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Other than the Native Americans, I mean. But first, some descriptions of interracial violence in the American South, and a comparison to Eastern Europe:

"The lynchers were not content merely to kill the victim, the act of lynching was often transformed into a public spectacle, and sometimes hundreds or thousands of whites from the surrounding countryside would come to observe the event. Before death the victim was tortured, tormented by having limbs or sexual organs amputated, by being slowly roasted over a fire. After death, pieces of the charred remains would be souvenirs to the mob whose members desired a keepsake."- Herbert Shapiro, White violence and the Black Response.

"The burning of the houses was carried out deliberately, and, although the crowd was present all the time, no one could be found who would say he saw the houses fired."-The Associated Press Report on the Rosewood Massacre, 1923. "Masses of twisted steel were all that remained of furniture formerly in the negro homes, [and] several charred bodies of dogs, and firearms left in the hasty retreat, bore evidence to the mob's fury which set fire to the negro section."-Gainesville Sun, 1923, on the Rosewood Massacre

"nd there the Negro hung until daylight the next morning - an unspeakably grisly, dangling horror, advertising the shame of the town. His head was shockingly crooked to one side, his ragged clothing, cut for souvenirs, exposed in places his bare body: he dripped blood. And, with the crowds of men both here and at the morgue where the body was publicly exhibited, came young boys in knickerbockers, and little girls and women by scores, horrified but curious. They came even with baby carriages! Men made jokes: "A dead nigger is a good nigger." And the purblind, dollars-and-cents man, most despicable of all, was congratulating the public:

'"It'll save the county a lot of money!"

Significant lessons, these, for the young!

But the mob wasn't through with its work. Easy people imagine that, having hanged a Negro, the mob goes quietly about its business; but that is never the way of the mob. Once released, the spirit of anarchy spreads and spreads, not subsiding until it has accomplished its full measure of evil."- Ray Stannard Baker, What is a Lynching?, McClure's Magazine (February, 1905)

Compare this to any language from Eastern Europe or the Middle East, during the aftermath of WW1.

"At first, civilian turks, natives of the town, were th e chief offenders. I myself saw such civilians armed with shotguns watching the windows of Christian houses ready to shoot at any head that might appear. These had the air of hunters crouching and stalking their prey. The hunting and killing of Armenian men, either by hacking or clubbing or driving out in squads into the country and shooting, caused unimaginable panic..."-George Horton, American Consul in Smyrna, 1922.

Recently, some historians have suggested that one of the actual causes of the Great Migration was an increase in Racial violence in the American south, not just an increase in economic opportunities up north. Yet it strikes me that America was still fairly lucky. We never saw anything like the racial violence that was associated with the fall of the Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Internment camps for Japanese Americans, yes; butchering them and force marching them across Death Valley, no.

Yet how much of that was because of American culture, and how much of this was due to the fact that the United States have never faced a severe crisis that led to the collapse of the state. Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats didn't kill each other in Yugoslavia in the 1930s; but once the nation was overrun by the Axis, it became a charnel house. Even more "civilized" transfers and settlements during the Great War were accompanied by nasty ethnic violence, such as that which accompanied the creation of the Kingdom of Poland.

Yet before these states collapsed, relations were amicable enough. As Ivan Adnric pointed out in his book on life in the Bosnian town of Visegrad before and during the Great War, relations were amicable enough despite tension. Yet by the Gerat War, the Bosnians, Jews, etc. which had once gossiped, shared coffee, etc. proceeded to kill each other, unleashing a blood bath.

Is it possible for parts of the USA to suffer from ethnic cleansing? Or the CSA? The idea occurred to me, I admit, rereading Turtledove's Great War Series; and the fate that occurred to me for the south's blacks was not enlistment in the army, but rather the Armenians...

Less probably, what about something like Jello's USSA? In the birth of the nation and a second civil war, it's hard not to imagine scores being settled...


Or am I just a bit dark on a rainy day?
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