Ethnic Cleansing

[Andrew Boulton]

Hmm, it's interesting, looking at this and Andrew's list of methods, that each generation seems to choose 'current technology' as the best method. That suggests to me that previous methods are thought to be ineffectual, or at least inefficient?

Not always - in 1994, 500,000-1,000,000 Rwandans were murdered, mostly with machetes.

 

[epicenter00]

Seizing a tract of land from someone is trivial in the 3I, especially if they're lower tech than you. Solutions can be limited by tech level.

A major consideration is how much time does do your belligerents have. Is it something they want to do "now" (within 10 ~ 20 years or so) or are they willing to take a longer view, perhaps willing to wait a few centuries? Like most things, longer-term solutions can be much more insidious (and easier to get away with) than shorter term ones. Once your plans start going beyond the average human lifetime you can get really nasty.

Another consideration is if the belligerents have something in particular against the population or humanity itself or if it just wants that land and otherwise it's "nothing personal."

Taking a page from David Brin, you could have a "hostage virus." Some disease that is introduced deliberately, be it openly or under some subterfuge about accidental release or even something the sophonts claim is something they natively carry and "didn't know about." Seed the entire planet with it, and say it requires some sort of antidote, administered periodically or the disease becomes terminal. Provide the population with the antidote, distributed for free from a number of key points (you can call these "camps" if you'd like). Once you have the populations concentrated you can do whatever you want with them. Obviously, some people are going to be immune but most people who don't come in are going to be dead. Regardless, the residue of human population shouldn't be a particular problem to your sophonts and certainly won't be a problem within 60 years or so.

Alternatively, if your species takes the long view, you could steer some enormous Dinosaur Killer of a meteor towards the world, wait a few hundred years and poof, it's done. If you want to be insidious, perhaps the aliens show up and warn the people about it. They even agree to attempt a deflection mission, one that fails ("Oh no! Our seismographs were wrong and the entire nickel-iron slug was actually an aggregate held together by water ice in the cracks! We broke the asteroid from an enormous lump the size of entire British Isles into a shotgun pattern of smaller but still enormous rocks that will ... inconveniently hit your entire world in a saturation pattern!"). After it hits, they can agree to even provide transport for the doomed survivors to relocate off of the world...

You could have blights attack food crops. Even in our TL8-9 world, a lot of our food supply comes from a surprisingly ungenetically diversified stock. Wipe out certain key food crops for a number of years and the humans on the world will start fighting amongst themselves for what's left especially if it's some superbug that's designed to be "rapidly mutating" (another term for your sophonts biological warfare groups seeding new versions of the blight as native resources find resistant strains). Now, I'm sure someone will suggest that people could use hydroponics and similar set-ups and to an extent, I agree - that would work, if the populations had time to prepare. Sprung on them suddenly? Not a chance, I think. Humans being industrious creatures, can handle most of your genocide as "have-nots" will start fighting the "haves" for what's left. Once they've gotten into the "nuking/chemical/bioweapons on the other side just for revenge purposes" your sophonts can give it a further nudge, nuking a city here, introducing more bioweapons there with only the thinnest veneer to make the mutually suspicious human groups believe it was done by their enemies. Move in as PKFs and relocate the various human groups off to separate world as this one is too polluted and the antagonistic human groups will never agree to live together. Obviously, there'll be people who don't want to leave, but they're not being reasonable anymore, so you can certainly treat them with more hostility.

Luxury them to death. If you're in the 3I, you can blitz a formerly primitive world all sorts of images of life of plenty on higher TL worlds in the 3I. Provide them with easy and cheap and eventually free transport off of the planet to these worlds. The majority of the young people will leave, hoping for a better future. Now, some might counter that won't get rid of everyone, but there's entire towns in the American Midwest, the west coast of Japan and similar places that'd disagree if there was anyone left to disagree. Is it still ethnic cleansing if they want to leave? Once social cohesion goes away and traditions unravel, it's much easier to make people pick up roots and go elsewhere.

Obviously, there's higher tech methods of doing stuff as well. Use big orbital mirrors to melt the poles for instance. Or shades that throw the world into an ice age. Use mirrors to cause a 20 year drought in some area and I'm sure very few to no people will live there. We can't really do anything about it even in our TL8-9 society. Such things aren't impossible once your sophonts get into the (IMO) silly TLs with anti-grav cities and fusion power because really cheap and really plentiful along with gravitics so common they could stick them in women's bras and on their husband's stomachs.

Combinations of the above methods work pretty well as well - most species are pretty resistant to extinction from a single cause. The trick is to hit them with multiple problems at the same time and then people will die out.

 

[DaveChase]

Possible Corp outlook at the needed resources of a planet

Also depends on how obvious you want the dying out to be.

Long long view at removing every living being is to introduce infertileness into the population.

Then offer to work as a humanitarian company to help them solve the issue. Of course secertly you are just using them as test subjects and helping kill off a few 1,000 extra.

Also you would once in a while have a success or two that would be approved for the general population which when released actually has unforseen mass effects on the masses.
Opps, sorry, we will try harder now.

Dave Chase

 

[Spinward Scout]

Luxury them to death. If you're in the 3I, you can blitz a formerly primitive world all sorts of images of life of plenty on higher TL worlds in the 3I. Provide them with easy and cheap and eventually free transport off of the planet to these worlds. The majority of the young people will leave, hoping for a better future. Now, some might counter that won't get rid of everyone, but there's entire towns in the American Midwest, the west coast of Japan and similar places that'd disagree if there was anyone left to disagree. Is it still ethnic cleansing if they want to leave? Once social cohesion goes away and traditions unravel, it's much easier to make people pick up roots and go elsewhere.

I believe that's called the Pied Piper tactic...

 

[jatay3]

Sad to say that it has been done. Or at least it has been done thoroughly enough to be considered at least a partial "success." Take again the fruits of one such success, which we Americans and Canadians are now enjoying. The destruction of the native population on the North American continent took more than two-hundred years, and suffered several retaliations and setbacks, but was ultimately a successful case of ethnic cleansing.

Moreover, this ethnic cleansing was not done entirely through "accidental" means (i.e. the introduction of European diseases.) Death marches, wholesale slaughters, and (oft overlooked) the willful destruction of essential economic resources were all employed. That last one would be the elimination of the plains buffalo. Without the buffalo, the plains Indians, who represented an abiding threat to Western expansion, could no longer practice their way of life.

Our own history of genocide and ethnic cleansing tends to be a bit of a blind spot when examining the topic. That's pretty standard, actually.

Actually it is not a blind spot. Someone brings it up every time the subject is mentioned.

 

[jatay3]

Actually it is not a blind spot. Someone brings it up every time the subject is mentioned.

One might point out that the Indian Wars were not an ethnic cleansing though it did include ethnic cleansings as a by-product. It was a migration war. A large group of people were pouring into an area at the same time and there was no policy of removing or annihilating Indians in general(as opposed to in specific).
As for the buffalo, that was an act of war against tribes who were using them to support hostilities against the federal government.
In any case there are probably more Indians now then there were then, and they don't live all that badly, so if it was an intentional ethnic cleansing it was pretty obviously unsuccessful.
If one is to call the Indian Wars an ethnic cleansing, one must equally call the Irish coming to New York such, and the farmers coming to the frontier and disrupting the ranchers. In neither of which cases have I heard much sympathy for the "ethnically cleansed", even though THEIR ways of life were disrupted.

 

[rust]

If you remove an ethnic group from its home region, it is ethnic cleansing, if
you kill them, it is genocide.

So, there was an official policy of ethnic cleansing towards many of the na-
tive American tribes, and there were several cases of genocide, too. And to
destroy the food resource of a civilian population (= kill the buffaloes) was a
war crime.

This is in no way an accusation, especially since these definitions and most of
the ideas behind them are rather new and were not applied at the time, but
in my opinion it would be a mistake to ignore facts or to try to "rename" them.
One can not learn from the past if one does not see it clearly.

The examples of the Irish coming to New York or of the farmers coming to the
frontier are somewhat strange, as neither the population of New York nor the
ranchers were an ethnic group.

 

[Spinward Scout]

If you remove an ethnic group from its home region, it is ethnic cleansing, if you kill them, it is genocide.

No, it's not. Read about it on Thesaurus.com. Ethnic cleansing is the same thing as genocide.

Ethnic Cleansing

 

[rust]

Well, take a look at the various comments on international law and human
rights developed by the UN and other international bodies.
Ethnic cleansing does not necessarily mean that anyone is killed in the pro-
cess, it is already ethnic cleansing if you force an ethnic group to relocate
(e.g. Albanians now forcing Serbs out of Kosovo, etc.).
Genocide, on the other hand, includes the destruction of the ethnic group,
usually by killing its members, although there is also a discussion about
"cultural genocide" by destroying the group's culture.
To give a well-known example of the difference: After WW II most Germans
were forced to leave Poland, which was ethnic cleansing, but they were not
killed, which would have been genocide.

 

[Major B]

Maybe the confusion over the term ethnic cleansing comes from what I think is its mis-appelation to events in what used to be Yugoslavia. At least I beleive that is where the term came into common use.

What happened as Yugoslavia broke up could (perhaps better) be described as ethnic homogenizing. IIRC, it was in large part an effort to reverse Tito's policy of forcing the diversification of ethnic groups in order to manage his population and maintain control.

On the other hand, I think both terms have drawbacks as they are both euphemisms for some really terrible actions. If I was incorporating this idea as a plot device IMTU I guess I'd describe it more plainly, especially since the party responsible for the action would clearly be in the wrong and the players would be wearing the white hats.

 

[Valarian]

One might point out that the Indian Wars were not an ethnic cleansing though it did include ethnic cleansings as a by-product. It was a migration war. A large group of people were pouring into an area at the same time and there was no policy of removing or annihilating Indians in general(as opposed to in specific).

o: The Indian Wars were indeed ethnic cleansing, there were government policies of removal to reservation land despite treaties promising perpetual grants by treaty of said land to the tribes inhabiting it. As white settlers demanded more and more land, or rights to mineral wealth under tribal lands, the federal government broke treaty after treaty and forced the tribes off the land. In addition to the forced removal, there was genocide performed at the local level. Though there was never a federal level policy of genocide, local military officers and Indian Office agents took it upon themselves to ensure that the population declined, often through direct means: such as denying food allocated to the tribe in supposed recompense for taking their land. One military officer, Gen. Philip Sheriden, even coined the phrase: "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" (actual quote: "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead").

I suggest you read Dee Brown's book: Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee.
Black Elk Speaks is also a very good account. It's the biography of someone who lived through the time, narrated to the writer. In modern terms, it would probably be classed as an "autobiography" and John Neihardt would have just ghost-written the book.

As far as population figures go, the census information on Native American population was extremely sketchy until around 100 years ago. Although I can't find strong figures to bear this out, I would severely doubt that population growth in the Native American population has outstripped that of white America.
Read: We, the people and Native Americans in the Census

 

[Renaissance Man]

In any case there are probably more Indians now then there were then, and they don't live all that badly, so if it was an intentional ethnic cleansing it was pretty obviously unsuccessful.

By this analysis, one could minimize the Nazi holocaust the same way. "Well, there are probably more of them then there were then, and they don't live all that badly." And of course the genocide was unsuccessful. But genocide it was.

Let's try and get real about the natives. Sometimes they sold their homes away, sometimes not. But many were forced from their homes. Many were killed, many were subject to violence and what we might today call "terrorism." Many retaliated in similar "barbaric" fashion. But the end result is that a population, reduced to a fraction of it's original size, was herded onto reservations to make room for whites. Maybe, after 200 years, their population is beginning to recover, but I don't see what that has to do with the original crimes.

This process, taken as a whole, can pretty accurately be described as ethnic cleansing. Individual historical cases and areas might wander into genocide territory, while others might be more benign, but if this was not a case of ethnic cleansing, the term certainly loses some of it's clarity.

Or maybe not. Maybe it isn't supposed to be called ethnic cleansing if we did it.

I think we may have just strayed into pit territory by now...

 

[G. Kashkanun Anderson]

One might point out that the Indian Wars were not an ethnic cleansing though it did include ethnic cleansings as a by-product. It was a migration war. A large group of people were pouring into an area at the same time and there was no policy of removing or annihilating Indians in general(as opposed to in specific).

That would come as a surprise to the likes of Andrew Jackson, Congressman Davy Crockett, and the rest of the entire US population alive in the first half of the 19th century. A major plank of Andrew Jackson's successful election campaign of 1828 was his stated intention to expunge all Eastern Indian tribes from their homelands into territories west of the Mississippi River. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, and its resulting subsequent wholesale uprooting of the affected populations, was the end result.

Davy Crockett, then a Representative from Tennessee, adamantly opposed this legislation on moral grounds, and had his political career effectively destroyed because of it. In fact, if it weren't for the actions of a horde of irate Mexicans in the early spring of 1836, I doubt that anybody today would even know Crockett ever existed.

Of course, most of the tribes affected by the Act were removed by a variety of individual treaties. But if you honestly think that makes it all good and legal, then I trust you won't say anything when I show up on your doorstep one day with a shotgun and a twenty dollar bill and announce that I'm buying your house.

As for the buffalo, that was an act of war against tribes who were using them to support hostilities against the federal government.

The Dakota in Minnesota were flat destitute and starving by 1862, due to the fact that they had surrendered virtually all of their land to white settlement by treaty, and the US Government had failed to even give them what they had been promised for it. When the Dakota leadership asked their Indian Agency officials how they were supposed to feed their people, one local official replied that they could literally eat their own sh!t for all he cared. The Dakota responded with open warfare, and the government answered by crushing the rebellion, tossing 1700 of the tribe's warriors into a 19th century equivalent of a concentration camp, subjecting the tribal leadership in custody to the largest mass execution in US history, and enacting legislation providing a $25 shoot-on-sight bounty on any Dakota foolhardy enough to be found within the boundaries of the State of Minnesota. Most fled west, into the Dakota territories that now bear their name.

Dakota leader Little Crow escaped capture, but was shot for a bounty while picking raspberries some years later. His body was mutilated and fed to local dogs, little boys put lit firecrackers in his nostrils and ears, and the rest was tossed into a nearby garbage pit -- except for his arm and scalp, which were removed and put on display at the state capitol until 1971.

But you're right: by 1873 (when the buffalo killings began) the tribes inhabiting Dakotas and High Plains of North America had become decidedly hostile to the concept of western US expansion. And this no doubt played a part in why at about the same time General Philip H. "the Shenandoah Valley is my Personal Barbecue Pit" Sheridan was up before Congress advocating the simultaneous extinction of the American Bison and Plains Indian Culture.

In any case there are probably more Indians now then there were then, and they don't live all that badly, so if it was an intentional ethnic cleansing it was pretty obviously unsuccessful.

In a word, no. While a distinct minority are currently benefiting from having gotten in on the ground floor of the modern Indian Casino Phenomenon, that is certainly not the case with the rest of the Rez Dwellers out there, whose lives are just as worn down, poverty stricken, and marginalized as they were a generation ago.

Now, you're free to disbelieve me if you want. And you're equally free to wander on up to Red Lake, Rosebud, or Pine Ridge to tell these people just how wonderful they have it up there. But if you do, please bring a film crew with you; I'd pay to watch that action.

If one is to call the Indian Wars an ethnic cleansing, one must equally call the Irish coming to New York such, and the farmers coming to the frontier and disrupting the ranchers. In neither of which cases have I heard much sympathy for the "ethnically cleansed", even though THEIR ways of life were disrupted.

The Irish were victims of ethnic cleansing during the Potato Famine years; high-ranking British officials of the era were quoted with admitting (proudly!) how useful the famine was in clearing out the island of all those unnecessary Micks, and did whatever they could to insure that The Hunger was as effective as possible in making this impromptu plan work. But it's ridiculous to claim that the Irish themselves were ethnically cleansing New York simply by the act of moving there; if that's the case, then I just "ethnically cleansed" some dude's old apartment two months ago.

And you cannot ethnically cleanse a rancher because ranching is a profession, not an ethnic group. And the ranchers could have kept the farmers off all that land they were using for free by actually homesteading or (God forbid!) buying it; but they didn't. Simply being too obstinate to adjust your business model to a new economic reality is not the same thing as being ethnically cleansed.

 

[jatay3]

o: The Indian Wars were indeed ethnic cleansing, there were government policies of removal to reservation land despite treaties promising perpetual grants by treaty of said land to the tribes inhabiting it. As white settlers demanded more and more land, or rights to mineral wealth under tribal lands, the federal government broke treaty after treaty and forced the tribes off the land. In addition to the forced removal, there was genocide performed at the local level. Though there was never a federal level policy of genocide, local military officers and Indian Office agents took it upon themselves to ensure that the population declined, often through direct means: such as denying food allocated to the tribe in supposed recompense for taking their land. One military officer, Gen. Philip Sheriden, even coined the phrase: "The only good Indian is a dead Indian" (actual quote: "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead").

I suggest you read Dee Brown's book: Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee.
Black Elk Speaks is also a very good account. It's the biography of someone who lived through the time, narrated to the writer. In modern terms, it would probably be classed as an "autobiography" and John Neihardt would have just ghost-written the book.

As far as population figures go, the census information on Native American population was extremely sketchy until around 100 years ago. Although I can't find strong figures to bear this out, I would severely doubt that population growth in the Native American population has outstripped that of white America.
Read: We, the people and Native Americans in the Census

destroying the food source of the civilian population is a war crime? you mean like Run Silent, Run Deep?
In any case the source of the civilian population at that time was the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Which were a bunch of slimy people and well provoked rebellion. But the act of rebelling presuposes the acceptance of retailiation.
In any case, the point was not that atrocities were not commited. The point was that there was not a general policy of ethnic cleansing. If anything there was a lack of policy.
And yes I did mention "specific instances".

The point was that the Indian wars were a long process involving four hundred years and millions of people working semi-independently. Few of them had any intention of being ethnic-cleansers, most just wanted to be farmers or whatever. It was the presence of large groups of such people doing this at the same time that was the catalyst.

The Nazis were deliberately and consciously attempting to exterminate people as a policy. It was not caused a social trend the way the Indian Wars were and could have been avoided very easily which the Indian Wars could not have.

 

[rust]

But the act of rebelling presuposes the acceptance of retailiation.

I am not convinced that any rebellion in history was accepting of retaliation.
In fact, in your country the ex-British rebels of 1776 seemed rather unaccepting
of British retaliation, to give just one example.
And after the Civil War the Southerners also did not seem to accept Northern
retaliation, to give a second example.

 

[su_liam]

The act of an FBI agent bringing down a mob boss presupposes the acceptance that his family might be gunned down in "retaliation"? The act of a soldier in fighting "Al Qaeda" in Iraq presupposes the acceptance of his head being chopped off after he's captured? I kind of doubt if the Czech folks who ushered Reinhard Heydrich on his way to hell actually accepted that their heads would be mailed to their mommies.

They don't accept retaliation. It can be reasonably assumed that they understood that there was a hazard of meeting violence at the hands of their enemies. Every soldier knows that going into war. Or should. "Accepting retaliation for rebellion," implies that they accept the legitimacy of the government against which they are rebelling. This is never true of actual rebels and seldom true even of mere petty criminals. A captured rebel doesn't consider himself to be punished for a wrong he did in rebelling, but martyred for his cause.

 

[jatay3]

I am not convinced that any rebellion in history was accepting of retaliation.
In fact, in your country the ex-British rebels of 1776 seemed rather unaccepting
of British retaliation, to give just one example.
And after the Civil War the Southerners also did not seem to accept Northern
retaliation, to give a second example.

By that I mean that hitting someone without the assumption that they will hit back is unreasonable. I blame the Nazis for the Holocaust. However I do not blame the Wehrmacht for shooting at my grandfather even though the first was related to the second.

And don't bring up the American Revolution. That is as wearisome as the Indian Wars. If I think the American Revolution was right I must think all rebellion is right. Well in the first place I don't think the American Revolution WAS justified. In the second place, the point was not to blame the Sioux for rebelling but to say that blaming the Federal government for suppressing the rebellion is equally wrong.
I object to calling the Indian wars an "Ethnic Cleansing" because it is simplistic, bumper-stickerish and shows a remarkable amount of self-righteousness toward people who it is fashionable to be self-righteous against. The Indian Wars INCLUDED ethnic cleansing. They were not themselves an example of an ethnic cleansing. They were an example of a feud. Just as Catholics and Protestants comitted atrocities DURING the Thirty Years War, but the Thirty Years War was not an atrocity. It was a war.

As for:

"And you cannot ethnically cleanse a rancher because ranching is a profession, not an ethnic group. And the ranchers could have kept the farmers off all that land they were using for free by actually homesteading or (God forbid!) buying it; but they didn't. Simply being too obstinate to adjust your business model to a new economic reality is not the same thing as being ethnically cleansed.
Today 01:46 PM"

Wasn't that the essence of the Indian Wars? The fact that hunter-gatherers and farmers can't share the same space and the Indians refused to become part of the general economic structure.

As for ranching, "not being an ethnicity", that is true. But it was a way of life. And one could just as easily say buffalo hunting was a profession, not an ethnicity.
In any case, is the fact of not being an ethnicity something that makes changing ones lifestyle more pleasant? It is true it is not specificly "ETHNIC cleansing" but to say that that is especially relevant is to say that ancestry determines justice. Now in fact I am not especially indignant about the fate of the ranchers. But I do find the lack of sympathy given them rather inconsistent with the sympathy given the Indians. It is true that one can only be sympathetic toward a few people at a time. But at least one might think of others.


As for:

"The Irish were victims of ethnic cleansing during the Potato Famine years; high-ranking British officials of the era were quoted with admitting (proudly!) how useful the famine was in clearing out the island of all those unnecessary Micks, and did whatever they could to insure that The Hunger was as effective as possible in making this impromptu plan work. But it's ridiculous to claim that the Irish themselves were ethnically cleansing New York simply by the act of moving there; if that's the case, then I just "ethnically cleansed" some dude's old apartment two months ago."

Exactly, that was the whole point. It is ridiculous to claim that the simple act of moving to a location is ethnic cleansing. However the point of the Indian Wars was that neither was willing to live in the others presence and you could as easily say that it was an ethnic cleansing by the Indians as they were objecting to foreigners in their vicinity and were attempting to remove them violently.
My point was not that ethnic cleansing did not take place. My point was that you cannot say the Indian Wars WERE an ethnic cleansing.

 

[Renaissance Man]

This is for the pit folks. Really. The experiment of keeping the topic of Ethnic Cleansing from becoming political has failed. I accept at least partial responsibility for this.

BTW, to GKA, thanks for his informative, impassioned and well-argued post.

 

[rust]

My point was not that ethnic cleansing did not take place. My point was that you cannot say the Indian Wars WERE an ethnic cleansing.

Well, if this is your point, I do agree. Of course there were many other ele-
ments involved in the Indian Wars, including even seemingly very distant ele-
ments like the wish to secure a border with the British in Canada, or unem-
ployment of soldiers after the Civil War. The pattern is indeed very complex,
and changed often over time.

 

[jatay3]

Well, if this is your point, I do agree. Of course there were many other ele-
ments involved in the Indian Wars, including even seemingly very distant ele-
ments like the wish to secure a border with the British in Canada, or unem-
ployment of soldiers after the Civil War. The pattern is indeed very complex,
and changed often over time.

Thank you, and I apoligize for ruining the thread. Hopefully it will recover.