7 ms·

Just another example of the extreme moral ambiguity of the West. We regularly ignore our own standards around giving people a fair trial when it suits the execu

• AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  > It is sad to think that the myth of our moral superiority has never been anything else. No, it's real, just not as real as we like to think. Between "imprison people of Japanese ancestry for the rest of the war, then free them" and "imprison people of Jewish ancestry, then kill them", there is a real moral difference. They are both wrong, but they are not equal.
  • pessimizer 10y ago
    That proves true the myth of our moral superiority to the Nazi regime, but not the myth of our moral superiority.
    • AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      To the Nazi regime. To the Communist regimes. To Turkey (Armenian genocide). To Rwanda. To Serbia. But not to everyone, I'll agree.
      • ebiester 10y ago
        Is the Armenian genocide worse than the Trail of Tears, for example? (I'm not trying to discredit or diminish the Armenian genocide here, mind you, but rather point out we still have someone who committed genocide by the same terms on American money.)
        • desireco42 10y ago
          They are fairly similar, however we just don't know much about what happened to Armenians, which doesn't diminish what they endured or how bad things were done to them.
        • mikeash 10y ago
          I think most Americans will, at this point, agree that the Trail of Tears was terrible. The National Park Service has an official historic trail covering the route, with many exhibits describing the terrible suffering. Turkey, on the other hand, still tries to pretend that the Armenian Genocide did not happen, even prosecuting people who say it did. We are by no means perfect, but I think nations which are able to acknowledge and learn from the mistakes of their past have a leg up on those that try to pretend everything was great.
          • turar 10y ago
            > We are by no means perfect, but I think nations which are able to acknowledge and learn from the mistakes of their past have a leg up on those that try to pretend everything was great. The United States government has never acknowledged Native American genocide either.
            • mikeash 10y ago
              They clearly have to some extent. That's why I mentioned the National Park Service trail. More would be better, for sure, but we don't deny it, nor prosecute people who say it happened.
              • hkt 10y ago
                Calling it a genocide is an important acknowledgement in its own right.
                • mikeash 10y ago
                  That's an argument that the US could handle it better. My argument is simply that some countries handle it qualitatively better than others, and in particular that the US acknowledges and learns from the Trail of Tears in ways that Turkey does not with the Armenian Genocide. These two arguments are compatible.
      • jlillyreed 10y ago
        I would say that our genocide of the indigenous people's of North America was just as bad as either of those. ..and we're still invading their lands and violating treaties with them.
        • angersock 10y ago
          This is a bit misleading, given the documented atrocities that certain Native American tribes committed against settlers. Fact is, there was no future in which they were going to keep their nice things and in which we would be able to get where we are today.
          • exolymph 10y ago
            Yes, some Native American tribes treated the settlers badly too. (Even then, there was conflict within tribes regarding how to deal with whites.) But there was an order of magnitude difference in the amount of violence perpetrated and the amount of harm caused.
          • adrienne 10y ago
            The "documented atrocities that certain Native American tribes committed" against INVADERS, you mean? Because it was their land, and the word "settlers" is a way to whitewash what people did to them - and are still doing to them today - which is invasion and genocide.
      • rodgerd 10y ago
        Hitler cited the US actions against Native Americans in the same breath as the Armenian genocide - as reasons he could eliminate the Jews and suffer no ill effects.
        • dragonwriter 10y ago
          And he would probably have been right, had he not coupled it with a war of aggression against enough of the world to get every major power not in the Axis aligned against it. The Nazi's downfall wasn't the genocide against Jews and other "undesirables", for all that that became the basis of punishment for some ex-regime figures after the Nazis were defeated.
  • bildung 10y ago
    > No, it's real, just not as real as we like to think. Between "imprison people of Japanese ancestry for the rest of the war, then free them" and "imprison people of Jewish ancestry, then kill them", there is a real moral difference. They are both wrong, but they are not equal. Of course, but Germany belongs to the "West", too. I think GP alluded to e.g. human rights in China.
    • lomnakkus 10y ago
      I must be missing something, but China is actually doing "bad things" now. The Japanese internment happened ~75 years ago. I like to think that the "West" has progressed since then. (That's not say that everything's just fine and dandy, but there is a clear difference between the West and, say, China today.)
      • jlillyreed 10y ago
        > I like to think that the "West" has progressed since then. You might like to think so, but you'd be VERY VERY wrong. This year Trump surrogates began justifying their proposal to create a muslim registry by saying that the Japanese Internment gave precedence for their desired actions.
        • YPCrumble 10y ago
          Aren't we still in political moratorium week? How does one flag a comment?
          • TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
            It was ended.
            • striking 10y ago
              Clearly 'dang needs to remind people of this.
  • myfirstaccount 10y ago
    Also keep in mind that the end result could have been very different if United States soil was under attack. Somehow I do not have hard time believing that the people who has comitted large scale genocide on native americans would not to find a "final solution" for the japanese problem
  • hkt 10y ago
    No dispute here over relative merits, but if moral superiority over the perpetrators of the holocaust is all we are aiming for then the bar is frighteningly low.
  • megous 10y ago
    It might have been different if America had not 110000 people to deal with, but 5000000. It might have found its own final solution for the Japanese. Nazis only got to the final solution quite a bit into the war. There were various plans over the previous years to move undesirable people elsewhere, like Madagascar, etc.
  • petulanta 10y ago
    So just because we didn't cause the Holocaust, we are morally superior? That's a pretty low bar and a ridiculous argument, but it says a lot about the American mindset.
    • talmand 10y ago
      I don't appreciate the generalization in that statement.
    • dang 10y ago
      I'm uncomfortable with some of the arguments being made here, too, but your first sentence is a rather uncharitable spin and your second one reads like a slur (though I'm sure you didn't mean it that way). Please don't comment like this here. Instead, please post civilly and substantively, and make your comments more civil and substantive on divisive topics, not less. That's the only way we can stave off a downward spiral in this place. https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • petulanta 10y ago
        Please name one other way you can logically interpret that statement because I certainly see no other meaning whatsoever.
        • dang 10y ago
          "Please name", followed by an invitation to a pointless meta argument, is a troll trope. That, plus that you didn't acknowledge the civility issue here, makes me worry that you're not interested in using this site in good faith. Please review the links I mentioned. Edit: Actually, since there's evidence that you've violated the rules of this site many times previously, I'm banning your account until we get some indication that you'll stop doing this.
• deleted 10y ago
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• jimbokun 10y ago
  The struggle for "Western Civilization" or "Western Values" has always been a struggle within our nations, rather than between us and the rest of the world. Slowly, real progress has been made, but unevenly distributed, and often with great leaps backwards. I will leave out my opinion about whether current events reflect a time of progress or one of those great backward leaps.
• tptacek 10y ago
  I find your sentiment somewhat tossed-off, implying as it does that we "regularly ignore" things like Japanese-American internment camps, when in fact we teach them to elementary school children as national disgraces we hope never to repeat.
  • quesera 10y ago
    That is not a component of all curricula in the country. And the idea of a "registry" is a modern day touchy thing.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    > when in fact we teach them to elementary school children as national disgraces we hope never to repeat When it's cited as a precedent to justify a policy proposal, it's pretty clear that lesson isn't being taught effectively, if it's being taught.
  • gdilla 10y ago
    you wouldn't think so after the rhetoric of the last presidential campaign. We forgot all our lessons of national disgraces.
• kofejnik 10y ago
  As someone born in USSR, I have to really disagree. What happened to Japanese-Americans absolutely sucked, but in no way can be compared to how people were treated in USSR, where millions died in camps and on their way to camps. Millions of Ukrainians (~10%) died in the artificial famine of 1933, just to enforce compliance with the reforms. Chechens were interned in 1944, and estimated 25-30% of them (or 150-200 thousand people) died in exile. This list goes on and on in USSR alone, who were supposedly good guys and allies. To all those millions of people, being locked on a farm with dull food and nothing to do and shortages of hot water, would be a nice vacation. Takes special kind of mental gymnastics to see these cases as equivalent.