Some Overseas Atrocities Before 1890, 1917, or 1941
* One might notice that the atrocities discussed in this work often are far more heavily weighted towards the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Many earlier atrocities happening outside the US are not discussed, notably the Irish Famine, the Taiping Rebellion, King Leopold's genocide in the Congo, and the massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic in 1937.
* One might wonder why those tragedies and not others? Surely the Irish in the 1840s, Chinese in the 1850s, Africans in the 1890s, and Haitians in 1937, all of whom died or were killed in huge numbers, deserve as much consideration for why a president did nothing as Blacks under slavery, California Indians, Holocaust victims, or Rwandans do.
* One thing this work promotes is the basic spiritual principle of the humanity of all peoples, no matter how unfamiliar the people may be to many Americans. An American life is no more or less valuable than a Rwandan's, though most Americans could not tell you a single fact about Rwanda besides there having been a genocide there (and some not even that.)
* That many more Americans (including presidents) were deeply racist as the time is not an excuse either. A great many whites also were not. So Black slaves and California Natives were no less human and there is no justifiable reason for ignoring atrocities done against them.
* So why not include the first four named groups, as well as many others? There are several considerations for why they were not included in this work:
* 1. Were the atrocities widely known, and known in time to have been stopped? Technology at the time was not what it is today. Communication took weeks under the most ideal circumstances, more often months, not seconds as today. There was no internet nor satellite television. The younger readers may not know that one of the first times social media technology made concealing atrocities far more difficult was the Tienanmen Square massacre, and that was in 1989.
* In the case of the Congo, King Leopold began taking over the region in 1885, and his worst atrocities began in the 1890s. But widespread reporting on the genocide he was carrying out did not reach Europe until 1900. The Congo was extremely remote from communication methods at the time, with reports from the deepest interior taking as long as eight months.
* In the Dominican Republic in 1937, the massacre happened very quickly, 12,000 to 35,000 Haitian deaths in only five days. There was really no way to gather a military force to stop it in time. Roosevelt's response was complicated by his Good Neighbor Policy, vowing to no longer send US troops to Latin America. Roosevelt and Haitian President Stenio Vincent did get reparations for the victims' families. Corrupt Haitian officials embezzled almost all of the reparations paid.
* 2. Was it practical for the US and American presidents to have intervened at the time? US military power in 1860, for example, was nowhere near what it is today. The US Army at the start of the Civil War was only 16,000. This was not a small army for that time either. People often forget the entire world population did not reach one billion until the twentieth century. All three huge (for that time) American, British, and French armies at the Battle of Yorktown were not even 22,000 men.
* But in the Taiping Rebellion, 20 million died in China, which already had a population numbering over 100 million. Each side in the rebellion had at least half a million troops. In theory, 5,000 US troops traveling to the other side of the world were unlikely to stop the war's humanitarian catastrophe. (There were foreigners already fighting in the rebellion, British and French mercenaries against the rebels. Americans often fought on the side of the rebels since they were fellow Christians.)
* Many also tend to forget the US did not become a superpower until after World War II. In the case of the Irish Famine, the British Empire was the most powerful nation on the planet at the time, with the most powerful navy, and Ireland was next door to Britain. It is very unlikely US power could have challenged the British, even had the public wanted to.
* 3. Was the American public isolationist, inclined to stay out of foreign affairs entirely, even to stop preventable atrocities? This did not happen nearly as much as many claim. Isolationism is perhaps the most overrated threat in the minds of those who worship the ideas of American power and American empire. It has been invoked many times, throughout the Cold War and after, as an argument for why the US should always be a superpower and involved whenever the amorphous idea of “national security” is brought up. The term can mean anything from business interests to the need for military bases to simply punishing any nation that does not agree with the US government.
* American isolationism before World War II is greatly overstated. (See Sections Three and Five.) Private armies of Americans invaded dozens of countries before the Civil War. The US fought five wars to expand slavery, and conquered territory from the Mississippi River to the Pacific and beyond, to Hawaii and the Philippines. Any American who remembers basic facts from high school history recalls the Monroe Doctrine, essentially declaring Latin America was the US's turf. (European powers ignored it until after World War II, but that does not change it being declared.) As the US recovered from the Civil War and those with memories of it died off, starting in the 1890s the US military invaded Latin American nations dozens of times, at times occupying countries for decades. (See Section Five.)
* But this is still in the Americas, and only in the nations near the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean. One has to consider those dates at the title of this entry, 1890, 1917, and 1941. Before 1890, the US neither had the military power nor the state of mind to invade overseas, except for the northernmost parts of Latin America. After 1917, much of the US was somewhat inclined to invade overseas if humanitarian reasons or preserving order was the rationale. But there was also a large part of the public that was deeply skeptical. In part this was because many of them recognized “the flag follows the dollar,” that these invasions were often done for economic domination, or became such domination after the fact. After 1941 is when the US was fully committed as a world power, having both the military might and the will to send troops overseas.