Democracy Versus Autocracy: Democracy’s Problem Is Its Voters

 This is being written as the Russian invasion of Ukraine is reaching a month in duration.  Much is at stake for so many peoples and so many countries, providing multiple concerns about the eventual outcome.  Here the interest will be in examining the conflict as an incident in a much broader battle for supremacy: democracies versus autocracies.  On one side, Ukraine and the western European and NATO countries are representative of democracies.  On the other side, Russia with its Belarusian ally, and an at least nominal alliance with China, represent autocracies, where democratic means are perverted to place supreme power in persons who do not have to answer to voters for whatever actions they choose to take.  Ukraine’s future depends on its own national institutions and its own citizens’ dedication to those institutions for its survival.  It also depends on coherent and persistent support from its democratic allies.  Autocracies can benefit from the ability to form plans and carry them out with no dissent to worry about.  Democracies can be hindered by political divides, multiple conflicting interest groups, and the constant need to maintain the support of their citizenries.  Democracies can have difficulty forming a plan of action; autocracies can quickly form a plan of action, even if the plan turns out to be stupid.

Since World War II, the US has been the dominant nation, the hegemon.  China clearly has a long-term plan to replace the US in that role.  There is a battle being waged for world dominance.  This competition was discussed in The US vs. China: Future Dominance and Common Prosperity.  China, coming from far behind, is approaching parity in many areas.  To become the hegemon, China must become dominant as an economic and cultural force.  It must demonstrate that its autocratic way of running a nation is an improvement over the democracy-based approach practiced in the US.  China has a long way to go in selling its methods to the rest of the world, but, as discussed in The Decline in Support for Democratic Institutions: Use Them or Lose Them, the US seems to be facing diminishing approval for democracy-based governance.  The observation that autocracy is gaining relative to democracy as the desired option is troubling.

When one claims that autocracy is gaining favor relative to democracy, the statement pertains not just to the US, but to other European countries as well.  One must ask if there could be a weakness to democracy that becomes more serious as time advances.  Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels provide some perspective on that question as it relates to the US in their book Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government.

The authors describe what has become a popular conception for the workings of a democracy as a “folk theory.”

“Proponents of democracy have long thought that human dignity required self-government.  People should choose their leaders at the polls and hold them accountable.  Voters should be represented, not just governed.  Reflecting Enlightenment optimism about human nature, along with skepticism about tradition and hierarchy, the argument for democracy supposed that good citizens would engage in thoughtful monitoring of their government.  The abuses of kings, aristocrats, commissars, and dictators would be eliminated.  Democratic norms would be enforced by the shared values of an enlightened populace.  Mistakes would occur, of course, but they would be the people’s own mistakes, and thus susceptible to quick recognition and reversal.  Most of the time, democratic government would be good government indeed.” 

The authors quote the results of innumerable political science and psychological studies to point out that human voters don’t measure up to that “Enlightenment optimism.”  To begin with, voters, in general, are not up to the role assigned to them.

“Numerous studies have demonstrated that most residents of democratic countries have little interest in politics and do not follow news of public affairs beyond browsing the headlines.  They do not know the details of even salient policy debates, they do not have a firm understanding of what the political parties stand for, and they often vote for parties whose long-standing issue positions are at odds with their own.” 

A second duty of the ideal voter is to judge the performance of the politicians in office and either reward or punish them for their performance.  As one might expect, bad times are much more memorable than the expected good times.

“First, they must be able to discern the specific role of the government’s diligence and competence in producing the pain or pleasure they experience.  Punishing the incumbents for events beyond their control makes no more sense than kicking the dog to get back at a difficult boss at work.  And second, they must be able to evaluate sensibly whether times have been good or bad under the incumbent government.”

“Hence, as we have shown, citizens routinely fail in both these respects.  Our analyses…show that governments are punished willy-nilly for bad times, including bad times clearly due to events beyond the government’s control.”

The authors conclude that voting patterns are best explained by what they refer to as the “group theory” of democracy.

“This model portrays citizens first and foremost as members of social groups, with (no doubt numerous and complex) social identities and group attachments figuring crucially in their political loyalties and behaviors.”

“Partisan loyalties reflect the way people understand their own lives, jobs, religious views, ancestral identities, family traditions, and personal ties.  For ordinary citizens, parties make sense—if they make sense at all—in social identity terms, not as ideological frameworks.”

But not all voters claim membership in a party.  Some proclaim themselves as independents.  Accepting that label seems to have more to do with personal self-image than with willingness to vote based on party differences.  Numerous studies have concluded that most independents are aligned with one of the parties.  The voters with no presupposed inclinations are generally those who know the least about the political issues and are the most easily swayed by their own recent observations of personal pain or gain. 

If you have a situation in which the two parties have nearly equal adherents, the results of an election may have little to do with policies or the competencies of the politicians.  Factors that inhibit the turnout of a particular class of voters, or excite the few true independents contribute to a degree of randomness in electoral results. 

The picture the authors present of electoral performance in the US are not very encouraging.  In fact, they felt a need to come to democracy’s defense at their conclusion.  Perhaps the best argument for democracy is that presented by Winston Churchill.

“No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Given current events, perhaps the best advantage of a functioning democracy is that when bad governance exists the voters have the power to throw the bums out.  For four years both the US and Russia were run by bums.  The US voters threw theirs out.  Russia is stuck with its bum. 

China’s biggest worry should be that it will give too much power to the wrong person, and it will not have the ability to throw the bum out before it is too late.

 

 

Bombing: The Evolving Morality of Warfare

This is being written as the assault by Russia on Ukraine is in its third week.  This is an event that has forced us to think back to the era of World War II.  That conflagration is famous for unleashing the weapons of war on civilian populations in ways that would have been unthinkable in previous centuries.  Russia is being condemned for breaking assumed norms for avoiding casualties with indiscriminate bombing of civilian locations.  Terms like “genocide” and “war crimes” are being bandied about.  Civilians being killed in wartime seems no longer an inevitability; rather, such an occurrence is greeted with the condemnation usually reserved for acts of terrorism. 

In World War II, all the major players—Germany, Japan, US, USSR, and Great Britain—used force indiscriminately, and often purposely used the killing of civilians as part of their war strategy.  Such a strategic goal was controversial at the time, raising serious moral issues.  Have these moral considerations become more dominant over time?  The current Russian invasion and its comparison to the earlier conflict invites a reconsideration of the morality issues involved.  The killing of civilians by dropping dumb bombs on them was controversial in the previous war and it is controversial in the current one. 

In his book, The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell provides an interesting and revealing look back at the issues raised in World War II with the availability of fast, long-range, and high-altitude bombers.  As the capability of bombers began to grow between the two world wars. A group of US pilots began dreaming of being able to use this developing capability to make the next war shorter and less deadly.  They were driven by the assumption that precision bombing could be used to eliminate an enemy’s warfighting capabilities while avoiding attacks that harmed civilians.  Gladwell would refer to these dreamers as “The Bomber Mafia.”  To perform such precision bombing it would be necessary to fly a direct path at high altitude to avoid antiaircraft fire, and fly during daylight hours to identify the desired target.  To actually hit a target under those conditions with what we would now call a “dumb” bomb, an accurate way to hit the target must be developed.  Their hope was placed in the Norden bombsight, named after its inventor, Carl Norden.

“The most expensive single undertaking of the Second World War was the B-29 bomber, the Superfortress.  The second most expensive was the Manhattan Project, the massive, unprecedented effort to invent and build the world’s first atomic bomb.  But the third most expensive project of the war?  Not a bomb, not a plane, not a tank, not a gun, not a ship.  It was the Norden bombsight, the fifty-five-pound analog computer conceived inside the exacting imagination of Carl L. Norden.  And why spend so much on a bombsight?  Because the Norden represented a dream—one of the most powerful dreams in the history of warfare: if we could drop bombs into pickle barrels from thirty thousand feet, we wouldn’t need armies anymore.  We wouldn’t need to leave young men dead on battlefields or lay waste to entire cities.  We would reinvent war.  Make it precise and quick and almost bloodless.  Almost.”

“Its official name was the Mark XV.  It was dubbed ‘the football’ by the airmen who used it.  It weighed fifty-five pounds.  It sat on a kind of platform—a packing box stabilized by a gyroscope—that kept it level at all times, even as the plane was bouncing around.  The bombsight was essentially an analogue computer, a compact, finely machined contraption composed of mirrors, a telescope, ball bearings, levels, and dials.  From a moving plane, the bombardier peered through the telescope at the target and made a fantastically complicated series of adjustments.  Norden created sixty-four algorithms that he believed addressed every question of the bombing problem, including: How much do the speed and direction of the wind affect the trajectory of a bomb?  How much does the air temperature affect it?  Or the speed of the aircraft?  To be properly trained on the Norden took six months.”

“The Army bought thousands of Norden bombsights.  Before every mission, the bombardier, with an armed escort, would retrieve his device from a vault.  He would carry it out to the plane in a metal box.  In the event of a crash landing, the bombardier was instructed to destroy the bombsight immediately, lest it fall into enemy hands.”

Other nations approached war with different dreams.  The British believed in what was referred to as “area bombing.”

“Area bombing is not done in daylight, because if you are not bombing at anything specific, why do you need to see anything?  And it was specifically aimed at civilians.  It said: you should hit residential neighborhoods, and keep coming night after night, in wave after wave, until your enemy’s cities are reduced to rubble.  Then the will of the enemy is going to sink so low that it will just give up.  When the British wanted a better euphemism for what they were doing, they called it ‘morale bombing’—bombing with the intent to destroy the homes and cities of your enemy and reduce your enemy’s population to a state of despair.”

Hitler believed in area bombing and unleashed it on the British at the start of the war.

“Hitler believed that if the Nazis bombed the working-class neighborhoods of East London, they would break the will of the British population.  And because the British believed the same theory, they were terrified that the Blitz would cost them the war.”

The British were incorrect in their assumptions, yet they chose to maintain them.

“Once they tallied up the damage, the British determined that more than forty-three thousand people had been killed and tens of thousands injured.  More than a million buildings were damaged or destroyed.  And it didn’t work.  Not on London or Londoners.  It did not crack their morale.  And despite that lesson, just two years later, the Royal Air force was proposing to do the exact same thing to the Germans.”

This concept of area bombing raised serious moral questions.  Those in favor had to conclude that killing little children playing with toys, killing nurses and doctors working in hospitals, killing those too old to fight back, all contributed to diminishing the fighting capability of the enemy.  They were all part of the enemy war effort.  That would be a moral leap too far for those in charge of US bombing strategy. 

The US bombers would continue to focus on precision bombing in the European theater in spite of disappointing results.  The most important and revealing episode involved the attack on the ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt.  This was to be a classic demonstration of benefits derived from precision bombing.  Ball bearings were critical components of armaments and Schweinfurt was the dominant provider for the Nazi war machine.  Eliminating it as a source would seriously limit war production. 

Two massive attacks on the Schweinfurt plants would be executed.  In the first, eighty bombs would hit the vast production facilities.  That may seem like a lot, but it was eighty bombs out of a total of about two thousand.  It was difficult to describe that as precision bombing.  The net effect on the German war effort was too small to be noticed.  The second raid would be a bit more accurate, but still yielded little benefit.  Meanwhile, the losses in planes and manpower from those vulnerable daylight raids was enormous and unsustainable.

“And how many planes did the Eighth Air Force lose in that second raid?  Sixty outright; seventeen damaged so badly that they had to be mothballed; 650 airmen killed or captured.  Nearly a quarter of the crews on that mission did not come home.”

This episode would be memorialized a few years after the war in the film Twelve O’Clock High.

The Schweinfurt missions were viewed as a waste of resources.  Ironically, feedback from the German side would come after the war.

“In his memoir, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production, Albert Speer, provides a detailed account of the Schweinfurt missions and what he calls ‘the enemy’s error.’  He notes: ‘The attacks on the ball-bearing industry ceased abruptly.  Thus, the Allies threw away success when it was already in their hands.  Had they continued the attacks…with the same energy, we would have quickly been at our last gasp’.” 

The US would again face the moral decision of precision bombing or area bombing when the ability to attack the Japan’s homeland became available.  In the fall of 1944, the three Marianas islands of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam had been captured and provided places to build landing strips close enough to Japan that the new B-29s could reach it and drop bombs.  Responsibility for that campaign went to Haywood Hansell, a member of the Bomber Mafia dedicated to the notion of precision bombing as the way to end the war. 

The first target would be the Nakajima Aircraft Company which was the main producer of combat aircraft.  Performing high-altitude precision bombing of Japan encountered difficulties, some of which were totally unexpected.  Such a mission required clear skies to identify a target.  Weather in Japan would provide those conditions only about one week out of a month.  The more severe problem, the totally unexpected one, was the discovery of the jet stream which at that time of the year flowed directly over Japan.

“And in the winter of 1944 and early spring of 1945, this narrow, hurricane-force band of air was directly over Japan.  That made it impossible for Hansell’s pilots to do any of the precision bombing they had planned to do.  If they flew across it, the plane would get blown sideways.  If they flew into it, they’d be fighting to stay aloft and would be easy targets for the Japanese.  And if they flew with it, they’d be racing too fast to take proper aim.”

Hansell would make several attempts to take out the Nakajima plants with little success.  His superiors were getting impatient and began demanding a change in tactics.  Japan was recognized as an ideal target for area bombing.  Its residential structures were mostly paper and wood inviting attacks with incendiary weapons.  And napalm was now available.

“At one point, in late December, the second in command of the entire Army Air Forces, Lauris Norstad, gave Hansell a direct order: launch a napalm attack on the Japanese city of Nagoya as soon as possible…Hansell did a trial run and burned down a paltry three acres of the city.”

Hansell was just not willing for or capable of a mission that would kill up to a hundred thousand people.  He would have to be replaced by someone who had demonstrated he would do whatever was necessary to get the job done.  That man was Curtis Lemay.

Getting the job done avoided the weather issues by flying below the cloud cover.  That low an approach was only feasible at night.  Precision bombing was now out of the question; for area bombing the ideal weapon for mass destruction was napalm.  Casualties from such attacks would be beyond what had been observed in the European theater.  How could those be justified?

“So how would Lemay have justified the firebombing he intended to inflict upon Japan?  Well, he would have said that it was the responsibility of a military leader to make wars as short as possible.  That it was the duration of war, not the techniques of war, that caused suffering.  If you cared about the lives of your men—and the pain inflicted on your enemy—then you ought to wage as relentless and decisive and devastating a war as you could.  Because if being relentless, decisive, and devastating turned a two-year war into a one-year war, wasn’t that the most desirable outcome?” 

The first firebombing of Tokyo took place on the night of March 9, 1945.  The planes would come in at about 5,000 feet.

“The full attack lasted almost three hours; 1,665 tons of napalm were dropped.  Lemay’s planners had worked out in advance that this many firebombs, dropped in such tight proximity, would create a firestorm—a conflagration of such intensity that it would create and sustain its own wind system.  They were correct.  Everything burned for sixteen square miles.”

It was estimated that as many as a hundred thousand people died that night.  The historian Conrad Crane would include this gruesome note:

“They’re about five thousand feet, they are pretty low…They are low enough that the smell of burning flesh permeates the aircraft…They actually have to fumigate the aircraft when they land back in the Marianas, because the smell of burning flesh remains within the aircraft.” 

Lemay and his bombers would continue to firebomb other cities, sixty-seven in all until Japan finally surrendered.  That would come a few days after the nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“Lemay always said that the atomic bombs were superfluous.  The real work had already been done.”

It is easy to view the combined firebombing and nuclear bombing of Japan as an unmitigated tragedy for humanity; something that should never have happened and should never happen again.  Certainly, most Japanese felt the same way, but, surprisingly, some thought that forcing their country to surrender and avoiding the planned invasion was beneficial to the Japanese people.  Some, astonishingly, issued thanks to Lemay for his actions in bringing the war to an early end.  Surrendering when they did and avoiding invasion spared the nation from millions of lives lost in those battles and kept the Soviets from claiming parts of its land.  The historian Crane also provided this perspective.:

“The other thing that would have happened is that there would have been millions of Japanese who would have starved to death in the winter.  Because what happens is that by surrendering in August, that gives MacArthur time to come in with his occupation forces and actually feed Japan…I mean, that’s one of MacArthur’s main successes: bringing in a massive amount of food to avoid starvation in the winter of 1945.”

Gladwell provides this note.

“Curtis Lemay’s approach brought everyone—Americans and Japanese—back to peace and prosperity as quickly as possible.  In 1964, the Japanese government awarded Lemay the highest award their country could give a foreigner, the First-Class Order of Merit of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun, in appreciation for his help in rebuilding the Japanese Air Force.  ‘Bygones are bygones’ the Premier of Japan said at the time, dismissing the objections of his colleagues in the Japanese parliament.”

Defining what is moral behavior in time of war can be difficult if not impossible.  It certainly was so in the Second World War.  Gladwell sets up Hansell and Lemay as competing proponents of differing moralities.  While Lemay’s approach successfully brings the war to a quick conclusion—with benefits perhaps to both sides—Gladwell’s hero seems to be Hansell.  He finishes with these comments.

“There is a set of moral problems that can be resolved only with the application of conscience and will.  Those are the hardest kinds of problems.  But there are other problems that can be resolved with the application of human ingenuity.  The genius of the Bomber Mafia was to understand that distinction—and to say, We don’t have to slaughter the innocent, burn them beyond recognition, in pursuit of our military goals.  We can do better.  And they were right.”

Hansell and his like didn’t have the tools at their disposal to effectively fight the war they wished to fight, but the direction which military technology has followed seems to have been in the direction they desired.  GPS systems and guided munitions are the standard today.  Gladwell claims our modern weapons could be used to kill an individual in a room on the top floor of a house while leaving the rest of the structure unharmed.  The military seems to have accepted the Bomber Mafia philosophy, justifying this conclusion.

“Curtis Lemay won the battle.  Haywood Hansell won the war.”

Yes, the precision strike mentality is alive and well.  But could it have defeated enemies like Germany and Japan who were determined to go on fighting as long as they were able?  There was a time when an army could demonstrate sufficient power to convince an enemy to sue for peace, surrender something to the victor, and then go on living.  Such a time seems to no longer exist. 

When one strives for unconditional surrender there is some truth in the claim by the area bombers that all the enemy are part of the war effort.  If the war ends when no individual is left to contest with the superior force, the war goes on until there is no one left with a gun to shoot back.  In this situation precision weapons are much less effective.  Modern weaponry can efficiently inflict severe damage on military and civilian assets.  This sets a threshold of pain that a potential enemy must be willing to accept before going to war, but it does not guarantee that this enemy will admit to being defeated.  The US military views Russia, China, and Iran as potential adversaries.  The capability to inflict extensive damage on each nation exists, but the ability to defeat any nation that does not wish to be defeated does not. 

If there is a morality in war today, it is associated with having so much power that the level of pain one can deliver to an adversary is too great to be endured.  If any potential adversary has similar pain to inflict, then there is nothing to be gained from warfare.  That is essentially the mutual assured destruction standoff that stabilized the nuclear postures of the US and the USSR.  Russia has maintained the dominant military power in Europe.  NATO countries, allied with the US, collectively have countered that power—at least up to now.  Russia has decided to invade a non-NATO country, Ukraine.  This intention has been hinted at for at least a decade.  The moral thing for NATO to have done would have been to incorporate Ukraine as either a member or as a country that was under its protection.  The members have not had the courage to do that, allowing mighty Russia to attack lonely Ukraine—and to wonder what else Russia has in mind

The Russians face a situation similar to what the Allies faced with Germany and Japan.  Precision bombing of warfare infrastructure will not get the adversary to surrender.  Intense and widespread death and destruction might.  What is NATO’s moral role in this struggle?  Is it content to let Ukraine live or die fighting NATO’s battles?

The Lies Told of Indigenous Peoples So They Could Be Killed and Their Land Taken

True psychopaths, people who are not inhibited by moral constraints, are few and far between.  When we encounter abhorrent behavior, it is usually because those responsible have made a moral decision that justifies what they have done.  What is of particular interest here is what colonialists told themselves that justified killing indigenous peoples they encountered in order to take their land. 

Colonialism and its legal justification dates back to the Treaty of Tordesilas in 1494 in which the Pope legitimized the claiming of non-Christian lands under what came to be called the Doctrine of Discovery.  This doctrine essentially assumed that non-Christian lands had no governance worth recognizing until Christian colonists “discovered” them and laid claim to them.  The great propagator of the notion that all white men are created equal, Thomas Jefferson, would proclaim as Secretary of State in 1792 that this Doctrine of Discovery was International Law and would be applied in lands colonized by the United States.  American Natives would therefore have no right of ownership to any of the lands they had inhabited for thousands of years.  This would be further confirmed by the Supreme Court in Johnson v. M’intosh (1823).  The court ruled that all land was originally owned by the country that had “discovered” it.  In this case it was the US federal government which inherited it from the British discoverers.  The Doctrine of Discovery would be applied everywhere as the US advanced westward into new territories. 

The legal framework for appropriating lands in which others had lived was established, but what provided the justification for using violence in taking control of them?  It seems claiming people were less than fully human was necessary.  Initially being non-Christian would justify rape, pillage, and murder.  As time went on, more nuanced justifications would be developed.

David Graeber and David Wengrow provide some perspective on these considerations in their book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

“…it’s important to understand a little of the legal basis for dispossessing people who had the misfortune to be living in territories coveted by European settlers.  This was, almost invariably, what nineteenth century jurists came to call the ‘agricultural argument’, a principle that has played a major role in the displacement of untold thousands of indigenous peoples from ancestral lands in Australia, New Zealand, sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas: processes typically accompanied by the rape, torture and mass murder of human beings, and often the destruction of entire civilizations.”

“Colonial appropriation of indigenous lands often began with some blanket assertion that foraging peoples really were living in a State of Nature—which meant that they were deemed to be part of the land but had no legal claims to own it.  The entire basis for dispossession, in turn, was premised on the idea that the current inhabitants of those lands weren’t really working.”

“The argument goes back to John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690), in which he argued that property rights are necessarily derived from labour.  In working the land, one ‘mixes one’s labor’ with it; in this way it becomes, in a sense, an extension of oneself.  Lazy natives according to Lock’s disciples, didn’t do that.  They were not, Lockeans claimed, ‘improving landlords’ but simply made use of the land to satisfy their basic needs with the minimum effort.”

To the Europeans in their crowded lands, working the land meant raising crops and herds of animals.  Such an arguable conclusion had vast and terrible consequences.

“James Tully, an authority on indigenous rights, spells out the historical implications: land used for hunting and gathering was considered vacant, and ‘if the Aboriginal peoples attempt to subject the Europeans to their laws and customs or to defend the territories that they have mistakenly believed to be their property for thousands of years, then it is they who violate natural law and may be punished or “destroyed” like savage beasts’.”

This conclusion can only be reached if one is of the mind to assert that the humans involved were in fact nothing more than “savage beasts.”

“What to a settler’s eye seemed savage, untouched wilderness, usually turns out to be landscapes actively managed by indigenous populations for thousands of years through controlled burning, weeding, coppicing, fertilizing and pruning, terracing estuarine plots to extend the habitat of particular wild flora, building clam gardens in intertidal zones to enhance the reproduction of shellfish, creating weirs to catch salmon, bass and sturgeon, and so on.” 

Greed and ignorance are powerful tools in rationalizing decisions.

 

Civil Rights for Indigenous Peoples: China and Others

China takes a lot of heat for its various civil rights abuses.  Of particular concern is the treatment of the Uyghurs, a people native to central Asia.  They make up a significant fraction of the population of China’s Xinjiang region.  The issue arises because they differ from the bulk of China in history, language, religion, and general culture.  China’s strategy with all of its various peoples is to train them to be obedient to the wishes of the government and its leaders: good citizens by its reckoning. This type of control requires considerable commonality in language and culture. The Uyghurs have resisted this homogenization forcing the Chinese leaders to use extreme measures to attain their goals.  The most repugnant actions involve steps taken to limit the birth rate of the Uyghurs.  The United States and other countries recognized these actions as technically falling within the definition of genocide.  Much of what China is doing would also fit within what one might call “cultural genocide” since the goal is to separate the Uyghurs from their traditional culture and replace it with something more acceptable to the Chinese government.

It is appropriate to criticize China for its activities.  However, it is also appropriate to recognize that countries most critical of China have themselves been guilty of “genocidal” practices against peoples whose existence was deemed “inappropriate.”  And this activity was occurring until quite recently.

The mass murders of Native Americans as the United States colonized territories while spreading westward is well documented.  Even so, native populations persisted, and another approach was needed to terminate their existence.  Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a policy that has been referred to as “kill the Indian, save the man” would be implemented.  This practice would take native children away from their parents—forever—and strip them of their native languages, names, and culture in schools where they were reprogrammed to assimilate into white European culture. 

Note the similarities with the present-day practices in the Xinjiang region. The Chinese are at least extending their assimilation activities to adults as well as children.  The United States policy, carried to its logical conclusion, would lead to true genocide as the parent generation aged and died leaving no one to carry on.

Walter Johnson provides some perspective in his book The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States.

“It was Carl Schurz, the German radical turned Missouri liberal and Bentonite imperialist, who outlined the most coherent alternative to Indian-killing-as-the-course-of-imperial-progress in the 1870s and 1880s.  As head of the US Interior Department, Schurz had nominal jurisdiction over Indian affairs, and beginning in 1887 he sought to transform that administrative responsibility into actual control.  Schurz’s main antagonists in the effort were Generals Sherman and Philip Sheridan, who tried in 1878 to have Indian affairs moved out of the Interior Department and into the War Department.  In contrast to Sheridan’s notorious statement that ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian, Schurz advocated a policy that was later summarized by William Henry Pratt, a one-time lieutenant in the 10^th Cavalry and founder of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, as ‘kill the Indian, save the man’—pacification through the separation of Indian children from their families and their reeducation in eastern boarding schools.  In other words, cultural genocide.”

“Within a few years, three-quarters of Native children were being taught in boarding schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (within the Interior Department), one third of those in off-reservation schools like Carlisle.”

Many of the tribes who remained with viable populations had been hunters and foragers who had ranged over vast areas.  With a perspective formed in the crowded nations of Europe, one was deemed to own land only if one actually worked the land.  In the eyes of the colonists, the Indians were not working the land so how could one conclude that they owned it.  By the reckoning of those who desired the Indian lands, the Indians were no different than any other beast who existed on the land.  One could do with them as one wished.

“In Schurz’s vision, citizenship and private property were mutually defining: only by learning how to cultivate the land as owners could Indians become citizens; only by learning to be citizens could they become worthy of the land upon which they had always lived, but never truly possessed according to Schurz.”

Apparently, any hope for Indian survival resided in becoming farmers.

“It was under Schurz that the push for privatization of Indian lands culminated in the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887.  The Dawes Act dissolved the common holding of American Indians and pulverized their nations into 160-acre plots, assigned one at a time and on the basis of individually held parcels of private property to every Indian head of household.” 

This legislation essentially declared Native American lifestyles illegal and un-American.  Yet another step in cultural genocide. 

“Because the reservation lands and other common lands, as restricted as they were, had once included land for hunting and seasonal migration, there was a great deal of unassigned land left over after severalty—as much as three-quarters of what had been Indian territory in the years leading up to 1887.  The Dawes Act deemed this unassigned Indian land ‘surplus’ and provided for its distribution to white homesteaders, who once again began to embark from St. Louis by the tens of thousands.”

As one might expect, the experiences of children forced to be raised in American Indian Residence Schools were not good.  While many complaints about Chinese practices relate to attempts to diminish the role of Islam in the lives of the Uyghurs, the US schools were intended to Christianize the children.  Since many of the Indian schools were run by religious groups, sexual abuse was common, along with physical and emotional abuse.

“The arc of the moral universe” is definitely long.

“In 1978 Congress passed and the President signed the Indian Child Welfare Act, giving Native American parents the legal right to refuse their child's placement in a school. Damning evidence related to years of abuses of students in off-reservation boarding schools contributed to the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act. Congress approved this act after hearing testimony about life in Indian boarding schools.”

The Canadians would copy the US schools for its Native Americans with similar results.  A recent CBS News 60-Minutes segment, Canada's unmarked graves: How residential schools carried out "cultural genocide" against indigenous children, focused on the number of unrecorded deaths that occurred among the children, presumably due to a combination of infections, abuse, and suicides.  CBS News also prepared a shorter piece on US residential schools: Indigenous activists shine a light on the history of residential schools.  Again, the victims claimed being subjected to cultural genocide. 

The Australians would also mistreat their Aboriginals in a similar manner and attain similar levels of pain and suffering.  They refer to the practice as “Stolen Generations.”

What is it they say about people in glass houses?