Comment by specproc
16 days ago
I'm sorry, but the US has an abysmal human rights record.
It has a per capita incarceration rate lower only than Rwanda, Turkmenistan, Cuba and El Salvador (which is a prison subcontractor _for_ the US).
It has started more wars than any other country since the second World War.
It is the only country to have used a nuclear weapon in anger.
It has a death penalty.
It supports numerous regimes with abysmal human rights records, Israel, Egypt and Saudi spring to mind, but that's just `head(3)`.
It has bombed it's own population, shot its own students, had racial segregation in living memory.
Given its scale and reach, I'd suggest that the US is, in fact, the world's greatest human rights abuser.
I'm struggling to think of a country with a worse record.
This is easy. We're sitting here texting on an American platform and both willing to say that the imprisonment rate in America is abysmal, that in its history America has supported awful dictatorships and racist regimes.
You can't do that in China or Cuba or Russia. You can't even mention it or you would be black holed and your family would be taken away in the night.
I'm in America and I have no fear of telling the authorities what I think.
As awful as some of the things America has done in the past 249 years are, you really can't compare them to the actions of non-democracies and authoritarian regimes. To do so is an insult to the people who struggle every day as prisoners under those regimes. You can hate America with all your heart, but you can't reasonably compare its foreign policy to that of Napoleon or Hitler or Stalin. You can't say that America ever attempted a Great Leap Forward leading to the starvation of 40 million people, or the Holodomor, or the Holocaust, or the Rwandan genocide or even the current genocide against Uighurs by China. Even the British empire looks incredibly cruel by modern American standards.
Is it still a big world power dominating other smaller countries? Definitely.
America has acted as if it were a global empire in its own self interest. But it's probably been the lesser of most evils, certainly throughout the 20th Century. What it is or may be now, it's harder to say, and we'll find out. But comparatively speaking, only a person who hadn't been to the countries you listed would make the claim that it was worse to have America running the world.
Someone's going to run the world, you know.
> Someone's going to run the world, you know.
The entitlement in that statement is jaw-dropping. No, no one needs to run the world.
And I definitely, definitely can compare US actions to Hitler and Stalin. Vietnam alone, over fifty years ago, ignoring everything that's gone on since was 1.4 million deaths, more than Auschwitz, about a third of the Holodomor.
In the 20th century, leaving aside WWI and WWII, America fought its native population, and in Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Korea, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Lao, Indonesia, Lebanon, the Congo, Bolivia, Cambodia, Granada, Libya, Panama, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia.
These are troops on the ground wars, in the twentieth century alone, which are a matter of public record. We're not even at the War on Terror, small scale secret stuff, or counting the viscous regimes the US has propped up. Or sanctions, or internal repression, lynching, assassinations and the like.
We don't have a body count as the US stopped counting in Vietnam, but I'd wager if we took all the deaths for which the US is directly responsible, it outstrip would outstrip Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union combined by an order of magnitude.
[Breathes] To the initial point, and speaking from somewhere where one's political views can definitely get one locked up. The (debatable) free speech of Americans means nothing to those not protected by US law, which is most of the world.
The American human rights record may look passable from the inside, but from the outside it's just another monstrous empire.
>No, no one needs to run the world.
Previous to the current unipolar hegemony of the US, it was the bipolar days of the US and USSR, otherwise known as the Cold War. That gave us Vietnam, Afghanistan part 1, Korea, and the Greek, Lebanese, Nicaraguan, Angolan civil wars. Before that it was a multipolar system of competing empires, fighting and carving up sections of the globe, which gave us both world wars, and countless wars before that. Unipolar hegemony provides stability and reduces interstate violence. The idea that Russia, China, and the EU competing for power and influence is a better situation does not ring true for me. The war in Ukraine is the first major interstate territorial grab since the end of the Cold War, and that is only the beginning in a multipolar world.
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Can we summarize international politics like this: once a nice person gets a gun, he realizes that there is no need to be nice anymore?
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Ok. Breathe.
What would have happened if the US hadn't entered WWII or hadn't remained in western Europe to stop the Soviets, or hadn't responded to the invasion of South Korea?
Presumably, someone or something besides what we politely call liberal democracy would be running those places, mmm? Probably in the manner in which either Germany or the USSR was run at the time, or in which North Korea is run today?
Perhaps after murdering all the intellectuals and landowners and shop owners, they would have come to some phase of neo-communist authoritarian capitalism like Vietnam or China now, (or if the Nazis had won, maybe their kids would have agitated for free speech and minority rights!) although it's debatable whether a Stalinist or Maoist country could get there without an evil capitalist villain to push it toward perestroika.
I'm not defending America sending troops hither and yon to defend banana companies.
But you say it's breathtakingly entitled to simply state that someone is going to run the world, and I think it's just a plainly obvious fact. By someone, hopefully you understand that I mean a polity and not a person, and ideally a group of nations with a commitment to the rule of law and civil rights. That would be as good as it has ever gotten in the long dark history of the world.
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In the past 249 years? The genocide of Native Americans was on the same scale as any of the atrocities you listed. Slavery too.
In recent years? I'd say the War on Terror was one of the deadliest things in 21st century so far.
Ok. Name a country 249 years ago that wasn't a conquering power, that didn't commit atrocities and that didn't have slavery.
You can't. They didn't exist.
Name one that opened its doors to immigrants, has the most diverse population in the world, progressively enhanced civil rights and enshrined freedom of speech, built a rule of law into its practices, and most importantly, name a single country that has had a peaceful democratic transition of power for more than half that time.
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Definitely the worst human rights abuser in history followed by the British, French, Germans, etc.
uh... are you being ironic?
Do you know what's going on to average citizens in North Korea?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aquariums_of_Pyongyang
Do you know that showing ANY anti-war symbol in Russia against the invasion of Ukraine will get you arrested?
Do you know how many Tibetans put their lives on the line to organize resistance in Tibet, now, against the genocidal CCP?
Do you know anything about the civil war in Sudan?
So
if the worst human rights abusers in your mind are America, the UK, France and Germany, is that because those are the only countries you can name? Or because you don't understand what the rest of the world is?
Why do you believe everything the western media tells you as they lie about everything relating to Israel and Palestine?
Your North Korea info. America is the one that didn’t allow free elections and invaded (yes I know you will say North Korea invaded. I know what people who repeat every western talking point say).
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How do you think Africa turned out the way it did? Which people in the late 1800s decided to carve up Africa? Which people continue doing [neo]colonialism?
Why is Sudan a country with its borders? It’s the west that did that. A country can’t be free when colonizers draw the borders. Even if you try to bring in the Arab states screwing Sudan up, those states are also a cause of western colonialism.
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Tibet was a slave society and part of China for many many years.
Most Tibetan people speak their native language. How about native Hawaiian or indigenous people in continental US?
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Like I said in another comment. If Xinjiang had been in Europe or America. The Muslims would’ve been genocided. Thank god my people were in Xinjiang China and not elsewhere.
I’d advise you to read Manufacturing Consent and learn more about the world before saying the most typical western talking points.
It's scale. North Korea is mainly abusing North Korean human rights, the US has brutalised many more countries, not incidentally including Korea.
Yes, I'm very familiar with the Russia situation, but are you trying to say all arrests in the US are completely justifiable? Despite their apparent arrest-happiness, they've a much smaller prison population than the US.
China, I know less about, but let's call the Uighurs and Tibet equivalent to say, Iraq and Libya, the US has done far more besides.
Having worked in the aid business, I'd say I'm sadly a little familiar with Sudan. For example I know they've been victims of US sanctions which have created and exacerbated the famines and economic misery paved the way for this war. The US even lobbed a cruise missile them once.
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> Do you know that showing ANY anti-war symbol in Russia against the invasion of Ukraine will get you arrested?
Like students protesting against Palestinian genocide?
> Do you know how many Tibetans put their lives on the line to organize resistance in Tibet, now, against the genocidal CCP?
Like the Hawaiian sovereignty movement?