Remember When The United States Committed Genocide?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
The United States has a long history of being terrible.
But do you remember that one time the United States actively engaged in genocide? Boy, that sure was crazy, that one time.
Sorry, for clarification, I’m not referring to the time in 1846 when future United States President Zachary Taylor oversaw the rape, torture, robbery, and massacre of innocent civilians in the Mexican-American war.
Nor am I talking about how, when the Mexican citizens killed one single American soldier in retaliation for the more than 100 innocent women and children the army had butchered, due mostly to boredom, Taylor instructed Captain Mabry Gray to kidnap and execute 24 random Mexican civilians who were just trying to live their lives.
I am also not making reference toward the actions of General Joseph Lane, who ordered his men to burn an entire city of civilians to the ground after getting drunk on stolen alcohol. Many of Lanes men were reported to have raped and murdered children while the city burned to the ground, but that’s a story for another day.
To be perfectly clear: the genocide I was referring to is not the Mexican-American War, which resulted in over 10,000 innocent Mexican civilians unlawfully executed by United States armed forces, none of whom were charged for their war crimes.
But, I can see why that’s where your mind went.
I’m also not talking about the Phillipine-American war, in which General Jacob H. Smith was court martialed and forced to retire due to his command to burn all prisoners alive.
Unfortunately, the court martial works slowly and Smith’s orders were, for lack of a better word, executed for many years before anyone stopped to think that perhaps it was wrong to commit a series of horrifying war crimes.
In this article, I won’t go into excessive detail regarding the more than 50,000 innocent women and children who were burned alive during the Phillipine-American war, because that is not the genocide that this article is focussed on.
Those examples are from the 1800’s, a long-forgotten point in history, centuries ago, and not the subject of this article.
What we are going to talk about today, has nothing to do with the acts of the United States Marines in World War 2, who reportedly raped over 10,000 women in the prefecture of Okinawa, Japan, after learning that all the men in the surrounding villages had been drafted into the war and mobilized elsewhere.
Fun fact: Many of the women raped in Okinawa went on to commit suicide, or die due to complications regarding DIY abortions to prevent giving birth to children conceived by rape. That isn’t pertinent to today’s topic, but be sure to bear it in mind for later anyway.
Nor am I going to focus on the fact that United States military had knowledge of the rapes occurring in Okinawa and did nothing to stop them, while actively covering them up, even as the rapes continued after the Japanese had formally surrendered.
In fact, if I were going to talk about American WW2 massacres, (which I’m not!) we’d probably be here all day. That’s why I don’t have time to do a deep dive into the Laconia massacre, the Canicattì massacre, the Biscari massacre, Operation Teardrop, or the 14,000 rapes that happened during the liberation of France as well as the occupation of Germany.
Of course, I’m definitely not referring to the 500+ innocent civilians killed in cold blood during the Korean War, or the My Lai massacre of Vietnam. I’m not even talking about the incidents regarding the Highway of Death in Iraq where the United States and their allies murdered fleeing civilians attempting to escape their war-torn country seemingly just for sport.
Those examples, of course, are from the distant reaches of human memory. Taking place in the 1900’s, who could even recall such a primitive time in the annals of the modern world? It would be crazy to write about any of those things, because they’re such ancient history at this point.
Now, if I were to write an article about the time the United States committed genocide, I would of course write it about an event that happened in this century.
For instance, perhaps I would write about the protections afforded to enemy soldiers and war participants outlined in the Geneva Conventions, which the Bush Jr. administration purposefully eschewed by using complex legal definitions to implement the unlawful kidnapping, wiretapping, rape, murder, and torture of anyone they saw fit. But that’s not what we’re here to discuss today.
However, if we were to discuss the events which took place in the middle east during the war on terror, we could probably do a little deep dive into the intentional butchering of entire cities orchestrated and overseen by military personnel throughout the entire chain of command, all the way to the architects of this shameless smash-and-grab in the White House such as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, John Yoo, and George Tenet.
But of course, that is all unrelated to the genocide we’re all here to recall.
What we are here to talk about today, is the genocide currently taking place on American soil, in which Mexican immigrants are taken from a detention center in Georgia, and given forced, unnecessary, hysterectomies against their will.
Apparently, the doctor performing these unwanted surgeries is known colloquially as the “Uterus Collector” because this is just his thing. What a cool and fun dystopian nightmare it is to live in this terrible, terrible fucking country.
The details of this literal genocide are still being unearthed, which may cause some readers to think of responses to this information as largely reactionary and needlessly alarmist, but regardless of the details on this specific eugenics exercise, these allegations reveal an interesting pattern of conduct within the United States at large.
I could spend hours listing eugenics movements and genocides that took place on American soil, intentionally crafted as a way for the wealthy white men in charge to purge the races they saw as undesirables. I could do that, but instead, let us just consider for a moment that more than thirty states have had forced sterilization programs in the 20th century alone.
And, if those numbers seem staggering to you, consider how insulting it is that the very same people acting as a driving force behind forced sterilization in this country are writing and enforcing laws which regulate women’s bodies in such a way that they don’t have the autonomy to choose to get hysterectomies or abortions for themselves. Ironically, if you want to get an abortion in this country, you’ll have to enter it hoping for asylum.
So, now we all remember when the United States committed genocide! What a fun little trip down memory lane we all had together.
You know, it’s funny. It’s almost like the entire history of the United States as a sovereign nation can be told exclusively through a long list of genocides and war crimes. Isn’t that fun? Hm.
