Winning an occupation via genocide

In an earlier post, I noted that genocide or expulsion are the only two ways to win an occupation. Inevitably, then, people point to the occupations of Japan and Germany as examples of "occupations gone right." But this ignores one critical piece of information: we did commit genocide against the people of Japan and Germany.

We killed millions of Japanese and German civilians during the course of the war. We killed pretty much every male between the ages of 18 and 35 in those countries during the course of the war. We turned their countries into rubble filled with starving women and children and old men, and several millions starved or died of exposure in the rubble in the aftermath of the war. We committed acts of genocide as bad as have ever been done by people like Pol Pot, Stalin, or Hitler. We killed so many Germans that only today, 60 years after the war ended, has Germany's population rebounded to its pre-war totals. Looking at the census numbers, it appears that we managed to kill over 20,000,000 Germans -- or about 1/4th of their population. That's genocide, my friends.

We did this because it was necessary. Those nations had attacked us. The majority of the people of those nations had supported their government, or at least done nothing to try to undermine it. The only way to stop them was to kill so many people in those countries and destroy so much of their infrastructure that they would be unable to commit further acts of war against us. But that doesn't mean that we didn't commit genocide against the people of Germany and Japan. We did. If you don't believe me, look at the firebombing of Dresden, a city with absolutely no military value.

Does that mean I'm sorry we committed genocide against the Japanese and Germans? Hell no! But let's call a spade a spade. The people of Japan and Germany supported war against our nation, and we killed them until there wasn't enough of them left to fight. That's how you win an occupation -- by killing all the men between the ages of 17 and 38. That's how we won the occupation of Germany and Japan.

Does that mean this (genocide) is what we should do in Iraq? Not no, but *HELL* no. The Iraqi government has never attacked America, and the Iraqi people never supported war against America (at least, not until we occupied their country). Indeed, in the two Oil Wars, they were so uninterested in fighting Americans that their starving draftee soldiers barely fired a shot in the direction of the Americans before dropping their rifles and surrendering to the nearest news crew (remember that one?!), resulting in ludicriously low casualties on the American side (what, maybe 1000 total between the two wars?). To commit genocide against the Iraqi people would not be an act of preserving the American nation. It would be an act of evil on the same scale as Stalin slaughtering millions of Ukrainians until they submitted to the Soviet occupation.

An act of evil which, alas, I fear that America's timid and frightened citizenry might, just might, support if Dear Leader said "we must kill all the Iraqi men or the terrorists have won!". Feh. Cowards. "Land of the brave and home of the free"? Maybe in LSD hallucinations... but more like "Land of the cowards and home of the surveilled" today. If the WWII generation wasn't already dying of old age, they'd be dying of shame at what America has become -- a bunch of passive cowering sheep letting their Dear Leader scare them into doing some of the most horrible things in recent history, including the crime of killing tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians based upon a lie -- the lie that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq occupation is going to go down in history alongside the genocide against the Filipinos in the early 1900's in the history books. Not that many Americans know that America committed an act of genocide against the Filipinos in the early 1900's, of course -- mention of the Phillipine-American War has been carefully censored from the history books that most American schoolchildren are taught out of, because truth is unpatriotic. Which is, alas, the same argument that Dear Leader uses against accurate reporting of the current occupation -- "truth is unpatriotic". Bleh.

-- Badtux the History Penguin