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No, they really were not doing it on a more visceral and savage basis, as they lacked the means of the 7th Cavalry to bering concentrated firepower onto an entire village of women and children. Moreover, they did not have the capacity to enslave an entire tribe and move it to a reservation, where it was slowly starved to death and made completely dependent on government food handouts.
Let's, instead, start portraying it as it actually was.
They were stabbing and murdering and scalping and raping and killing each other. They were too primitive to have more developed weaponry, but if they did, they would have murdered and maimed each other with greater effectiveness. They were savages.
So yes, we took the land. As we should have. They were too primitive to do anything with it except fight each other over it, so it was completely appropriate that a higher society organize the continent and make it productive. Savages don't own land, they simply occupy it. They don't even have a system of private property rights or ownership rights. There is no right to land ownership until ownership rights are invented and utilized by advanced societies. The natives had no more right to the land than the squirrels or the bison.
Anyway, our taking of the North American continent was not a stain of any sort, it was the correct thing to do at the time, and it resulted in the finest society in the history of planet Earth. Revisionist left-wing gobbledygook notwithstanding.
You can't allow your actions to drop to the level your worst and most barbaric enemy is willing to go to. That's what should separate you from them. What makes you better. It's no different than a criminal who committed an awful crime. We punish them with law. We do not do the same or worse crimes to them. But some people will always demand bloodlust as punishment
"One must take care when fighting monsters, lest you become one. For when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes back into you."
This is a ridiculous assessment, one that would have certainly been news to the Chinese, Koreans, and the other parts of Asia that continued to live under a brutal Japanese occupation. The Japanese were continuing to fight in those theaters. In that sense, you show a Western bias, for you only look at the war from the American perspective. Even after the shooting had stopped on Okinawa an average of 7000 civilians and military personnel elsewhere were dying weekly at the hands of the Japanese. I mean, a careful reading of the debate and turmoil in Japan's leadership would show even the most facile reader that a very influential faction wanted to fight on to the bitter end. It literally took the Emperor intervening to settle the matter, and even he was almost deposed in a coup by the Japanese military. Geez, man. Try reading your history before you debate it.
I'm with cpg35223 on this one. Neither the Japanese nor the Germans were stopping any time soon in their war efforts. In both cases the people had to be thoroughly demoralized. Unfortunately the lesson of history is that belligerents fight on when there is little or no hope. Even in the American Civil War it took Sherman's March to the Sea, and some pretty bloody fighting in Virginia against starving Confederate troops to end the war.
I suspect strongly that your agenda is that there should have been negotiated ends to the wars. As you can see from the Arab-Israeli fighting and Iraq-Syria that means the fighting never really stops.
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Originally Posted by TheWiseWino
It has also been very persausively argued on these pages that it wasn't the Atomic bomb but rather Russia's entrance into the war against Japan that turned the tide towards an unconditional surrender that wasn't really all that unconditional to begin with.
I strongly doubt that Russian troops perched in the desolate Siberian-Manchurian region or the equally frostbitten Kurile Islands scared Tojo all that much.
Which was ethnic cleansing and wholesale land theft, you may call it emminent domain but it is still what it was and more importantly always will be, which is just one reason that most of the world doens't give a rat's ass about American's lectures about how they are supposed to behave or what rules of law they are suppose to observe.
Yet they do give a rat's ass about gaining that precious visa that permits them to come to this hellhole.
Go figure.
Which of these two actions will have the longest cast the most deleterious shadow over the character of American's legacy of American's character from slavey and Jim Crow, the genocide of Native People or the internment of Japanese Americand during WII or the mass deportation undocumented/illgeal aliens/
The slaughter of Native Americans and southerners at the hands of the US government is the worst of the atrocities listed by the OP. But conspicuously absent from the aforementioned list is the treatment of our military veterans. Everything from agent orange to the VA is simply inexcusable.
Deportation of illegal aliens isn't a stain on history, it's the right thing to do.
But conspicuously absent from the aforementioned list is the treatment of our military veterans. Everything from agent orange to the VA is simply inexcusable.
But it (slavery) wasn't abolished until President Lincoln... #16
He didn't abolish slavery all across the United States, he only abolished it in "the states that were in rebellion." Under Lincoln, slavery remained Constitutional in Union states.
Even though these are some of the worst things people could do to others in protection of their interest ......... But the actual worst thing on American History is the adoption and acceptance of the Sixteenth Amendment
Deportation of illegal aliens isn't a stain on history, it's the right thing to do.
Since it can't possibly be conducted within the framework of the U.S.Constitution and wholesale violation of the rights of legitimate, U. S citizens, I can't imagine how this could ever be construed as the "right thing" to do?
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