth in separate entries in this encyclopedia. More controversial, however, is whether the colonies and the United States participated in genocidal acts as an overall policy toward Native Americans. The Native-American population decrease since the arrival of Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus alone signals the toll colonization and U.S. settlement took on the native population. Scholars estimate that approximately 10 million pre-Columbian Native Americans resided in the present-day United States. That number has since fallen to approximately 2.4 million. While this population decrease cannot be attributed solely to the actions of the U.S. government, they certainly played a key role. In addition to population decrease, Native Americans have also experienced significant cultural and proprietary losses as a result of U.S. governmental actions. The total effect has posed a serious threat to the sustainability of the Native-American people and culture.

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http://www.enotes.com/native-americans-reference/native-americans

Genocide is the ultimate result of an attempt at 'ethnic cleansing.'

http://academic.udayton.edu/race/06hrights/georegions/northamerica/UnitedStates02.htm

The US and the Crime of Genocide Against Native Americans

Lindsay Glauner



excerpted from: Lindsay Glauner, The Need for Accountability and Reparation: 1830-1976 the United States Government's Role in the Promotion, Implementation, and Execution of the Crime of Genocide Against Native Americans , 51 DePaul Law Review 911-961, 911-917 (Spring 2002)(349 Footnotes)

On September 8, 2000, the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) formally apologized for the agency's participation in the "ethnic cleansing" of Western tribes. From the forced relocation and assimilation of the "sauvage" to the white man's way of life to the forced sterilization of Native Americans, the BIA set out to "destroy all things Indian." Through the exploration of the United States' Federal Indian policy, it is evident that this policy intended to "destroy, in whole or in part," the Native American population. The extreme disparity in the number of Native American people living within the United States' borders at the time Columbus arrived, approximately ten million compared to the approximate 2.4 million Indians and Eskimos alive in the United States today, is but one factor that illustrates the success of the government's plan of "Manifest Destiny."

No longer can we remain indifferent and justify these acts of genocide committed by the United States government, its agencies, and its personnel against Native Americans as a result of colonization or the need to establish a prosperous union. Instead, the United States government, its agencies, and those involved with carrying out the measures designed to inflict genocidal acts against the Native American population must be held in violation of customary international law, as well as conventional international law, as proscribed in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention).

Genocide is the ultimate result of an attempt at 'ethnic cleansing.' You keep asking, how many people would have to die before you consider an act genocidal. As many as there are of that particular nationality, race, religious group or whatever.

But to keep on referring to it as 'genocide' simply shows a lack of understanding of the word itself.

The term Genocide derives from the Latin (genos=race, tribe; cide=killing) and means literally the killing or murder of an entire tribe or people. The Oxford English Dictionary defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group" and cites the first usage of the term as R. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, (1944) p.79. "By 'genocide' we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group." The U.N. General Assembly adopted this term and defended it in 1946 as "....a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups." Most people tend to associate genocide with wholesale slaughter of a specific people. However, "the 1994 U.N. Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, describes genocide beyond outright murder of people as the destruction and extermination of culture." Article II of the convention lists five categories of activity as genocidal when directed against a specific "national, ethnic, racial, or religious group."

These categories are:

Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of group;
Deliberately infliction on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Genocide or the deliberate extermination of one ethnic group by another is not new, for example in 1937 the Pequot Indians were exterminated by the Colonists when they burned their villages in Mystic, Connecticut, and then shot all the other people -- including women and children -- who tried to escape. The United States Government has refused to ratify the U.N. convention on genocide. There are many facets of genocide which have been implemented upon indigenous peoples of North America. The list of American genocidal policies includes: Mass-execution, Biological warfare, Forced Removal from homelands, Incarceration, Indoctrination of non-indigenous values, forced surgical sterilization of native women, Prevention of religious practices, just to name a few.

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http://www.operationmorningstar.org/genocide_of_native_americans.htm

Hi. Just a quick question
After looking at the link I posted. If you could have a time machine and you were in complete charge of the whole atomic operations. Would you do it again? ( make sure you look at the link please )

oralloy wrote:

igm wrote:

What might the future hold after the nuclear strike on Japan? It could eventually lead to state sponsored terrorism successfully detonating a nuclear device on the US homeland with no chance of retaliation... so we have a useless deterrent... no country to bomb... just a terrorist cell which can't be nuked... or even destroyed conventionally because they just keep on recruiting.

Your term "state sponsored" indicates that we would very much have someone to retaliate against.
Terrorist cells can also be destroyed. DroneStrikes are awesome!

You couldn't be certain which state did the sponsoring (they would obviously be unknown)

you can't nuke without worldwide opinion that is certain of the sponsor... it would never happen.

A cell can be destroyed but replacements are easy to find and to them its win win as they've just nuked the US with the loss of just a single terrorist cell at most.

I hate to say it... In fact, the thing doesn't really even hinge on the use of the two A bombs at all, a better question is why some more serious attempt to get the Japanese to surrender wasn't made after the first two or three big fire-bomb raids.

Maneuvering Japan to attack first

It's both immoral and illegal to target civilians in order to shorten a war or protect your own soldiers/civilians.

Would it be fair to say that "If other terrorists were able to detonate a few nukes here in our country killing many innocent civilians that they too would be level headed if they succeeded in their objective?

I completely disagree with oralloy when he accuses Howard Zinn of lying or altering the facts. Zinn's research and scholarship are impeccable.

And the Japanese were ready to surrender.

Maneuvering Japan to attack first

If we maneuvered Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor,
then Japan maneuvered us into dropping the A-bombs on them.

Kinda the way the citizens in the world trade center died?

I wonder if the Germans seen the Jews the same way.

The Jews were the Nazi enemies and if they had not been in their country they would have not been targeted?

Have scholars come to a consensus for a precise definition of genocide?

Why do you think that the US wanted to be exempt from ever being charged with genocide if a world court ever found them guilty?

firefly wrote:

"Ethnic cleansing" is genocide.

Well sure it is but what comes to my mind when I think of the Holocaust is ethnic cleansing. The bombing of Japan does not seem like ethnic cleansing but rather a genocide committed against a nation.

Maneuvering Japan to attack first

If we maneuvered Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor,
then Japan maneuvered us into dropping the A-bombs on them.

According to the Treaty of Peace with Japan and the bilateral agreements,
Japan agreed to pay around ¥1.03 trillion as reparations.