Do we not like to talk about our atrocities because WE were on the receiving end sometimes?
Last edited Tue Jun 29, 2021, 11:39 AM - Edit history (1)
How much abuse have we put up with because we'll "be billionaires someday"? Because we don't want to be seen as liberals, socialists, or communists or sympathizing with them? How much hostility have we taken because as long as "the other guy gets it worse" then it's all good? To protect profit margins or the "world's greatest healthcare system"?
I was curious to what exactly "atrocity" meant here, it led me to articles about "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity".
Examples of crimes against humanity include war crimes, murder, massacres, dehumanization, genocide, ethnic cleansing, deportations, unethical human experimentation, extrajudicial punishments including summary executions, use of weapons of mass destruction, state terrorism or state sponsoring of terrorism, death squads, kidnappings and forced disappearances, use of child soldiers, unjust imprisonment, enslavement, torture, rape, political repression, racial discrimination, religious persecution, and other human rights abuses.
I want to focus on that one particular thing... unethical human experimentation. Which our government has done... to its own citizens. Sidney Gottlieb, MKUltra, eugenics which continued into the 1970s, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, and something that hits a little close to home. My own family was on the receiving end of this.
I had an uncle, when he was in the Navy, he was unknowingly and purposefully dosed with high amounts of radiation; he got multiple cancers that ravaged his body about 20 years later, and the cancers killed him pretty quickly. Nobody else in my family has ever died from cancer or got anything besides precancer besides my grandfather who worked enriching uranium. It doesn't take an oncologist to link the two things.
I'm not going to compare what happened to my family to slavery, to Jim Crow, to Manifest Destiny, to the Trail of Tears, to the Iraq War, or funding the Contras, it's not, but at the same time, I think I can say it's not acceptable that it happened, to my family, or to anyone's family. It's also not acceptable that the government has ever acknowledged that this was wrong or that it even happened.
I'm a little curious that if we all knew what "atrocity" truly meant, the full scale of what an atrocity is, how much of us can look back and find something that was taken from us, maybe in our own lives or the lives of our parents, and why? Was there even a reason?
I think at some point, we'll try something other than the standard solution - pretend it didn't happen.
Critical Race Theory
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