Comment by specproc
15 days ago
> 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.
Right. Next question being, of the current contenders for crown in a unipolar world, which one would you want to live in - and which would you think your children and their children had a chance of improving and being free in, rather than being slaves? Because if there's a better option than America, I'll move there.
Everything changes. The America of 20 years ago is different from the America of today, and will be different in 20 years again (I have no idea how). Likewise for Europe (either individual countries or the EU). Will Argentina finally get of the constant ruin from decades of unchecked leftism and become a world power in 20 years - who knows. Some of the changes will be good and some bad. There are things to like and dislike about every option. So far I'm holding out hope that the US and Europe both overall remain good choices. 20 years ago I was expecting China to become a good choice, but now they are not. I didn't even think of Vietnam 20 years ago, but they have some good signs (I'm not sure if there are enough). There are a few countries in Africa that are doing good things even though the continent as a whole is a string of one bad thing after another.
Well argued.
Unipolarity has however also seen considerable brutality, in the places the empire cares about (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya) and the places it doesn't, like Rwanda.
My point was made in frustration at the flippancy of the parent comment. The attitude that "someone has to run the world so it might as well be us" is precisely the source of the misery that the US, and every other empire, has inflicted on the world. It's a justification for untold evil and had to be challenged.
I'd further argue that the war in Ukraine isn't the first interstate territorial land grab, far from it. What else was the War on Terror?
The main characteristic of the (pre-Trump) US empire is that it doesn't incorporate territories, it plants bases and friendly governments. With varying degrees of success.
>Unipolarity has however also seen considerable brutality, in the places the empire cares about (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya) and the places it doesn't, like Rwanda.
We should probably view these in context to alternatives. Just looking at Afghanistan, the 20 year “War on Terror” is estimated to have killed approximately 200,000 people in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In contrast to the Soviet Afghan War, which was half a long, but resulted in between 1.2 and 2 million people killed, an order of magnitude more bloody.
Your comparison of the US and “every other empire” and equating Ukraine to the War on Terror is the same lack of context argument. The US “soft empire” of economic pressure, military protection, and clandestine regime change is not comparable to empires that literally would invade, conquer, and rule over other countries. The US does not own land in Afghanistan, did not annex and take control of oil or other natural resources in Iraq. Just because something is bad, doesn’t mean it is equivalent to other bad things and I think it is very clear that the US has been much “less bad” than the previous alternatives.
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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?
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.
FYI I'm writing from a former Soviet state and need no lectures and whatifs on matters of the USSR.
A US-led unipolar world existed between 1989 and 2025. Multipolarity is the norm, even the British empire was truly top dog for like 50-100 years at best.
Attempts to control the world are what lead to the sort of acts of barbarism, exemplified by the US, that are the subject of this conversation.
The US is, once more, the greatest human rights abuser in living memory, in large part because it believed it should run the world.
The main learning from WWII, which America has consistently eroded over its period at the helm is that on a global scale, multi-state governance based on mechanisms like the UN, the international criminal court etc should be the mechanism for global governance. Not some state with a manifest destiny complex's self interest.
> on a global scale, multi-state governance based on mechanisms like the UN, the international criminal court etc should be the mechanism for global governance.
The UN is not for “global governance”, it is to prevent the nuclear holocaust that would be WWIII by giving super powers a place to resolve conflicts. The international court at the Hague is only able to try war criminals, for example from the Yugoslav Wars, because the countries were not powerful enough to just ignore it. Just because we were able to try and convict Slobodan Milošević, doesn’t mean that China or Russia would ever extradite a former head of state for trial.
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Unfortunately the world bodies like the UN are overwhelmingly stocked with dictatorships ranging from Angola to Russia which have no interest in civil liberties or human rights. While they frequently claim the US to be the world's greatest human rights abuser, as you have, they perpetrate mass murder on their own citizens. The living memory of my family from Odesa, who survived the holocaust, who survived the famine, to see the invasion of Ukraine and the butchery of Hamas, while the culprits and murderers themselves run the United Nations and ICJ, and while people trying to survive are told they are the worst war criminals in history by the people whose history is one of ceaseless murder tells me that it's better to be American and, if necessary, spit out all those organizations for their lies.