Comment by noduerme
17 days ago
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.
They did Bibi, which was good. Growing a pair in its old age.
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.