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1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2, defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
US intervention in Indochina began and thus proceeded from support for the French attempt (with intent) to destroy the independent nation of Vietnam. All subsequent US actions qualify as continuing this attack on a national group.
In addition, the national group of the Vietnamese was designated originally for colonization by the French on the basis of a racist assessment of European superiority. Following directly from the failed French genocidal war, the US intervened with its own troops, using an invented incident as the pretext, and without valid grounds for intervention in any body of law. As we ultimately found out from the documents, the invalid (and immoral) motives of the planners valued the lives of Vietnamese and other non-whites or non-Americans as particularly expendable on behalf of geostrategic (and imperialist) considerations.
The US power thereupon created a bogus nation under a puppet government in the south of Vietnam. To impose its will against the resistance of the Vietnamese people, it employed all means normally associated with genocide: bombings and massacres of civilian populations, summary execution of captured partisans, rounding up of civilian populations involuntarily into concentration camps with conditions bringing about physical destruction in whole or in part (keeping them away from their fields, lower calorie intake ultimately results). This was accompanied throughout by a widespread racist rhetoric (not official) among troops and on homefront about gooks and slopeheads and how we should just kill them all, and political pressure to use nukes and bomb the dikes killing millions at a blow.
In general, I object strenuously on moral grounds to a definition of genocide under which a white government killing two million brown civilians in an unprovoked aggressive war is considered to have committed genocide only if it announced an explicit and official ideology that defined those civilians as an undesirable racial category; but the same government is off the hook for genocide if those two million people were "merely" "collateral" (but do note: predictable) casualties who happened to be in the way of an imperial quest for control over oil (for example). If we accept this definition, then killing all people in an area indiscriminately (but for their wealth) is considered less genocidal than a targeted killing of some of the people in that area. Anyone who insists on this definition perhaps needs to come up with a word for a crime worse than genocide.
In practice, the definition of genocide prevalent among some on this board, i.e., those who wish to exclude the US crimes in Vietnam and Iraq, effectively covers in particular for the crimes of Western imperialism. This is because by the mythology associated with Western imperialism, its crimes are almost never due to racism but only for national interest, or else arise from a noble desire to civilize the world. Perhaps even King Leopold's destruction and murder of 10 million people in the Congo in about 10 years (worked to death as slaves, arms hacked off for poor performance, starved to death, massacred) would not qualify as genocide, since the primary motive was not to kill Africans per se, but to plunder the region's wealth.
If anything, killing entire peoples incidentally with the motive of plunder should be considered equally criminal to killing them with the motive of hatred. Keep in mind that even Hitler has had apologists who claimed the Nazi crimes were committed in the course of a strict Realpolitik and struggle among the European powers. Killing masses of civilians, or taking actions that predictably lead to their deaths, should be roughly seen as equally criminal whatever the motives, which ultimately may be unknowable.
One larger point surely is that the Belgian destruction of the Congolese peoples would never have happened to the same extent if Leopold's ideology and religious beliefs had honored black people as human beings equal to white people. And the same is true of the US actions in Vietnam and Iraq, two nations that (unlike Germany and Japan) never attacked or provoked or declared war on the US, or even posed potential threats to its security. The one-sided killing of millions of people there by invading American troops is inconceivable outside the context of the racist worldview that values American civilization and interests as superior to those of other nations, especially insofar as these are predominantly non-white, non-European and non-Christian nations. Whether or not that racism is stated explicitly or even fully conscious is secondary.
The political will to attack or occupy Iraq would have never been formed if it had been a nation of white, mostly Christian (or Jewish) people; and it would have never been attacked if it could have defended itself. Those two facts are inescapable, and they amply justify an Iranian policy to build nuclear weapons, if that is in fact what they are doing.
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