Hint
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Answer
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The nation goes to war with this country, ostensibly over "WMDs" which are never found.
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Iraq
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This senator speaks for more than 24 hours nonstop to try and defeat Civil Rights legislation
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Strom Thurmond
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This war kills or maims millions, including 200,000 Americans, and ultimately ends in failure.
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Vietnam
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This Supreme Court decision upholds the legality of racial Segregation.
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Plessy v. Ferguson
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The USAF participates in the bombing of this German city, leaving 25,000 dead.
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Dresden
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At the height of the Red Scare this senator leads sensationalist attacks against alleged Communists.
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Joseph McCarthy
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From 1692 to 1693 20 people are executed for witchcraft in this Massachusetts town.
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Salem
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During this massacre in Vietnam, hundreds of unarmed civilians are gang raped, murdered, and/or mutilated. Only one Army Lieutenant is convicted. He gets a slap on the wrist.
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My Lai
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Nathan Bedford Forrest and others form this organization in 1865 to terrorize "blacks" and promote "white" supremacy.
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Ku Klux Klan
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Firebombing of this city in 1945 kills 100,000 people in a single day.
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Tokyo
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In 1812 a poorly planned invasion of this country ends in fiasco.
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Canada
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The war against republican freedom fighters in this country, won by the US after the Spanish-American War, may have resulted in as many as a million deaths.
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Philippines
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This slave in 1857, when unsuccessfully suing for his own independence, was told by the Supreme Court that he could not be a US citizen due to his race and status as property.
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Dred Scott
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Over 100,000 people with ancestors from this country were sent to internment camps during WW2.
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Japan
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During this 1932-1972 study, African Americans who thought they were receiving free health care were intentionally infected with syphillis and then not given medical treatment for it.
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Tuskegee experiment
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This war leaves half a million Americans dead, having been initiated by the secession of Southern states for perhaps the worst of all possible reasons.
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Civil War
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The first atomic bomb deployed against a civilian population is dropped on this Japanese city, obliterating it completely and inflicting hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.
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Hiroshima
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Three days later, a second atomic bomb is dropped on this city.
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Nagasaki
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After directing Bad Boys, Armageddon, and Pearl Harbor, this man is allowed to continue making movies.
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Michael Bay
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The original sin of the nation, inherited from European colonists, this "peculiar institution" condemned tens of millions of people to lives of unimaginable suffering and hardship.
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Slavery
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Government policy for about 100 years of forced relocations, land grabs, and outright massacres amount to what is essentially systematic genocide of this large and diverse group.
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American Indians
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In the end, notable destructive Allied air raids are ALWAYS unfairly given negative attention over Axis air raids that were similarly destructive, like Rotterdam.
Gifted Americans
Countries With the Biggest Boobies
The USA has plenty of good things going for it. And in many of my quizzes I have pointed toward those things (in a way that others often misconstrue as me heaping praise on the country).
There are thousands of quizzes on this site. Each one focuses on something different. Do you find it overkill that there is a whole quiz devoted to American fast food chains that doesn't say anything about all the unhealthy foods from other countries around the world and never mentions the thousands of great American restaurants that aren't about fast food? Do you feel the two quizzes I made on oldest cities don't cover enough young cities? Or maybe it's unfair in my countries with the biggest boobs quiz I don't also include countries with average sized boobs? There is no quiz on this site that is about everything. I find your criticisms absurd. lighten up.
Peer back a few thousand years and it was generally well accepted that if your tribe, city, or country went to war against another tribe and won, there was a not-insignificant chance that genocide against the males and sexual enslavement of the females in the losing tribe would follow.... I'm sure if you did a poll of Americans or other Westerners today the approval rates for such a thing would be extremely low. And by extremely low I mean very close to 0%.
1. In the late 1700s, infected blankets from smallpox patients were distributed to native Americans with the intention of spreading the disease to them.
2. In the Northeast, settlers were actually paid for each Penobscot person they killed.
3. In the 1775 Phips Proclamation, King George called for “subjects to embrace all opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing and destroying all and every of the aforesaid Indians.”
4. In 1864, Colonel John Chivington led a 700-man force into a village of around 150 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho people, about ⅔ of whom were women, chlidren, and even infants. Chivington and his men took scalps, human genitalia, and even human fetuses as trophies. Of his actions, Chivington stated: "Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable."
Relax -- every nation has embarrassing episodes and its okay to talk about them; the British episodes could go on endlessly as they add new episodes on a yearly basis. Even Canada, the boy scout of nations, could easily create an episode or two -- teaching history to 12 - 14 year olds, I spend more time on these "embarrassing" chapters than the old fashioned narratives of the past. My unit on whether we should have statues of our first PM forces students to make judgements based on evidence and logic. Nothing wrong with airing the dirty laundry to try and improve the future.
The atomic bombs is an interesting argument, by modern standards it may be an embarrisment however at the time it was seen as the only option by the U.S. military of the time, given how high U.S casualties were already and the fanatical and suicidal actions of Japanese military personal at Okinawa and Iwo Jima it is understandable that the U.S. would take the option that resulted in the least U.S. casualties.
For Dresden it happened because initially like the British airforce the U.S. airforce only undertook direct target bombing, however due to the high casualties on aircrews and the seeming lack of results lead to the descision to undertake high altitude carpet bombing.
It is a common blank spot when it comes to judging past events by modern ethics and morals. Like how nobody talks about islamic colonisation when the evils of colonisation is discussed. Or how slavery in africa was commonplace long before europeans showed up. Or people bowling over statues because the individual may have owned some slaves but arnt mass protesting Mauritania or Morocco as the centers of slave trade in africa happening right now.
It is an introspective comment looking at the way people see the past through there own bias. I am pretty sure if you went back in time a huron would not see any difference between having thier family murdered by a colonist or a lakota sioux. Yet people today do see one.
If that's not the point you were making then I just find it odd you would bring it up in this context. If one person says "the Holocaust was bad," and a 2nd person says "well what about when the followers of Moses slaughtered the Canaanites? Wasn't that also bad?" ... that's whataboutism. It just comes across as cynical and missing the point, and perhaps trying to excuse something horrible (the Holocaust) by pointing at something else that was also bad. And saying one thing is bad doesn't mean that all other things not mentioned are not bad. So if that is being implied, then that's attacking a strawman.
And at any rate, what was done to North American indigenous people as a whole by European colonists and their descendants is way worse than anything that they did to one another (possibly excepting the indigenous people of Mexico who practiced industrial-scale human sacrifice). So... one is mentioned more often than the other because it was actually a lot worse. Or maybe because the descendants of the people who perpetrated the latter atrocities are either dead now, not around in very large numbers, or they just don't have much power.
If i came across as cynical or like i was trying to make out like that european colonialism and U.S. colonism wernt bad because native americans did bad things too, my apologies that wasnt my point.
It was introspection about how people talk about U.S. history and how focus tends to fall on european history of the region and not the several thousand years of history that happened before hand. Especially when it comes to modern moral and ethical sentiments about how history should be seen.
and in that case... the reason why there aren't more atrocities committed by Native Americans on this and the other quizzes in the series is primarily three-fold:
1. We know very much less about them. Tribes indigenous to North America did not have writing. Their cultures, at the time of first contact with Europeans, were technically still "pre-historic." We have very little reliable information about what they were doing before European colonization, and after that point, they were slowly but surely integrated into the modern nation-states that came to exist on the land.
2. I'll admit this is in a way oddly racist, Euro-centric, and chauvinistic... but typically the concept of "US history" includes the history of the United States as well as the history of the European settlers and colonists whose descendants would go on to found the United States, and the indigenous peoples they interacted with or assimilated.
3. Still, whatever atrocities the indigenous people of North America got up to, they were generally not as bad and significantly smaller in scale than some of the worst things listed on this quiz. Plus... Americans generally know almost nothing about them... so... less cause for embarrassment. (once again, exception made for the Aztecs, who were pretty awful, but they lived in Mexico)
I will say this as a personal opinion. When it comes to historical atrocities I have always found the scale argument a bit of a slippery slope even though it is common in everything in western cultures, like a murderer vs a mass murderer for example.
It does in my opinion, create a problem of absolution via numbers, ignore this particular nation even though they committed atrocities because the number of victims arnt as high as this other country.
It is a natural process to consider a higher number of victims to be worse, but does create a system of ignorance that can exclude many victims just because there victimisers come from a small nation. Kinda like how male rape victims tend to be ignored because we think that the number of female rape victims are much higher and therefore more worthy of attention.