Sallow
The Big Bad Wolf.
- Thread starter
- #21
With the turks you saw a deliberate attempt to either kill off or get rid of the armenians, which is a different situation. The US didnt want the fillipinos to go to taiwan or anywhere else. Even during the fighting the political view was that the phillipines would eventually be given self determination, followed by independence.
When you are going for genocide, you typically dont try to let the locals establish self rule (Judenraat excluded), recruit locals to your side (sonderkommando don't count), or try to establish systems of education for the people you are trying to remove/kill off.
Actually..I don't really see the difference here. About the same number of people died as well. The US was contending that the Philippines belonged to the US. The Turks were contending that Istanbul belong to them.
The difference was that killing the armenians had no real relation to keeping istanbul. There was no military value, besides getting rid if people who dont like you, to the mass migration and extermination of armenians. In the phillipines the US used a tactic of corralling civillians in camps, so they could gun for eveyone else remaining (the logic of outside of camp = rebel). The deaths in the camps were due to disease, not a systemic approach to kill filipinos. You can call the camp thing barbaric and a war crime, but its still not genocide. The US goal was not to kill every filipino, just the rebels. In the case of the Turks, ANY armenian was a target for either death or exodus. Same with the Jews in Germany in WWII.
My view on this is based on people not using words that invoke horror for any reason less than what they were intended for. Starting to call any group of deaths genocide weakens the term.
As an aside, Cambodia is a wierd one, in that it was cambodians killing cambodians. I think that is genocide, but it doesnt fit into my definition well, I admit.
They Americans didn't only kill combatants..they killed everyone. The figures are somewhat shaky but it runs between 600K and 1.4 million people. I call that a genocide. We had no business whatsoever in the Philippines. Even ol' Teddy came to realize that.
Little late after everyone is dead.