alt Hacker NewsI'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.
Replies
Definitely the worst human rights abuser in history followed by the British, French, Germans, etc.
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.