Comment by 542354234235

> going back to my very first post on here…address the core point that the US government, has in actuality caused more suffering, to more people, in more countries, over a longer period of time than any other since the end of WW2.

Lets look at that.

>Vietnam alone, over fifty years ago, ignoring everything that's gone on since was 1.4 million deaths

This ignores that the USSR was on the other side of this war, so those deaths are shared equally.

>Cuba, Nicaragua, Korea, the Congo, Cambodia, Lao

These are all Cold War proxy wars with the Soviet Union, a direct result of duopolistic fighting.

> the former Yugoslavia

The Yugoslavian wars were internal/civil wars over nationalism and involved extensive ethnic cleansing. The US stepped in and ended the wars after a fairly short bombing campaign.

>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.

Mao’s Great Leap Forward is estimated to have caused 30 to 45 million deaths. Stalin’s Great Purge murdered between 700,000–1.2 million. Stalin also forcibly deported 15 million people as part of his Dekulakization, and cause 20 million deaths total. This claim that the US has killed orders of magnitude more people has no basis in fact.

A majority of the wars were proxy wars, and as horrible as they were, they were less destructive than wars of conquest they replaced. The Napoleonic wars killed 6.5 million with muskets and cannons. Meanwhile, the Iraq war, the worst US war since the fall of the Soviet Union, resulted in less than a third of the deaths in Korean or Vietnam wars.

Listing the United States Superpower misdeeds only sound horrible when you ignore the context of what the other Superpowers were doing. At it ignores the amount of violence in a unipolar US world compared to duopolistic and multipolar worlds.