alt Hacker News> 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.
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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.
>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.