[ChewyGranola]

So, this executive order makes no sense. Neither does the "gleeful" ratification of Congress with the Resolution Act of 2016. I mean, here in the real world, the United States suffered a pretty nasty terrorist attack. People who resemble the attackers in things like religion and skin color live right here, in the US. No political group called for their extermination, no one wanted to put all of a particular group in internment camps, etc, at least no one credible or serious or powerful in any way. There were isolated attacks against sadly innocent people, but the US government did not suddenly become a genocidal hate machine.

Now I am well aware of the travesty that was Japanese Internment.That was a terrible act, but for all the misery inflicted on Japanese-Americans, the government never even discussed the wholsale extermination the way the US government of the Shadowrun universe just did for reasons, at least not that I'm aware of.

What I'm getting at is this: what the heck is up with this part of the plot? Has it been revealed anywhere that President Jarman was some kind of evil spirit, or an immortal with an agenda, or something that makes sense in game? Because otherwise, I just can't make sense of this part of the history. I mean, I can handle the NAN, because I figure that in the alternate reality of SR there were lots more Native Americans. I can handle the CAS seceding for making the map look cool reasons, I can handle a state being "kicked out" of the Union, but the wanton extermination of Native Americans by a United States with similar experiences to the United States of the real world I don't really understand.

Sorry for the text wall. And I'm not trying to bring up real world politics or history, but I thought that if I just asked "what's up with Native extermination" people would bring up Internment and 9/11 related violence so I wanted to get that over with.

Thanks.

[SlowDeck]

It's due to the fact the SR timeline is different from our own. While it wouldn't make sense in the real world, in their world there was apparently a lot less acceptance of Native Americans. So, given there was still a lot more bigotry than exists in real life, they naturally took the dumbest decision possible for solving a problem.

Keep in mind that bit of timeline was originally decided during the Cold War, back when America was backing dictators and terrorist organizations left and right, crushing small democracies because they didn't agree with the U.S., and the current acceptance of Native Americans was not as wide-spread. So the idea that the U.S. would do some very horrific things to a group of people it didn't like internally was actually realistic, given it was currently doing exactly that at the time (including funneling drugs into low-class communities, illegal drug tests on minorities, and a few other atrocities). So, basically, the entire premise of the Great Ghost Dance was based on the very real viewpoint that America was an asshole victim.

Then the Soviet Union fell apart and within only a couple years all of that no longer was as relevant.

[ChewyGranola]

I totally get what you are saying. However, in spite of the Cold War circumstances of the setting, in spite of the dictators and terrorist organizations the US backed, none of that equates to genocide. It's a long step from realpolitik to genocide. Hell, even at the highest point of, say, the Civil Rights Movement, which did get voilent on many occasions (mostly from the police and racist groups but obviously black people had to defend themselves too), no one seriously said "fuck it, genocide is the solution". I was really really hoping there was a cool in-game explaination. Otherwise, next time I introduce newbies to Shadowrun, I'm going to have to alter that a bit, like internment but no extermination.

[SlowDeck]

A major part of why genocide was not considered a solution to the Civil Rights movement is because of World War 2; when you get to before that, the U.S. had no problem considering genocide (Hitler was very popular in the U.S. prior to WW2) and had already attempted multiple genocides by that point (most directed at Native Americans).

In addition, even after WW2, the U.S. aided a number of genocides, and it's well known that certain segments of the government actually did consider genocide as a response to the Civil Rights movement. The only thing that held them back was the kinder elements that came into power and were horrified at the Holocaust. But even then, it did not stop the experiments on low-class populations, some of which were definitely war crimes.

So, really, people had no problem believing the U.S. would commit genocide yet again because it had already done so multiple times and was guilty of aiding other genocides. Of course, the Soviets were not exactly any better.

It's not really until the 1990s that you see the U.S. government as a whole start to really get the idea that genocide is a bad thing and start to back away from helping people who commit it.

[Absols]

Theres a bunch of really stupid unbelievable stuff in SR's backstory e.g  The US abandoning California to be invaded by japan because it wanted to save on its aid budget, The UK just sort of giving up on northern Ireland ect.

[SlowDeck]

Well, to be honest, the California bit is California's fault. California was, in effect, trying to emotionally blackmail the U.S. into giving it more and more attention and threatening secession if it didn't get what it wanted. The U.S. simply called its bluff and told it that it's no longer part of the Union; they never said California couldn't rejoin.

Instead of rejoining the Union when they got invaded, California called on Japan for help. That's what started the Japanese invasion.

The bit about Ireland? I can say that the UK, by the looks of things, was facing a number of ongoing disasters at the time and simply didn't have the resources to fight a magical nation that wanted to take a piece of land by force. Realistically, the UK only maintains its territory as it stands because so much of it is uninhabitable. That's also why they have the severe overcrowding problem on housing; they've had to move as much of Scotland into what was England as they could just to save lives. Grant total, about half of that island is inhospitable to human life right now.

[DeathStrobe]

You have to imagine that the extreme right had taken over the US government at the time. They were willing to let corporations run wild doing whatever corporations want, because what's good for the corporations is good for the economy, which in turn is good for America.

Here are these tree hugging eco terrorists which are a real threat to corporations and the economy and every white skinned/red blooded American who just a few years earlier told them all they had to leave America or else. And then on top of that they turn out to be bullet proof and causing all manner of natural disasters using magic. I mean, what are you going to do?

If all the AmerIndians wanted you dead because you didn't want to move, what would you do? You can't give them back their land and you don't want to die. So why not kill them all? They're going to keep fighting until they're all dead. So if your only solution to stop the fighting is to kill them all. You might as well kill them all.

Anyway, of course next year volcanos started to explode and the President realized that they wouldn't be able to kill them all and that it appeared like the opposite might be true in that the Indians might be able to kill all the white people. So naturally the Treaty of Denver happened and everyone lived happily ever after.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Understand that neither Executive Order 17-321 - or the Resolution Act of 2016 - stand alone.  To understand them, you really, really, really need to look at the whole picture.  This isn't a matter of 'the extreme right' or 'a single terrorist act'.  This is nuclear fraggin' war that SAIM attempted; that got them especially isolated. Then they broke out.  Then the NAN ordered all the non-Indians (except for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) to get the hell off their land (i.e. the entire North American continent) under threat of dire magical retribution.  And then, just to prove they could, they made Redondo Peak light off and killed Los Alamos and everyone in it.  Call it 12,000 innocent people.

No fraggin' offense, but the NAN goddamn shot first.

Now, that isn't to say that genocide is the answer; EO 17-321 and the Resolution Act are travesties.  And they, and everything on the USA side that led up to it, were very heavily influenced by the corporations that were pulling the purse strings.  But they are neither totally one-sided nor massacres of undefended peoples - when you get down to it, the NAN kicked some very serious ass.

[Crimsondude]

And then, just to prove they could, they made Redondo Peak light off and killed Los Alamos and everyone in it.  Call it 12,000 innocent people.

20,000.

Hence the name Alamos 20,000.


(And fuck Daniel Howling Coyote for blowing up a mountain sacred to many of the Pueblos which surround Los Alamos and Redondo Peak. No wonder the PCC and Ute Nation had several "border skirmishes" before PCC took over Ute and bent them over a barrel.)

[Critias]

I hope this won't be seen as too personal -- it's not really all aimed at you in particular, it's a long-standing frustration of mine, and I might just yell it all at my students the first day of class, instead of going over the syllabus -- but this really kind of...rubbed me the wrong way.  I know your question is well-intended, and I'm glad you're interested in the setting, interested in explaining the setting to your friends, and wanting the setting to make sense to your friends when you explain it.  I get that!  It's awesome.  And I'll totally agree that parts of the setting are really weird and/or stupid, and always have been, and there's nothing wrong with loving it, warts and all, like so many of us do.

[rant]

...but the wanton extermination of Native Americans by a United States with similar experiences to the United States of the real world I don't really understand.

What do you think happened to them here in the real world?  If that doesn't count as "wanton extermination of Native Americans" what the hell does?

I find it kind of troubling -- completely away from the game for a moment, just as a human being, a citizen of the planet, and perhaps most of all as a historian and professor -- that someone is so desperate to find a supernatural explanation for this (admittedly execrable) order, asking if there's been some metaplot development that shows an insect spirit or some other nefarious supernatural threat was involved.  It feels very old World of Darkness to me, that way, where everyone expects magic to be behind every important historical figure, explaining away every unlikely occurrence, or excusing humanity from every terrible ill we've inflicted upon one another.

People do evil shit just fine all by themselves.

I could soundly trounce the character limit of any given post, and a second, and a third, just rambling off a nigh-random, stream of consciousness, list of terrible things mankind has done to itself, with no more textual support required than a casual glance at the handful of books I see from this spot in front of my computer.  I'm not even in my Big Kid Library, I've only got about half a shelf out here that's full of actual academic texts instead of fiction of one stripe or another, but hell if that'd stop me, because all the historical texts are for is jogging my memory and reminding me of one atrocity or conquest or another.  It's, I mean, it's all of history, if you look at it from just that terrible angle.  It's what we do.  It's what groups of humans do to one another, every chance they get, and it's what some groups of humans are doing to other groups of humans right this very second.  It's not remarkable, what's remarkable is the absence of such behavior. 

Evil, even -- or perhaps especially? -- evil of a political, racial, cultural, and religious bent, requires absolutely no genuinely supernatural excuse to exist.  The long-standing differences, political, racial, cultural, and religious, between most of America and the tremendously marginalized Native American population are a yawning chasm that makes the Grand Canyon look like a crack in the sidewalk.  The only implausible thing about EO 17-321, to me, is that it took as long as it did to get written.  When one considers the tremendous history of violence, counter-violence, raid, skirmish, retaliation, escalation, and extirpation that makes up almost the entire written history of American Indians, it's not at all a stretch to me that one more President in a long line of Presidents, egged on by just a few little tweaks here and there in the alt-history that makes up The Sixth World, would give the order that was given.

Let's just...be careful what we Other too desperately.  Let's be careful what we don't give mundane humanity the "credit" for.  Humanity is capable of tremendous acts of absolutely shitty and vile behavior towards one another, even (or rather especially) on the grand, national, scale.  We haven't needed real-life Insect Spirits or genuinely sorcerous cabals or immortal handlers to make us do any of the terrible shit we've actually done to one another in real life, through the millenia...why would we need that in a fictional setting that's already meant to represent as at our greediest and most banal?

It doesn't take a magical threat to make someone in a position of power do something stupid and evil to a group of people with a different skin tone, speaking a different language, worshiping different gods, and living on land the powerful don't want them living on;  it almost takes magic to keep them from doing so.

[/professorial rant]

[Bull]

The other thing to note is that while Shadowrun's history "officially" splits with our own in 1989...  The fact is that it's an alternate timeline that stretches back decades, if not centuries with little, subtle differences that had to be in place for the major changes to come about. 

Unfortunately, except to a handful of history buffs, detailing all of that would be boring and pointless (not to mention a LOT of effort for very little reward).  So we only worry about the major changes that happened, the ones that directly brought about the World as we Know It in 2050+.

[ChewyGranola]

Critias- Thanks for the response. I totally understand what you're saying. However, the events I'm talking about seem more akin to the Final Solution than the past American policy towards Native Americans. I'm a historian too, and while my area of expertise is the Civil War and Reconstruction, I like American West history too. And I'm not meaning this in a snarky way at all, I'm just trying to explain my confusion with the Executive Order. I didn't take what you wrote as personal in any way. The internment of Native Americans in the SR universe I can totally get. Hell, the US had official policy to "whiten" Native Americans for a long time. But when it comes to out-and-out genocide, the physical wiping out of a group of people...well, I think that ship has sailed in the United States, at least in the 20th century. Once the Holocaust is history, I have a hard time believing that any Western nation would go for out-and-out genocide, regardless of the circumstances. Now, obviously, we have seen "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia, but the industrialized murder the SR history imples makes me question things.

It is funny that you thought that felt oWoD; I'm a long time player of those games. The only reason I was looking for a different explaination is that I find the SR historical event to be super implausable. Obviously humans are capable of a lot of evil, as we see throughout history. I'm no pollyanna, I normally figure that Evil and Stupid are driving many of the important events in history. However, I think even Evil and Stupid act within the mores of their times. Genocide, in the United States and in the West in general, seems to have gone out of fashion since the Holocaust. I think if the original authors had left it at, say, interning all Native Americans and "educating" them to not be culturally Native, then I could have accepted that with no problem, from an alt-historical POV.

Hopefully I'm making sense. Your post's points are very well taken, and I don't have a problem with regular people doing bad things to each other. It's just that within my understanding of history and the American mindset (whatever that means) since World War 2, straight up physical genocide seems to be off the table. I think Americans would be more likely to put people they don't like somewhere (like Reservations!) and forget about them than murder them man, woman and child.

Wyrm- Yeah, looking at it from a big picture perspective helps. And yeah, SR history is full of stupid. Your post was helpful in getting me to accept this facet of SR American history. Thanks!

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

It also helps to remember that this was the US declaring war on a segment of their own people.  The Constitution technically doesn't have a method for doing that, so ... and it wasn't like the Civil War, where you had a discrete line drawn.

[ChewyGranola]

Well the Civil War was kind of declaring war on a rebellious segment of the population too. Keep in mind, the South (or the North for that matter) was hardly unified on the questions of slavery and secession. Just look at the Baltimore riots in the north or the fates of Unionists in East Tennessee or Texas in the south. So the Civil War was not fully a country vs country conflict. In fact, I think of the Ghost Dance War as having to include disaffected "Anglos" on the Native side too, turning the whole thing into a second Civil War. That would help explain the populations of the NANs too, which is good for my headcanon.

Now, this is all my interpretation and stuff, so grain of salt and all that...

[SlowDeck]

Chewy, if you want something even more full of stupid, visit the American Revolution. The entire premise for the Revolution and what the colonists were doing, in light of everything leading up to it, was stupid at its finest on the part of the colonists.

It gets worse when you get into other historical events:

Another item full of stupid? The U.S. and British Empire almost ended up at war with each other over a pig. They had to get the German Empire to mediate the dispute.

The British Empire did eventually go to war with a group over a chair (the British technically lost this one).

Half of the wars the Italians were involved in. I think they even had a war over a bucket.

The Trojan War. Seriously, this is a war started by a guy just because his wife ran off. Genociding the Trojans was a wee bit of an overreaction.

Seriously, if you're going to dismiss SR history just because it's stupid, you also have to dismiss a lot of real-life history for the same reason. Because, ultimately, you're facing a case where people in real life go to war over farm animals and furniture. And where a genocide was committed just because of a jealous husband's reaction to his wife running away with her love. The U.S. in SR history at least had better justification for its last attempt.