I didn't think I needed a materialist explanation for why the US committed the genocides it did, but here it is.
It's a lot easier to win a war against a state than a war against a people. With wars like in Vietnam, the US was not merely fighting a state, but Eisenhower himself said over 80% of Vietnamese supported the communists. Guerrilla armies would constantly pop up and people would spontaneously fight back just because the South Vietnamese government was so overwhelmingly unpopular.
The more Vietnamese the US killed, the more joined the communists, until the US resorted to using chemical weapons to try and destroy the food supply and starve them to death, and still couldn't win, or in Korea where the US destroyed every standing building to the point that they began dumping bombs in the ocean because the bombers couldn't find enough targets anymore and needed to lose the weight to land.
The US could not have won the Vietnam war without actually nearly completing their genocide. Same with Korea, and even Afghanistan. The more they fought, the more people joined the other side to fight against the US because they just wanted an independent country and didn't want a foreign colonizer deciding for them.
When the US overthrew the fascist Japanese state, and aided in overthrowing the fascist Nazi state, they replaced these states with new ones that they retained a lot of the original institutions and a lot of the original people in power. There was a change, but the change was not that fundamental, the US did not have to kill off most the Japanese population or the German population to make these changes, and their mass killings of civilians they did participate in was not necessary.
The situation with Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Cambodia, this was entirely different. The US was not just trying to take control and make minor changes to the state. The US was trying to change the entire people, they wanted to purge communist and national liberation ideas from Vietnam, when these ideas gripped the masses. They had to fundamentally change the people themselves, which put the US at war with the people, which was a lot more difficult of a war to win than the war with Japan or Germany, even though Vietnam is a smaller, poorer country.
Is this "Ego Death"? Does it include gender dissolution? How much shrooms one needs for it?
Indonesia does seem to get overlooked on a constant basis. My guess is that it's because it wasn't a US invasion, was largely ignored at the time, and serves no US-positive message. When you talk to a non-lefty and say, "well what about the mass murderers in Indonesia?" they'll rarely have any idea what you're talking about.
I've got a friend whose family fled the genocide in Indonesia after fleeing the genocide in Taiwan and finally got close enough to the center of empire to relatively safe.
She was genuinely surprised that I knew about Indonesia's genocide and even more surprised that I heard about it on Chapo.
uncritical support for the DPRK in its heroic struggle to liberate occupied Korea from the genocidal American empire
kept checking this wasnt in the dunk tank. i need to unsub from that again.
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It's from genzedong. It makes sense. Hells, there's no sense to make, it's plain facts.
I'm taking about hexbear. I didn't want it to take a bad turn in the middle somewhere. But it's not in the dunk tank so I'm good
I've always found it curious that the US didn't just go all the way in Vietnam, or Afghanistan, or Iraq. It's not like the American Empire is above genocide. Genuine concern that carrying out a full scale genocide could cause political unrest domestically, following the protests of the '60s and '70s? That seems like giving too much credit to the American public. Maybe it's just that the Empire is overextended and can't carry out such a thing? Or a lack of will from the capitalists, maybe they don't see the profit in an old-school imperial project? A lack of settlers to replace the slaughtered labor force? Or some mixture of some or all of these concerns?
Man, these are grim questions. I am curious, though, but how morbid.
E: There must be freaks in some arm of the military whose whole job is to contemplate this, and I bet they don't feel ugly just thinking about it.
