Austin Hair wrote:
For the US, the analog to Tibet would be the overthrow of the monarchy and annexation of Hawaii, or the slaughtering of Native Americans and forcing them to live on undesirable land.
Both circumstances which took place over a century ago and are now universally deplored among our citizens and leaders alike. Modern times demand modern ideals, not arrogant attempts at dynasty.
That would be nice. Instead of hereditary kings we have the corprate ideals of Brown & Root in Vietnam and of Haliburton in Iraq.
When trying to make this more prominent in the [[Hawaii]] article, folks, including myself, were met immediately with abusive responses from fellow users - "ignorant," "intellectually dishonest," "childish," "blow your own horn."
As I recall, the overthrow of the monarchy was not state-sponsored, but rather a sort of personal coup undertaken unilaterally by our diplomats and condemned at the time by President Cleveland. I also seem to recall that the monarchy was restored, with annexation occuring after only after it collapsed on itself years later and everyone expected the United States to pick up the pieces (it was, after all, "our mess"). Perhaps the Philippines would be a better analogy.
Plausible deniability. Who was around during the Clinton administration that was directly affected by the sins of the Cleveland administration? It's easy to apologize when it's too late for any other meaningful act. The Catholic Church recently even apologized to Gallileo. Without even getting into whether the Bay of Pigs invasion was a good idea the fact is that the Kennedy administration was quick to distance itself from that operation when it saw that it was turning into a complete failure. What kind of an ally is that?
By allowing free enterprise to start the problems the US govenment can then reject its surrogates when things are going too badly, or send in the marching bands when there's glory to be had.
Murdering Indians is bad. You'll hear no excuses from me on the matter. That said, neither I nor any of my ancestors have ever knowingly killed an aboriginal native of the American continent, so don't kick my ass about it.
This is a question of collective guilt, not individual guilt. Of course those whose families did not immigrate into the US until after that time had no connection with the event.
Ec