Comment by DangitBobby
3 months ago
I'm skeptical things would have lasted this long if the "US never really believed in its own ideal or took their own laws seriously". I think you're letting your cynicism for this moment run away with you.
3 months ago
I'm skeptical things would have lasted this long if the "US never really believed in its own ideal or took their own laws seriously". I think you're letting your cynicism for this moment run away with you.
American involvement in the Nuremberg trials set the stage for the modern era of international law. It began with the United States, along with the allied nations, constructing a post-facto legal definition of crime against humanity that somehow included the Holocaust but excluded both the American campaign in Japan and various Russian war crimes on the Western Front. It’s not cynicism to point out the clear hypocrisy.
Not to mention Jim Crow was still in full effect in the US at the time, but somehow wasn't deemed "Crime against humanity". The winners truly do control the history.
Was Jim Crow a federally organized policy bent on extermination? It was state level discrimination that Nazi Germany copied in 1933-1938 to deal with their “Jewish problem”. By 1939 you had formal government-enforced ghettos with forced labor (no equivalent in America at the time) and by 1941 you had mass extinction.
Don’t get me wrong - Jim Crow was horrific. But it was state level after effects of the civil war and failure to establish absolute dominance over the southern states in reconstruction. Cultural problems we fought a civil war over and we’re still dealing with today. But one difference of the goal with slavery and Jim Crow is subjugation not extermination
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I was unaware that the US did anything similar to the Holocaust in Japan.
As are the Japanese.
I don't think there are many Japanese alive today not aware of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While it's true they didn't place Japanese in internment cam.. no wait, they did do that. While it's true they didn't straight up execute Japanese folks on the street, they did effectively erase two cities from the world map, how that isn't a "Crime against Humanity", I don't know why we even have the label.
So yeah, the US didn't spend years doing horrible stuff to humans like the Nazis did, the US wasn't exactly an angel in that conflict, by a long shot. But neither was pretty much any nation, I guess it kind comes with the whole "world war" thing.
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At the same quantitative scale, no. But qualitatively, large-scale violence against civilian populations with the stated intent of extermination? Yes.