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Spacewolf posted:This seems like an appropriate point at which to ask: No, it was a straight up systematic well planned genocide. It gave birth to the word genocide. I think get what you're wondering though. People often use "genocide" to describe the killing of the indigenous peoples of North America incorrectly, for example. It was horrible, ugly, awful, appalling...but it wasn't genocide, by the proper definition.
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Feb 25, 2015 17:31
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Precisely. To me, the North American peoples' situation wasn't, strictly speaking, a genocide (for the most part) - it was horrible, but not nearly planned or systematic enough to qualify as a genocide. Whereas the Holocaust was planned, and I guess? the Armenian genocide was, too. (I fully admit not knowing enough about events in the Ottoman Empire, including the Armenian Genocide.) It's the element of planning, the "when we are done, if we are successful, there will be no more X" intent that makes a genocide a genocide, I think I'm trying to communicate. What I do know re the Armenian Genocide had me wondering how planned it was, really. Because what I had known previously was that measures seemed sporadic and almost more the result of incompetence and lack of foresight.
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Feb 25, 2015 17:45
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Spacewolf posted:Precisely. To me, the North American peoples' situation wasn't, strictly speaking, a genocide (for the most part) - it was horrible, but not nearly planned or systematic enough to qualify as a genocide. Whereas the Holocaust was planned, and I guess? the Armenian genocide was, too. (I fully admit not knowing enough about events in the Ottoman Empire, including the Armenian Genocide.) It's the element of planning, the "when we are done, if we are successful, there will be no more X" intent that makes a genocide a genocide, I think I'm trying to communicate. The Native American genocide took place over 500 years. In some times and places it was ethnic cleansing, sometimes slavery and exploitation, sometimes war, and sometimes outright genocide. Because it was perpetrated by various governments over 500 years, some of the deaths and cultural destruction weren't as deliberate as the Armenian genocide, but it was a genocide.
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Feb 25, 2015 18:03
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All of president Andrew Jackson's actions were planned and systematic enough to be called "true" genocide rather than de facto genocide.
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Feb 25, 2015 19:15
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bewbies posted:I think get what you're wondering though. People often use "genocide" to describe the killing of the indigenous peoples of North America incorrectly, for example. It was horrible, ugly, awful, appalling...but it wasn't genocide, by the proper definition. What transpired in the Americas is very different depending on exactly when you're talking about. The deaths of >90% of the population as Eurasian diseases reached the continent was mostly not genocide, since the Europeans did it inadvertently and without understanding what would happen (except for the isolated incidents where they knew exactly what they were doing), but huge portions of European-American interaction was straight-up, organized genocide. The Canadian government was conducting an ongoing genocide until at least the 1960s.
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Feb 25, 2015 19:31
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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AgentJotun posted:Wasn't there around 250,000 Soviet casualties? Sure sounds like a hell of a lot given how shattered Germany was by this stage. Urban, house-to-house fighting is just about the bloodiest type of combat imaginable, and when you have two sides with almost no interest in giving quarter like the Germans and Russians in 1945, you get appalling casualty figures. There were something like 90,000 German troops in Berlin when it was surrounded, and they weren't all Volksstrum conscripts with a Panzerfaust and no shoes.
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Feb 26, 2015 00:27
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The word "genocide" implies intent and organization, and neither of those were really consistent throughout the whole centuries-long period in which the Native Americans were slaughtered. A better way to put it would be as a series of genocides. After all, it wasn't just one big native slaughter from start to finish; tribes were exterminated one at a time. The colonial powers allied with some natives and fought others. Sometimes colonial governments orchestrated massacres, and sometimes they just let civilians do the dirty work by being very laissez faire about enforcing treaties upon their citizens. Maybe sometimes diseases did the heavy lifting. Any which way, the natives were reduced from hundreds of tribes to far less. It's more complicated than just the almighty white man rounding up the natives and shooting them start to finish.
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Feb 26, 2015 01:00
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PittTheElder posted:What transpired in the Americas is very different depending on exactly when you're talking about. The deaths of >90% of the population as Eurasian diseases reached the continent was mostly not genocide, since the Europeans did it inadvertently and without understanding what would happen (except for the isolated incidents where they knew exactly what they were doing), but huge portions of European-American interaction was straight-up, organized genocide. The Canadian government was conducting an ongoing genocide until at least the 1960s. If I were king of the U.N. for a day I would strike "Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group" and " Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group" from the definition of genocide, because they really do not belong in the same definition as mass murder and death marches.
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Feb 26, 2015 01:09
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Yo, dude, do you have any opinions on the decision in 1915 to stop trying to shove battleships through the Dardanelles after March 18th? The more I think about the situation, the more it seems like a red herring that would have ended in an Army landing whatever happened, since even if they'd cleared the mines and completely wrecked the fort guns, they'd still have needed to stop the Ottoman field artillery having target practice with their supply ships in order to do anything useful in the Sea of Marmara...
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Feb 26, 2015 01:14
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Patrick Spens posted:If I were king of the U.N. for a day I would strike "Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group" and " Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group" from the definition of genocide, because they really do not belong in the same definition as mass murder and death marches. I disagree. The Canadian and American governments (and probably other ones, but I don't know) tried to destroy the culture of First Nations by removing children from their families. They also tried to reduce the Native population through involuntary sterilization, and in my province of Alberta they conducted those up until 1971. Whether a government tries to wipe out a persecuted culture by extermination or by preventing a people from passing on their culture, in the end it's the destruction of a culture either way.
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Feb 26, 2015 01:20
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Patrick Spens posted:If I were king of the U.N. for a day I would strike "Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group" and " Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group" from the definition of genocide, because they really do not belong in the same definition as mass murder and death marches. What possible benevolent purpose would those practices serve? The motivation behind murdering every member of a nation or preventing them raising their children is the same drat thing. They're all attempts to eliminate an ethnic group.
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Feb 26, 2015 01:23
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Were paratroopers used at all during the Vietnam War? Also, I know it's a complicated thing, but why did the United States lose the Vietnam war? Like can it be broken down into one forum post or is it too complicated.
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Feb 26, 2015 01:56
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Patrick Spens posted:If I were king of the U.N. for a day I would strike "Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group" and " Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group" from the definition of genocide, because they really do not belong in the same definition as mass murder and death marches. Jesus Christ.
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Feb 26, 2015 02:02
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Rincewind posted:Jesus Christ. 
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Feb 26, 2015 02:10
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Kanine posted:Were paratroopers used at all during the Vietnam War? Comedy answer: Dien Bien Phu. To both. Basically they lost for a lot of reasons, but the short one is that the Vietnamese still wanted to fight and the US didn't so they hosed off. Almost all wars end that way. Now, how specifically that point was reached has a lot too it, but you'd basically want to look at the whole war and go 'okay, yeah, that's how it happened.' Do you have any particular questions about that? Maybe a narrower question will give a better answer.
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Feb 26, 2015 02:19
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Kanine posted:Were paratroopers used at all during the Vietnam War? The French used them in their Vietnam war. The US wanted to prop up the government of South Vietnam, an unpopular and corrupt regime that could not sustain itself without the US paying for everything. The US could handily hold down South Vietnam militarily but couldn't actually invade North Vietnam, because it was thought that the Chinese would intervene massively like they did in Korea. So the thinking was well maybe if we hold down the south and inflict a lot of losses on the North (they did), while also bombing the hell out of the North from the air (they did), maybe after a while the North would just give up and let South Vietnam be (they didn't). All material losses inflicted on the North were replaced the next day by the Soviet Union and China, so it made no difference.
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Feb 26, 2015 02:22
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Kanine posted:Also, I know it's a complicated thing, but why did the United States lose the Vietnam war? Like can it be broken down into one forum post or is it too complicated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj5k6toS7i8
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Feb 26, 2015 02:22
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Kanine posted:Were paratroopers used at all during the Vietnam War? There were only three combat jumps involving more than 100 men during Vietnam, most were less than a platoon. I think there was only nine or ten combat jumps in total. The largest was Operation Junction City.
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Feb 26, 2015 02:25
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Kanine posted:Were paratroopers used at all during the Vietnam War? Helicopters had solidly replaced any sort of mass-plane-jumping by "Airborne" divisions in Vietnam. Parachuting into Southeast Asia sounds like a good way to get stuck in a tree. That being said, wikipedia says that one combat jump occurred, during Operation Junction City The reasons for the American failure in the Vietnam war are indeed complicated, but the general consensus is that there wasn't ever a way for them to win it. What could the Americans bring to the table to negotiate a favourable peace? What even were the Americans looking for? The dissolution of North Vietnam? Both North and South Vietnam were just artificial constructs cast from a nation that wholeheartedly supported the Vietnamese Communist Party. The government of South Vietnam was hideously unpopular, but the American strategy focused on destroying the North Vietnamese military. Basically, it turned into a Sisyphean struggle where the US was fighting on behalf of a state that had no justification for its existance.
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Feb 26, 2015 02:39
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Chamale posted:I disagree. The Canadian and American governments (and probably other ones, but I don't know) tried to destroy the culture of First Nations by removing children from their families. They also tried to reduce the Native population through involuntary sterilization, and in my province of Alberta they conducted those up until 1971. Whether a government tries to wipe out a persecuted culture by extermination or by preventing a people from passing on their culture, in the end it's the destruction of a culture either way. See also: Australia. Slim Jim Pickens posted:The reasons for the American failure in the Vietnam war are indeed complicated, but the general consensus is that there wasn't ever a way for them to win it. What could the Americans bring to the table to negotiate a favourable peace? What even were the Americans looking for? The dissolution of North Vietnam? See also: Iraq 
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Feb 26, 2015 03:13
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Slavvy posted:See also: Iraq Everyone is a fervent Baath party supporter? Was really hard to read Generation Kill and see all the good will they later wasted. As for losing Vietnam, yeah, it became highly unpopular, and Tet Offensive is often cited as one of the last nails in the coffin. Launched on Vietnamese New Year, it wasn't a military success, but very much a morale one.
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Feb 26, 2015 03:24
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The reasons for the American failure in the Vietnam war are indeed complicated, but the general consensus is that there wasn't ever a way for them to win it. What could the Americans bring to the table to negotiate a favourable peace? What even were the Americans looking for? The dissolution of North Vietnam? Yeah. It turns out, it's kind of hard to win a war in which you have no real achievable political goals, especially if the other side has concrete goals they're willing to sacrifice everything for.
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Feb 26, 2015 03:30
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Trin Tragula posted:Yo, dude, do you have any opinions on the decision in 1915 to stop trying to shove battleships through the Dardanelles after March 18th? The more I think about the situation, the more it seems like a red herring that would have ended in an Army landing whatever happened, since even if they'd cleared the mines and completely wrecked the fort guns, they'd still have needed to stop the Ottoman field artillery having target practice with their supply ships in order to do anything useful in the Sea of Marmara... I don't want to speak authoritatively on the subject since I haven't done much research on it, but there's been some historical research that shows the famous idea that the Turks were running out of shells was untrue (there's an article by Edward J. Erickson in a 2001 issue of the Journal of Strategic Studies to this effect). Of course that's something of a red herring in itself since the heavy battleship casualties were due to a minefield. I definitely think the allied naval forces could have forced the Dardanelles and reached Constantinople, but whether they could've forced the Ottomans out of the war is a very different question. With the clarity of hindsight it's obvious that 1) the naval attempt to force the Dardanelles should've been done simultaneously with the Gallipoli landings and 2) there should have been much more extensive preparations for the naval operations including decent minesweepers that could manage the heavy current of the straits. Much like the attempt to defend Antwerp in 1914, the Dardanelles (and Gallipoli) were strategically sound operations undone by the use of completely inadequate force. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Feb 26, 2015 |
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Feb 26, 2015 03:41
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Helicopters had solidly replaced any sort of mass-plane-jumping by "Airborne" divisions in Vietnam. Parachuting into Southeast Asia sounds like a good way to get stuck in a tree. Also, comedy answer, Richard Nixon sabotaging both peace negotiations, which prevented a favorable outcome for the US.
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Feb 26, 2015 03:47
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Kanine posted:]Also, I know it's a complicated thing, but why did the United States lose the Vietnam war? Like can it be broken down into one forum post or is it too complicated. Simply put, it was the wrong war to fight. - For the North Vietnamese, it was a full-on war of independence and national unification. - For the South, it was a post-colonial regime that never enjoyed much popular support trying to stay in power. - For the US, it was trying to help a bunch of oligarchs and military dictators on the other side of the planet to stay in power because of ill-defined and nebulous political bullshit. The North Vietnamese were simply much more invested into the entire thing and willing to pay just about any price for final victory, so short of flat-out matching on Hanoi, there wasn't really any chance to stop them permanently. And marching on Hanoi wasn't an option because that would have likely ended with a couple million angry Chinese coming in to join the party - understandably absolutely nobody involved wanted to open that can of worms. The real tragedy of it was that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist and patriot first and only went to the Soviets and Chinese for help for his cause once the US decided to back the French and later the South Vietnamese after telling him off.
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Feb 26, 2015 03:50
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Magni posted:The real tragedy of it was that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist and patriot first and only went to the Soviets and Chinese for help for his cause once the US decided to back the French and later the South Vietnamese after telling him off. Actually it was the other way around. Truman started supporting the French only after the Chinese and Soviets started supplying arms to Ho Chi Minh. Immediately after the war, Minh appealed to the US for help, but there was no way the US was going to fight against their recent ally. Truman told the French to get bent as well, and refused to get involved in their colonial affairs. Then Mao won the Chinese Civil War and he and Stalin started supplying Minh. Right about the same time the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb and the North Koreans invaded the South. American foreign policy suddenly became extremely interested in containing the Joe and Mao show, thus the aid started flowing to France while we dealt with Korea, only to take over ourselves after France was kicked out.
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Feb 26, 2015 04:08
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Were there concerted attempts on the part of the US to pacify the population and win 'hearts and minds' for the government?
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Feb 26, 2015 04:18
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Deteriorata posted:Actually it was the other way around. Truman started supporting the French only after the Chinese and Soviets started supplying arms to Ho Chi Minh. The US pressured the South to cancel unification elections so...
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Feb 26, 2015 04:20
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Raenir Salazar posted:The US pressured the South to cancel unification elections so... That was in 1956, after the French were gone and six years after Truman started sending aid.
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Feb 26, 2015 04:23
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StashAugustine posted:Were there concerted attempts on the part of the US to pacify the population and win 'hearts and minds' for the government? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearts_and_Minds_%28Vietnam%29 Vietnam is where that phrase comes from! Still, the idea of taking an undeveloped nation and "building" a functional democracy by fighting a war in it... pretty suspect.
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Feb 26, 2015 08:32
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Oh boy, a Vietnam War argument! The proximate answer to why America lost is that the North Vietnamese wanted to win more than America did, and that when yet another billion dollars of aid was needed to save South Vietnam in 1975, Congress and the American people were thoroughly sick of the mess and declined to provide it. The short milhist answer is that the Communists controlled the strategic tempo. They could attack at will or retreat into sanctuaries in the jungle, across the Cambodian and Laotian borders, or into North Vietnam. Close-range firefights in dense jungles effectively countered the American advantage in artillery and air power. Tactically, American forces were reduced to tromping around in the jungle waiting to get ambushed so they could hopefully kill more Vietnamese than they lost in ambush. This did not work, for obvious reasons. The kinds of major strategic moves that might have countered the Communist advantages: cutting the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos, carpet bombing Hanoi, striking logistics systems in China, had a high enough chance of starting World War III that American leaders refused to do so. The longer answer is that Vietnam was a political war, and that in the end it came down to Vietnamese people, and the Communists got most of the good ones. Imagine that you're a Vietnamese kid during the colonial period with an inclination towards politics. You can either join the (heroic, patriotic) Resistance or become part of the (hated, corrupt) French Colonial apparatus. World War II happens, and Vietnam becomes a colony of Vichy France, which continues a rather brutal and haphazard colonial administration until Vichy falls, at which point the Japanese invade and things somehow get even worse. When Japan surrenders Ho Chi Minh declares independence and there's a brief and pretty bloodless struggle. Independence doesn't last long, because France wants their empire back, and America needs France as an ally in Europe more than they need Vietnam as an ally in Asia. So the Resistance gets thrown under the bus, and there's nine years of war against the French which ends in Dien Bien Phu. At a conference in Geneva, Vietnam is partitioned into a Communist north and a Democratic south, which is a plan that has sorta-worked before in Germany and Korea. The problem for the South is that while they have Saigon and most of the fertile regions, they don't have any leadership. The French didn't promote any Vietnamese officers above Lieutenant. The main qualification of the new prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, were that he hated Communism and knew a bunch of Americans. The government and military of South Vietnam was chosen by basically pulling names out of a hat and hoping that they rose to the occasion. Conversely, North Vietnam had leaders like Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap (along with a whole hierarchy of lower-level commissars and organizers), who've been surviving and winning at revolutionary warfare for decades. Any chance that a democratic South Vietnamese civil society might arise was destroyed by pressure from above, as Giap and his successors ran a corrupt military dictatorship, and below, as the Viet Cong assassinated any local leaders who looked honest and competent. When the final blow arrived in 1975, ARVN was simply too brittle to resist. As for "Hearts and Minds", America did all kinds of stuff under the Department of State through USAID, CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support), and small scale military advisory efforts, including Special Forces and Marine Combined Action Platoons. These never came to much for two reasons. First, American firepower had a bad habit of undoing any positive develops. I've met a USAID adviser who built a cement school, well, clinic etc in a village, only to watch the entire place get bombed to pieces during the Tet Offensive, and things like this were constant as military units shifted around during the war and designated areas free fire zones, or just committed war crimes. South Vietnam was an agrarian country in 1954 and an urban country in 1972. Farmers fled the war in the countryside, but a without commensurate increase in industry. This led to weird distortions in the economy because it was always more profitable to serve the Americans than work an honest job. By 1970, a shoeshine boy and an ARVN colonel had comparable incomes, which meant that many officers and officials turned to corruption simply to feed their families, further weakening South Vietnamese civil society. While I'm sure that the Politburo was living better than the average North Vietnamese peasant, the divide wasn't nearly as large, and Soviet and Chinese aid didn't have such a corrosive effect on the economy. On the American side, after Kennedy there was more interest in the "big war" of battalion-sized sweeps and Arclight strikes than the "little war" of villages, and there was no consistent counter-insurgency program. The other big problem was that the "hearts and minds" campaign saw itself as primarily economic: give people higher yield rice, pigs and chickens, clinics and roads, and their loyalty will follow. What South Vietnam really needed was a honest connection between the wishes of the people and the policies in Saigon, and this never happened. First because the Communists would've won a fair election, second because the government in Saigon was beholden to large landowners (bad landlords are the standard Vietnamese peasant complaint back to the 11th century), and third because America didn't see itself as a colonial power and so refused to intervene in political matters.
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Feb 26, 2015 08:53
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100 Years Ago The French are ready to have yet another bash at Champagne, although there is at least a suggestion that they might soon try something more complicated than "En avant!" Herbert Sulzbach's battery gets some hefty counter-battery fire. The Dardanelles outer forts are being efficiently silenced, and the Telegraph's leader-writer gets up on his high horse about the shipbuilders asking for a wage increase so they can afford to live and eat.
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Feb 26, 2015 15:34
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Chamale posted:I disagree. The Canadian and American governments (and probably other ones, but I don't know) tried to destroy the culture of First Nations by removing children from their families. They also tried to reduce the Native population through involuntary sterilization, and in my province of Alberta they conducted those up until 1971. Whether a government tries to wipe out a persecuted culture by extermination or by preventing a people from passing on their culture, in the end it's the destruction of a culture either way. Well yes, but one way involves a giant pile of corpses and one doesn't. I'm not saying Canadian policy towards indigenous people wasn't awful, but that it should be in a different category than the policies driven by mass murder/starvation. Also, this is a nitpick, but "First Nations" doesn't include either Inuit or Metis people, both of whom were subjected to residential schools and (in the case of the Inuit) forced migration.
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Feb 26, 2015 16:41
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How reliable were the different tank models? How long distance could you drive on average before something broke, and you had to stop?
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Feb 26, 2015 17:52
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Patrick Spens posted:Well yes, but one way involves a giant pile of corpses and one doesn't. I'm not saying Canadian policy towards indigenous people wasn't awful, but that it should be in a different category than the policies driven by mass murder/starvation. "genocide" is simply the destruction of a tribe/people/race/nationality/however you want to parse group identity. It doesn't matter how it's accomplished. Yes, piles of corpses is one way to do it, but destroying their identity and forcing them to assimilate is another. Either way you are left with a post-genocide situation where group X does not exist in any recognizable form. The issue of whether or not it is a planned event is irrelevant. A government can enact genocidal policies without having any kind of overtly malicious intent, but if the end result is the destruction of another people, congrats, it's a genocide. "Cultural genocide" is very much a thing. The Germans had a pretty nasty variant of it planned for the Polish. They consciously and specifically targeted people who they identified as bearers and transmitters of Polish culture (politicians, priests, and Polish intelligentsia for the most part) for extermination and killed off tens of thousands of them. They wanted to create a culture-less slavic laboring class to essentially be a feudal peasantry for the German ruling class that would colonize the east after the war. While no one labeled it as such at the time (mostly because the terminology didn't exist) the various attempts to "Civilize savages through education" that you see in early 20th century Native schooling qualify as well because the result was largely the same - the production of a new generation that was culturally detached from their forefathers, didn't speak the language, didn't practice any of their religions, and basically had no non-genetic connection to the culture of their parents. This isn't a particularly new distinction. Lemkin was talking about it as early as the mid-40s.
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Feb 26, 2015 18:17
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The distinction isn't new, and neither is the attempt at equating "English-language schools" with "mass murder". Since it's the latter that most people think of when people use the term "genocide", I find that it's better to simply use that term and stop using "genocide" altogether since its meaning has been thoroughly appropriated.
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Feb 26, 2015 18:26
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There is a qualitative difference between gassing members of a race by virtue of their membership of that race forms of genocide as defined above me, and that difference that should be easily expressible in language, even if it's not with the word 'genocide'. For what it's worth, the genocide convention's criteria: quote:Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
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Feb 26, 2015 18:35
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Hogge Wild posted:How reliable were the different tank models? How long distance could you drive on average before something broke, and you had to stop? Of which war...?
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Feb 26, 2015 18:54
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Slavvy posted:Of which war...? When in doubt, assume WW2.
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Feb 26, 2015 18:58
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Disinterested posted:When in doubt, assume WW2. News to me, I usually assume Falklands.
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Feb 26, 2015 19:00
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