Thousands killed in 1950 by US's Korean ally

[CptSternn]

http://tinyurl.com/5rpymo

DAEJEON, South Korea - Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation's U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950.

With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or into the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial.

The mass executions — intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners — were carried out over mere weeks and were largely hidden from history for a half-century. They were "the most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War," said historian Kim Dong-choon, a member of a 2-year-old government commission investigating the killings.

Hundreds of sets of remains have been uncovered so far, but researchers say they are only a tiny fraction of the deaths. The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million.

That estimate is based on projections from local surveys and is "very conservative," said Kim. The true toll may be twice that or more, he told The Associated Press.

In addition, thousands of South Koreans who allegedly collaborated with the communist occupation were slain by southern forces later in 1950, and the invaders staged their own executions of rightists.

Through the postwar decades of South Korean right-wing dictatorships, victims' fearful families kept silent about that blood-soaked summer. American military reports of the South Korean slaughter were stamped "secret" and filed away in Washington. Communist accounts were dismissed as lies.

Only since the 1990s, and South Korea's democratization, has the truth begun to seep out.

In 2002, a typhoon's fury uncovered one mass grave. Another was found by a television news team that broke into a sealed mine. Further corroboration comes from a trickle of declassified U.S. military documents, including U.S. Army photographs of a mass killing outside this central South Korean city.

Now Kim's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has added government authority to the work of scattered researchers, family members and journalists trying to peel away the long-running cover-up. The commissioners have the help of a handful of remorseful old men.

"Even now, I feel guilty that I pulled the trigger," said Lee Joon-young, 83, one of the executioners in a secluded valley near Daejeon in early July 1950.

The retired prison guard told the AP he knew that many of those shot and buried en masse were ordinary convicts or illiterate peasants wrongly ensnared in roundups of supposed communist sympathizers. They didn't deserve to die, he said. They "knew nothing about communism."

The 17 investigators of the commission's subcommittee on "mass civilian sacrifice," led by Kim, have been dealing with petitions from more than 7,000 South Koreans, involving some 1,200 alleged incidents — not just mass planned executions, but also 215 cases in which the U.S. military is accused of the indiscriminate killing of South Korean civilians in 1950-51, usually in air attacks.

The commission last year excavated sites at four of an estimated 150 mass graves around the country, recovering remains of more than 400 people. Working deliberately, matching documents to eyewitness and survivor testimony, it has officially confirmed two large-scale executions — at a warehouse in the central South Korean county of Cheongwon, and at Ulsan on the southeast coast.

In January, then-President Roh Moo-hyun, under whose liberal leadership the commission was established, formally apologized for the more than 870 deaths confirmed at Ulsan, calling them "illegal acts the then-state authority committed."

The commission, with no power to compel testimony or prosecute, faces daunting tasks both in verifying events and identifying victims, and in tracing a chain of responsibility. Under Roh's conservative successor, Lee Myung-bak, whose party is seen as democratic heir to the old autocratic right wing, the commission may find less budgetary and political support.

The roots of the summer 1950 bloodbath lie in the U.S.-Soviet division of Japan's former Korea colony in 1945, which precipitated north-south turmoil and eventual war.

In the late 1940s, President Syngman Rhee's U.S.-installed rightist regime crushed leftist political activity in South Korea, including a guerrilla uprising inspired by the communists ruling the north. By 1950, southern jails were packed with up to 30,000 political prisoners.

The southern government, meanwhile, also created the National Guidance League, a "re-education" organization for recanting leftists and others suspected of communist leanings. Historians say officials met membership quotas by pressuring peasants into signing up with promises of rice rations or other benefits. By 1950, more than 300,000 people were on the league's rolls, organizers said.

North Korean invaders seized Seoul, the southern capital, in late June 1950 and freed thousands of prisoners, who rallied to the northern cause. Southern authorities, in full retreat with their U.S. military advisers, ordered National Guidance League members in areas they controlled to report to the police, who detained them. Soon after, commission researchers say, the organized mass executions of people regarded as potential collaborators began — "bad security risks," as a police official described the detainees at the time.

The declassified record of U.S. documents shows an ambivalent American attitude toward the killings. American diplomats that summer urged restraint on southern officials — to no obvious effect — but a State Department cable that fall said overall commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur viewed the executions as a Korean "internal matter," even though he controlled South Korea's military.

Ninety miles south of Seoul, here in the narrow, peaceful valley of Sannae, truckloads of prisoners were brought in from Daejeon Prison and elsewhere day after day in July 1950, as the North Koreans bore down on the city.

The American photos, taken by an Army major and kept classified for a half-century, show the macabre sequence of events.

White-clad detainees — bent, submissive, with hands bound — were thrown down prone, jammed side by side, on the edge of a long trench. South Korean military and national policemen then stepped up behind, pointed their rifles at the backs of their heads and fired. The bodies were tipped into the trench.

Trembling policemen — "they hadn't shot anyone before" — were sometimes off-target, leaving men wounded but alive, Lee said. He and others were ordered to check for wounded and finish them off.

Evidence indicates South Korean executioners killed between 3,000 and 7,000 here, said commissioner Kim. A half-dozen trenches, each up to 150 yards long and full of bodies, extended over an area almost a mile long, said Kim Chong-hyun, 70, chairman of a group of bereaved families campaigning for disclosure and compensation for the Daejeon killings. His father, accused but never convicted of militant leftist activity, was one victim.

Another was Yeo Tae-ku's father, whose wife and mother searched for him afterward.

"Bodies were just piled upon each other," said Yeo, 59, remembering his mother's description. "Arms would come off when they turned them over." The desperate women never found him, and the mass graves were quickly covered over, as were others in isolated spots up and down this mountainous peninsula, to be officially "forgotten."

When British communist journalist Alan Winnington entered Daejeon that summer with North Korean troops and visited the site, writing of "waxy dead hands and feet (that) stick through the soil," his reports in the Daily Worker were denounced as "fabrication" by the U.S. Embassy in London. American military accounts focused instead on North Korean reprisal killings that followed in Daejeon.

[CptSternn]

But CIA and U.S. military intelligence documents circulating even before the Winnington report, classified "secret" and since declassified, told of the executions by the South Koreans. Lt. Col. Bob Edwards, U.S. Embassy military attache in South Korea, wrote in conveying the Daejeon photos to Army intelligence in Washington that he believed nationwide "thousands of political prisoners were executed within (a) few weeks" by the South Koreans.

Another glimpse of the carnage appeared in an unofficial U.S. source, an obscure memoir self-published in 1981 by the late Donald Nichols, a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, who told of witnessing "the unforgettable massacre of approximately 1,800 at Suwon," 20 miles south of Seoul.

Such reports lend credibility to a captured North Korean document from Aug. 2, 1950, eventually declassified by Washington, which spoke of mass executions in 12 South Korean cities, including 1,000 killed in Suwon and 4,000 in Daejeon.

That early, incomplete North Korean report couldn't include those executed in territory still held by the southerners. Up to 10,000 were killed in the city of Busan alone, a South Korean lawmaker, Park Chan-hyun, estimated in 1960.

His investigation came during a 12-month democratic interlude between the overthrow of Rhee and a government takeover by Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee's authoritarian military, which quickly arrested many then probing for the hidden story of 1950.

Kim said his projection of at least 100,000 dead is based in part on extrapolating from a survey by non-governmental organizations in one province, Busan's South Gyeongsang, which estimated 25,000 killed there. And initial evidence suggests most of the National Guidance League's 300,000 members were killed, he said.

Commission investigators agree with the late Lt. Col. Edwards' note to Washington in 1950, that "orders for execution undoubtedly came from the top," that is, President Rhee, who died in 1965.

But any documentary proof of that may have been destroyed, just as the facts of the mass killings themselves were buried. In 1953, after the war ended in stalemate, after the deaths of at least 2 million people, half or more of them civilians, a U.S. Army war crimes report attributed all summary executions here in Daejeon to the "murderous barbarism" of North Koreans.

Such myths survived a half-century, in part because those who knew the truth were cowed into silence.

"My mother destroyed all pictures of my father, for fear the family would get an image as leftists," said Koh Chung-ryol, 57, who is convinced her 29-year-old father was innocent of wrongdoing when picked up in a broad police sweep here, to die in Sannae valley.

"My mother tried hard to get rid of anything about her husband," she said. "She suffered unspeakable pain."

Even educated South Koreans remained ignorant of their country's past. As a young researcher in the late 1980s, Yonsei University's Park Myung-lim, today a leading Korean War historian, was deeply shaken as he sought out confidential accounts of those days from ordinary Koreans.

"I cried," he said. "I felt, 'Oh, my goodness. Oh, Jesus. This was my country? It was true?'"

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission can recommend but not award compensation for lost and ruined lives, nor can it bring surviving perpetrators to justice. "Our investigative power is so meager," commission President Ahn Byung-ook told the AP.

His immediate concern is resources. "The current government isn't friendly toward us, and so we're concerned that the budget may be cut next year," he said.

South Korean conservatives complain the "truth" campaign will only reopen old wounds from a time when, even at the village level, leftists and rightists carried out bloody reprisals against each other.

The life of the commission — with a staff of 240 and annual budget of $19 million — is guaranteed by law until at least 2010, when it will issue a final, comprehensive report.

Later this spring and summer its teams will resume digging at mass grave sites. Thus far, it has verified 16 incidents of 1950-51 — not just large-scale detainee killings, but also such events as a South Korean battalion's cold-blooded killing of 187 men, women and children at Kochang village, supposed sympathizers with leftist guerrillas.

By exposing the truth of such episodes, "we hope to heal the trauma and pain of the bereaved families," the commission says. It also wants to educate people, "not just in Korea, but throughout the international community," to the reality of that long-ago conflict, to "prevent such a tragic war from reoccurring in the future."

[CptSternn]

This is yet another revelation that the powers that be tried to wipe from history.

Anyone else notice something? America has been behind the deaths of more civilians than any other regime in recent memory. America dropped two nukes on Japan, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children. Civilians. America then had operation tiger in Vietnam, where they went in and killed off innocent villagers - tens of thousands, of more innocent men, women, and children. Now it comes to light that in Korea America again was behind the mass execution of over a hundred thousand civilians.

Yet that is the premise they used to invade other nations - claiming that innocent people there are being killed.

Ironic?

[HumanePain]

"America has been behind the deaths of more civilians than any other regime in recent memory". I disagree: after reading the numbers in this article, it is a fact that Hitler's and Stalin's regime leave America far behind in the list, unless you deny the Holocaust.

[ZombieG]

Stalin surpassed Hitler as far as deaths, go. He starved millions of his own people.

Not to mention, I wouldn't bother talking about America's crimes against Japan. Read about the **** of Nanking and Unit 731. While, this article isn't exactly the shining moment of American ethics, eh. You'd be hard-pressed to find a nation that hasn't wiped their history at some point.

[ZombieG]

Originally Posted by ZombieG

Not to mention, I wouldn't bother talking about America's crimes against Japan. Read about the **** of Nanking and Unit 731.

Yep. As of December of last year, declassified documents found that the death toll during the Japanese occupation of Nanking (Or Nanjing, to be more accurate) breached 500,000.

[CptSternn]

Sorry, I should have qualified my statement better. I meant responsible for civilian deaths in conflicts.

Stalin was a right bastard, but he exterminated his own, so thats not really the same.

Hitler was part of WW2 - and exterminating a race of people also isn't really the same.

However, if you want to be techinical, then yes, hitler could be listed as the most egregious on this count. That being said that means America is only second to hitlers regime when it comes to killing civilians in a conflict.

Still not the label you really want, eh?

America, second only to hitler in the number of innocent people put to death by their military.

[Drake Dun]

Bullshit! America is never #2, got it?! NEVER. And if we have to kill some more people to prove it, then by our loving merciful God we will!

[ZombieG]

Originally Posted by CptSternn

Sorry, I should have qualified my statement better. I meant responsible for civilian deaths in conflicts.

Stalin was a right bastard, but he exterminated his own, so thats not really the same.

Hitler was part of WW2 - and exterminating a race of people also isn't really the same.

However, if you want to be techinical, then yes, hitler could be listed as the most egregious on this count. That being said that means America is only second to hitlers regime when it comes to killing civilians in a conflict.

Still not the label you really want, eh?

America, second only to hitler in the number of innocent people put to death by their military.

You're ridiculous. I'm sorry, but because Stalin murdered his own people he's somehow excused? Exterminating a race of people isn't the same? Death is fucking death. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you that you have to use such skewed logic to broil America? Do you think anyone really considers America to be a just country? Or that outside of news articles like this, we're ignorant of the atrocities we've committed? America unleashed the atomic bomb, starting years of nuclear proliferation and fear in league with the USSR. That alone should be enough to make the entire country look like the number one enemy to the health and progression of mankind.

So why exactly are you picking and choosing, here? Why are you pushing a propaganda piece instead of recognizing the fact that death is indeed death, regardless of circumstance, ethnicity or reason? Again, I am sorry, but such a blatant display of immaturity and ignorance is just.. disgusting in this day and age. It's obvious that you have some qualm (which I'm guessing is more than likely under the tag of "fashionable") against America, and that somewhere along the lines, you just decided to let logic blow in the wind. Because hey, why be objective? Being furiously dumb is so much more self-empowering and sexy, right?

[Stormtrooper of Death]

Pwnd!!!!!!

[Drake Dun]

Originally Posted by ZombieG

Do you think anyone really considers America to be a just country? Or that outside of news articles like this, we're ignorant of the atrocities we've committed?

He is being ridiculous, but on this one point I agree with him. I can tell you based on personal experience that a lot of Americans are living in a bubble of self-righteousness, carefully isolated from the facts of history. I just had a big row with my family during the Hawaii trip because my father said that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor because they wanted to annex Hawaii, and I had the temerity to challenge him. Meanwhile most Americans probably still can't tell you what motivated Al Qaeda to attack the WTC. They prefer the Fox News version of the story ("That's what evil people do, silly!").

Here's a recent example from a conversation I had on another forum:

Originally Posted by some American living in a bed time fairy tale

Forgive us for coming to America, defeating you for dominance of this country, increasing knowledge, technology, the vast improvement of life, instituiting a form of government superior to any formed by man, instituiting an American culture superior to any before it or after it, becoming a great nation on earth that is essentially the defensive wall against tyranny and injustice in the world, feeding the whole freakin world, coming to everybody's rescue around the world, removing slavery as an option in the world were up until that point would have continued, etc. etc. etc. I can go on and on about the benefits humanity has received by Europeans coming to America. What have we received from Indians? Tobacco cancer sticks and slim jims.

"...removing slavery as an option in the world were [sic] up until that point would [sic] have continued..." Classic.

It's a real problem.

[CptSternn]

Originally Posted by ZombieG

So why exactly are you picking and choosing, here? Why are you pushing a propaganda piece instead of recognizing the fact that death is indeed death, regardless of circumstance, ethnicity or reason?

Death is not just death. Isn't America right now in a 'war' against 'terrorism'? Since 9/11, not one American has been killed by a terrorist. That being said TENS OF THOUSANDS of Americans have been killed by gun violence in America, but yet not one politician has said one word, not one piece of legislation has been passed to stop gun violence, yet BILLIONS are continuing to be poured into stopping 'terrorists'.

So death obviously isn't 'just death'. Depending on the circumstances and your political views, some deaths appear to be more important than others.

That being said my point is that its quite ironic that America and its 'war on terror' - a war against killing civilians - is being waged by a nation that holds a rich history of engaging in terrorism.

America was founded by terrorists. If you look at texts from the 1700;s during the US war for independence you will see that America started guerrilla warfare against the brits. From the Boston Tea Party down to Paul Reveres ride, American history is chock full of terrorist activity.

This leads to even today, when we see America still involved in the mass executions and guerrilla war against now sovern nations.

Just seems odd to me that they are the ones who have throughout history been involved in the most cases of what can be labeled as terrorist attacks.

[ZombieG]

Originally Posted by Drake Dun

He is being ridiculous, but on this one point I agree with him. I can tell you based on personal experience that a lot of Americans are living in a bubble of self-righteousness, carefully isolated from the facts of history. I just had a big row with my family during the Hawaii trip because my father said that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor because they wanted to annex Hawaii, and I had the temerity to challenge him. Meanwhile most Americans probably still can't tell you what motivated Al Qaeda to attack the WTC. They prefer the Fox News version of the story ("That's what evil people do, silly!").

Here's a recent example from a conversation I had on another forum:



"...removing slavery as an option in the world were [sic] up until that point would [sic] have continued..." Classic.

It's a real problem.

I can't account for the handful or people who think that America has never had any faults.

And at least as far as I'm concerned and the people I communicate with, we're all fairly aware of what caused 9/11. Blow back.

However, I consider the people who refuse to believe that America could possibly have had an ill past akin to those in Japan who deny what happened in Nanking. Nationalism really isn't cool these days.

And CptSternn, are you not aware that the approval of this war is at the lowest it's ever been for any war in the history of America? Most of us are just as tired of this fake war on "terrorists" as the next person.

However, what you're saying reminds me of something. "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a thousand is a statistic." "One death is more important than others." Sure it is. To me, it sounds like you're just forgetting all aspects of history and focusing on Americas. Like you have a point to prove. Their deaths don't become less important at all, they become devalued.

Also, perhaps you should do a bit more reading. The fact that you think Paul Revere's ride was significant at all proves that you've bought into the pop-culture history of America, not the real one. I think the name you're looking for is Israel Bissel.

I'm sorry, but there is no possible way that I will concede that America is on the same level as any practical mass murderer. Sure, if you divide by context or nationality, I'm sure you can whittle it down to anything you want to prove. People do it all the time with Catholicism(And more often than not know nothing about the Crusades). Not that I'm saying America is a just country by any stretch of the imagination, but if the fact that somewhere, someone might actually like America pisses you off, something tells me you need to research more history in general.

[xParadigmx]

what about the trail of tears and the camps that relocated the indians? we were almost wiped out by our own country. does that mean that that doesnt count either? are we the new stalin?

[KontanKarite]

Okay, America is bad. We get it. So... who do we write the check to? Would you like it paid in gold, oil. or blood?

[Godslayer Jillian]

The fact that CptSternn keeps talking about the same things doesn't stop making them true.
Yeah, it gets annoying, but just because everyone now makes fun of Bush doesn't mean there's no reason for it.
Equally, although this has a very exaggerated tone, it is still a fact.

By the way, I think America has actually killed more people than Nazi Germany. I know that sounds like Godwin's law, but it's true. Just think of the atomic bombs, the mass genocides during colonization, lynchings, the bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia 'back to the stone age'...
The concentration camps only killed six million people. Yeah, they were brutal, but America had it's own concentration camps and Russia had Siberia.
Jews were treated horribly because they weren't considered fully human, supposedly. Well then, that sounds pretty much like how blacks were treated over here until the fifties. The only difference was that over here, there was no expressed state support for racial superiority. So if we speak about intentions, America was just as bad.
If we speak about numbers, then Stalin was FUCKING WAY WORSE. The obscene number of deaths under Stalin's regime is so underscored it pisses me off. Everyone thinks of Hitler as the epitome of evil, when numerically he was only about a fourth as bad as Stalin. The only reason Stalin is 'forgiven' of this is because he was an ally.

Now, I'm not saying heil hitler, not even 'leave him the fuck alone', but simply stop with the 'patriotic' rhetoric and realize we weren't even the lesser of two evils.

[HumanePain]

That was my earlier point. But yeah, we even killed ourselves during the civil war, and then throughout that and before the native Americans as you said.

But we are starting to mellow out.

[Wednesday Friday Addams]

Originally Posted by Godslayer Jillian

The fact that CptSternn keeps talking about the same things doesn't stop making them true.
Yeah, it gets annoying, but just because everyone now makes fun of Bush doesn't mean there's no reason for it.
Equally, although this has a very exaggerated tone, it is still a fact.

By the way, I think America has actually killed more people than Nazi Germany. I know that sounds like Godwin's law, but it's true. Just think of the atomic bombs, the mass genocides during colonization, lynchings, the bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia 'back to the stone age'...
The concentration camps only killed six million people. Yeah, they were brutal, but America had it's own concentration camps and Russia had Siberia.
Jews were treated horribly because they weren't considered fully human, supposedly. Well then, that sounds pretty much like how blacks were treated over here until the fifties. The only difference was that over here, there was no expressed state support for racial superiority. So if we speak about intentions, America was just as bad.
If we speak about numbers, then Stalin was FUCKING WAY WORSE. The obscene number of deaths under Stalin's regime is so underscored it pisses me off. Everyone thinks of Hitler as the epitome of evil, when numerically he was only about a fourth as bad as Stalin. The only reason Stalin is 'forgiven' of this is because he was an ally.

Now, I'm not saying heil hitler, not even 'leave him the fuck alone', but simply stop with the 'patriotic' rhetoric and realize we weren't even the lesser of two evils.

You can't really compare the whole history of modern America to Nazi Germany you guys have an unfair time advantage.

[Despanan]

Originally Posted by Godslayer Jillian

Now, I'm not saying heil hitler, not even 'leave him the fuck alone', but simply stop with the 'patriotic' rhetoric and realize we weren't even the lesser of two evils.

Weren't even the lesser of two evils? Are you out of your mind? I mean If we're going by raw numbers Nazi Germany killed WAY more than six million people. Jews made up only about half of the population of their concentration camps (if that), and if you're going to count the US's various bombing campaigns over the years then you've got to count those killed in London by the german blitz, you've got to count the dead French, the dead Africans etc...

Regardless, why would you even make that sort of intellectual leap? Do you really not see a difference between people killed in a war and deliberate systematic genocide? Do you really not see a difference between a bunch of rednecks in Alabama getting together a lynch mob and an entire country dedicated to the utter extermination of an entire people? You're really going to compare the subjugation of the Native Americans to German genocide? (Because I'll tell you right now there are a TON of Native American Chiefs from various tribes who'll bristle a the mere mention of that.) You're really going to stack up all the people the "United States" killed both by accident and on purpose during it's entire history as a nation and then stack that number up next to the what, 16? 20ish years the Nazi's were in power in Germany and say that that number proves the US is worse? Really GodslayerJillian? REALLY?

Hell why stop there? I'm sure the Holocaust was a mere blip in the radar when you compare it to the slaughter perpetrated by the Inquisition, hey lets throw in the crusades for good measure. Why the hell is anyone worrying about this Hitler guy anymore?

Look, we all want to maintain our liberal street cred. We all want to snicker at political cartoons of Baby "W" playing with a toy tank and knocking over blocks that spell "IRAQ". What we have to be careful of is letting our righteous political outrage get the best of us, because then we get pulled into vitriolic rants devoid of any semblance of intellectual honesty.

War sucks, people getting killed sucks, and the US (and for that matter everyone else as well) has done some horrible things. So here we are, what are we going to do about it? Are we going to actually do something to make this world a better place, or are we just going to link article after article in a forum filled with liberal goths who allready agree with us and say: "See? SEE?? See how bad the US is! VICTORLY!"?

[Godslayer Jillian]

Originally Posted by Despanan

Do you really not see a difference between a bunch of rednecks in Alabama getting together a lynch mob and an entire country dedicated to the utter extermination of an entire people?

Not in mindset. It was exactly the same. As for numbers, then how about the systematic killing of tens of millions of native americans during a period of less than a half-century, and that's in conservative estimates.

[ThreeEyesOni]

Riiiiiggght.

You know, I really can't be bothered to break down every point made in this thread and put up a specific response. I could, but I have other things that require my time and trying to sift through all this white text hurts my eyes.

To sum up: We get it. America is a country of being retarded violence freaks. Seriously, if you think you're saying anything new to the non-retarded individuals here you are drastically mistaken. And the people with a walnut-sized clump of working braincells that don't already agree with you are so drastically brainwashed as to make the whole thing moronic.

In a world view, America sucks and most of the world hates our guts for perfectly valid reasons. You don't have to make up idiocy like saying that we're worse than Hitler and Stalin combined, or that somehow the other atrocities wen't as bad in a certain light with compared to ours in another light.

The United States is the only country to have dropped the god damn nuclear bomb on living people, which more than earns the country a permanent black mark. I don't feel the need to go much further into detail than that.

You want to make comments about slavery in the US? OK, they've been earned, but I'd also challange you to find 5 regions in the freakin world that havn't had slavery at some point or another (and even during the same time period as here). The entire race is messed up and it has taken a good 6000 years of civilization for us to finally get to the point where "slavery = bad".

Mass graves in war? Go bloody figure; what the hell do you think happens in war? Do you think that the sterotyle of the Korean/Vietnam war veteran that came back insane exists because it's funny? It exists because even in WWI and WWII there was still the tendancy to dig neat little ditches and take turns blasting at eachother with bolt-action rifles. Korea was a "nice" little trip back to show what war was like before the British Empire came allong with funny hats, firm lines of rank and an insane amount of military infastructure that made this type of warefar winnable when used against more technologically primative cultures.

So I'm personally a bit sick of people pointing at the US's military past and making them out to be the largest atocities ever commited. Yes, they're bad, but no they're not the worst and no these horrors are not terribly different than what's happened for 6000 years.

America sucks. Life sucks. War sucks. Being doused in napalm or burried half-alive in a mass grave sucks.

Rubbing a country's nose in what previous generations have done sucks even more.

[ThreeEyesOni]

Originally Posted by Godslayer Jillian

Not in mindset. It was exactly the same. As for numbers, then how about the systematic killing of tens of millions of native americans during a period of less than a half-century, and that's in conservative estimates.

See, this is part of my point: What happened to the natrive americans was horrible. Terrrible. Damn-near unforgivable; though there comes a point where you have to move the hell on. Those events do not need to you create the line of "tens of millions".

Seriously, "tens of millions"? You show me valid sources for a number like that.

[Corpsey]

Don't forget the Ho-chi-minh trail!

People are still dying daily from mines left over from the unlawful bombing of Laos during the Vietnam war.

Originally Posted by ZombieG

Stalin surpassed Hitler as far as deaths, go. He starved millions of his own people.

Mao bet him last time I checked with having the worst famine in recorded history. I'll have to check my resources first.

ThreeEyesOni,

http://www.iearn.org/hgp/aeti/aeti-1...americans.html

That should suffice but I'm assuming Jil has half a dozen more resources up his sleeve that will be slightly clearer than that one.

[ThreeEyesOni]

That would appear to be class essay written by a highschool student. Not exactly who I'd consider a "reputable source" personally.

The upper reasonable estimates of the north-american pre-Columbian populations are between 5 and 20 million. This makes a fair amount of sense with some of the south-american estimates that are closer to 60 million, considering the differences is culture.

Now I know that there are estimates in the hundreds of thousands, which are generally considered (and a paraphrase here) certifiably insane by most historians.

Any millions killed are bad, I'm just saying it's more than a little asinine to use the phrase "tens of millions" when most informed estimates are roughly average to "ten (singular) million".

[Despanan]

Originally Posted by Godslayer Jillian

Not in mindset. It was exactly the same. As for numbers, then how about the systematic killing of tens of millions of native americans during a period of less than a half-century, and that's in conservative estimates.

Bullshit. the Americans were conquering them and taking their land, not attempting to deliberately kill off an entire harmless race, and while many atrocities were committed along the way, America's ultimate goal was subjegation not destruction.

And dude, Just so you know, be carful expressing that sort of sentiment towards actual Native Americans. You need to understand that the current "Noble savage" perception of native Americans is not only incorrect, to many it's offensive.

The majority of the Native American tribes were warriors, and many tibes such as the Shawnee are very proud of their warrior culture, and they will set you straight: They fought a war and lost and their culture was destroyed. It was horrible, it was brutal but I'll tell you that if you do any sort of research on the time period, you'll find that the Native people weren't carebears led to slaughter. The Indians put up one hell of a fight and did some horrible freaking stuff to the white settlers along the way (For instance, slaughtering an entire village of men women and children, making the survivors run a gauntlet, and then impaling them on two foot-spikes (up the old poopshoot) and leaving them there to bleed to death, or ripping out their prisoners intestines, stapling them to a tree and forcing the prisoner to run around and around the tree till he ripped his own stomach out of his body.) and the whites did some horrific things to the Indian tribes (Clubbing to death whole tribes of peacful, christian, Indians etc.) but it was not a slaughter, it was a war.

Hell If William Henry Harrison hadn't managed to goad the Tippecanoe indians into attacking him before Tecumseh's coalition was ready, Tecumseh probably would've pushed the Americans back into the sea, or at least managed to carve out a country for the Native Americans.

In the end, the mindset of the United States was one of greed and cruel indifference, not pure unadulterated evil like the Nazis, and Native Americans are a people who should be respected before they are pitied.