The US has done many horrible things, but that’s an awful list to go by. It mixes US involvement in the Philippines and the nightmare that was with “Israel killed someone and it’s likely the US was aware”, NATO involvement in Bosnia, and the US usage of radio and press releases to influence world opinion in its favor.
Specific incidents in Bosnia? Certainly. But on the face of it, the US joining with other nations to intervene in an ethnically driven civil war isn’t an attrocity. The US being aware of an Israeli operation isn’t a US attrocity. Propaganda isn’t an attrocity.
Hell, one entry literally seemed to be “American soldiers reported a South Korean war crime through appropriate channels, and this didn’t change US foreign policy”
Mixing actual attrocities in with the benign or unrelated things just dilutes the actual attrocities, particularly when the preamble says to play up to emotional outrage.
Hate to be that guy, but as much as the US sucks it’s no Nazi Germany. Broad estimates of US war victims range up to 12 million (a liberal estimate), whereas the Nazis killed over 13 million through mass killings alone (eg the Holocaust + exterminated minorities). The Soviet Union alone lost 20 to 27 million depending on who you ask.
Even if you take the most extreme interpretation of US responsibility possible (eg adding another 1-1.7 million people for “luring” the Soviet Union into attacking Afghanistan), you don’t get to 25 million. Which again, the Nazis killed in the Soviet Union alone.
Making these sorts of wild statements only invites scrutiny over the numbers and creates an argument you will lose. It’s far more effective to list more recent atrocities and zoom in on individual cases and motivations. Let’s also not understate the tremendous losses the Soviet Union took.
Broad estimates of US war victims range up to 12 million (a liberal estimate), whereas the Nazis killed over 13 million through mass killings alone (eg the Holocaust + exterminated minorities). The Soviet Union alone lost 20 to 27 million depending on who you ask.
In addition to the 500k-millions of native peoples and hundreds of tribes the US systematically nearly eradicated, lets take just a few more examples.
Vietnam: 1.5M killed
Laos: 300k
Iraq: 1M
Indonesia: 500k-1M
Korea: 500k
Japan: 200k-1M in civilian bombings
And I haven’t even started on operation condor and latin america yet.
The real tragedy is that of the victims who got stuck in the middle between two doctrines hell-bent on global domination.
The case of Imperial Japan is equivalent to that of Nazi Germany. A fascist regime that saw millions intentionally slaughtered and worked to death across Asia.
Here are some links for reading more about the killings related to:
Not disputing that, but Nazi Germany trumps that in numbers easily. If we take the upper estimates of these you get 5.5 million people (only half of the liberally estimated total of 12 million).
Again, I’m not disputing how horrible this all is, but it’s just not the same. This is decades of US warfare compared to just 6-9 years of Nazi Germany. And the comparison gets even worse considering world population at the time was much lower than it is now.
Bro just admit it, US is the OG third Reich. It was literally founded on Genocide and kept doing it until the Native population became irrelevant.
The Nazis literally planned Lebensraum after being inspired by ‘Manifest Destiny’ and modeled the Nuremberg laws after the Jim Crow. I suggest you read a book.
I am once again telling you to pick up a history book on US imperialism. You fucks just care about atrocities more when it’s inflicted on white people more than when it’s inflicted on colored people. The US literally preserved fascism in the western hemisphere to prevent the spread of Socialism.
I am taking atrocities against people of colour into account. These were genocidal and unequivocally horrible. But one really shouldn’t start understating the crimes of Nazi Germany to make the US look worse. It already looks terrible, comparing it to the Nazis makes it look comparatively better which is the opposite of what you’re trying to achieve (seriously, just the number of people killed in the Soviet Union is insane conceptually).
US atrocities, crimes and genocides can stand on their horrible own and be sufficiently terrible to convince people that the US is shit.
If anything, it exposes how inhumane and cruel the US Foreign policy has been. Why are you so fixated on making the American Empire look less harmful which is contradictory to the historical reality? Are you an Ameriphile?
The post does not go into kill counts as a direct comparison. It simply states that the us will be remembered as worse than nazi germany. So no, that is not the reason. I’m calling out your behavior specifically as problematic.
Even if you take the most extreme interpretation of US responsibility possible (eg adding another 1-1.7 million people for “luring” the Soviet Union into attacking Afghanistan), you don’t get to 25 million
You should know that these figures are fairly disputed. This specific study comes from a Venezuelan think-tank specifically set up to advocate for sanction relief. It also has some findings that go against previously established literature (such as stating that UN sanctions are less harmful than US sanctions, whereas previous studies found the opposite (eg https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/215035/1/cesifo1_wp8033.pdf). There’s also debate as to how much of this is causation and how much is correlation. Plus there’s no analysis regarding improved life expectancy after sanction relief compared to a scenario where no sanctions were instated in the first place.
Also, be aware that historically these arguments were used for example to seek sanction relief for Apartheid South-Africa.
According to you, is there Apartheid in Venezuela? Hell, the US and Israel tried to keep the regime in South Africa going for as long as they could, so it doesn’t even make much sense. Not only that, but sanctions STILL cause the deaths of over 500k people a year. People like you and me. Stop defending imperialism and mass death.
Again, these numbers are seriously disputed. And while there isn’t apartheid in Venezuela, there is significant suppression of freedom. 20% of the country packed up and left, a stark contrast with the Chavez days when Venezuela saw huge immigration instead.
Hell, the US and Israel tried to keep the regime in South Africa going for as long as they could, so it doesn’t even make much sense.
There are other countries than the US and Israel you know.
When European settlers arrived in the Americas, historians estimate there were over 10 million Native Americans living there. By 1900, their estimated population was under 300,000. Native Americans were subjected to many different forms of violence, all with the intention of destroying the community. In the late 1800s, blankets from smallpox patients were distributed to Native Americans in order to spread disease. There were several wars, and violence was encouraged; for example, European settlers were paid for each Penobscot person they killed. In the 19th century, 4,000 Cherokee people died on the Trail of Tears, a forced march from the southern U.S. to Oklahoma. In the 20th century, civil rights violations were common, and discrimination continues to this day.
Multiple millions of people were captured in Africa and sold as slaves as well
Surely we’d attribute most of those murders to the British Empire and the other colonisers at the time, no? The vast majority of these people died before the US even conceptually existed.
Again, not disputing that all of this is fucking horrible, but it’s not somehow “worse” than the sum of crimes committed by Nazi Germany (as far as comparing atrocities goes that is, which feels like something one shouldn’t compare too much. Each one is one too many after all).
The vast majority of these people died before the US even conceptually existed.
Germany didn’t write the holocaust out of their history like Americans did.
To mock the line I keep seeing in this thread full of apologists: Nazi Germany wasn’t quite there yet. They would have been as bad as the US if they had time.
Nazi Germany literally modeled their society off of the United States from Jim Crow apartheid to the frontier genocide.
You’re wrong. It’s not a contest. If they had been allowed to ‘let things that happened a hundred years ago fade away’ like they were planning THEN it would be a contest because they would have succeeded in creating a European America.
The project of Nazi Germany is literally the same project as Israel is literally the same project as America
It is exactly one thing: Settler colonialism and the only difference is the conditions of when and where and who. But that only goes as far as the particulars.
That’s what I said, maybe explain that to Dessalines who started this comparison.
There’s a bit of a difference though between settler colonialist states and Nazi Germany. As much as Nazi Germany also sought to colonise towards their east, they also attempted to genocide “undesirables” at an industrialised pace, murdering even ethnic Germans if they had some kind of disability. Racial and genetic purity was paramount to them, to a far greater degree than the US.
Again, none of this is denying the atrocities committed by any of these states.
The vast majority of these people died before the US even conceptually existed.
Disgusting take, acting as if genocide was not colonial policy. You desperately need to read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - an indigenous people’s history of the US.
Of course it was colonial policy. But it doesn’t stand to reason to primarily attribute those to the US as an entity, rather than the British, French or Spanish empires who instituted these policies and were responsible for them.
That’s not to say the US doesn’t have its own share in this history, but attributing the entire genocide to the US makes little sense since they didn’t exist for the majority of it.
Simply trying to compare kill counts like history is call of duty only serves to dehumanize the victims.
In my view, just one aspect of the U.S. makes it the worst country ever: its role in the ecological crisis. The us is like three corporations in a trench coat, and a us corporation knew about anthropogenic climate change and kept that internal, and that’s just one instance of fuckery where there are plenty more. That’s the international elephant in the room which nobody seems willing to talk about. We need to also consider all the future atrocities as well as those in the past.
Fully agreed that comparing “kill counts” is dehumanizing. Hence why I commented saying you shouldn’t invite these comparisons in the first place, because people will find an argument and you’ll get lost in the weeds.
Why do you only mention the Jewish people and not the Roma, the homosexual, the transgender, the socialist, the communist or the many other groups targeted? Far more than 6 million were targets of genocide by the Nazis.
Killed an entire continent of peoples and enslaved millions of people from another one to make agricultural commodities.
Also during ww2 the US refused a ship of jews fleeing nazi germany and made them return.
They also won’t make anti-semitism illegal cause freeze peach, so US cops often protect white supremacist groups during protests from righteously outraged ppl. US cops also often recruit directly from those groups, and use them to carry out illegal things actions they don’t want to be responsible for. There isn’t enough space here to even get into the US’s anti-semitic past.
Give me any nazi atrocity and I can provide an example of the US doing it, and probably far worse and on a larger scale.
List of US atrocities.
The US has done many horrible things, but that’s an awful list to go by. It mixes US involvement in the Philippines and the nightmare that was with “Israel killed someone and it’s likely the US was aware”, NATO involvement in Bosnia, and the US usage of radio and press releases to influence world opinion in its favor.
Specific incidents in Bosnia? Certainly. But on the face of it, the US joining with other nations to intervene in an ethnically driven civil war isn’t an attrocity. The US being aware of an Israeli operation isn’t a US attrocity. Propaganda isn’t an attrocity.
Hell, one entry literally seemed to be “American soldiers reported a South Korean war crime through appropriate channels, and this didn’t change US foreign policy”
Mixing actual attrocities in with the benign or unrelated things just dilutes the actual attrocities, particularly when the preamble says to play up to emotional outrage.
Someone didn’t read a history book.
Hate to be that guy, but as much as the US sucks it’s no Nazi Germany. Broad estimates of US war victims range up to 12 million (a liberal estimate), whereas the Nazis killed over 13 million through mass killings alone (eg the Holocaust + exterminated minorities). The Soviet Union alone lost 20 to 27 million depending on who you ask.
Even if you take the most extreme interpretation of US responsibility possible (eg adding another 1-1.7 million people for “luring” the Soviet Union into attacking Afghanistan), you don’t get to 25 million. Which again, the Nazis killed in the Soviet Union alone.
Making these sorts of wild statements only invites scrutiny over the numbers and creates an argument you will lose. It’s far more effective to list more recent atrocities and zoom in on individual cases and motivations. Let’s also not understate the tremendous losses the Soviet Union took.
A huge amount of deaths are directly caused by US sanctions in numerous countries.
You should count those
In addition to the 500k-millions of native peoples and hundreds of tribes the US systematically nearly eradicated, lets take just a few more examples.
And I haven’t even started on operation condor and latin america yet.
And US America is still going, the worst is yet to come
The real tragedy is that of the victims who got stuck in the middle between two doctrines hell-bent on global domination.
The case of Imperial Japan is equivalent to that of Nazi Germany. A fascist regime that saw millions intentionally slaughtered and worked to death across Asia.
Here are some links for reading more about the killings related to:
Imperial Japan
North Vietnam & the Vietnam War
North Korea & the Korean War
This popped up in my feed today:
Not disputing that, but Nazi Germany trumps that in numbers easily. If we take the upper estimates of these you get 5.5 million people (only half of the liberally estimated total of 12 million).
Again, I’m not disputing how horrible this all is, but it’s just not the same. This is decades of US warfare compared to just 6-9 years of Nazi Germany. And the comparison gets even worse considering world population at the time was much lower than it is now.
Sounds like they are in good company, millions is millions, but I’d argue America has committed more genocides.
Bro just admit it, US is the OG third Reich. It was literally founded on Genocide and kept doing it until the Native population became irrelevant. The Nazis literally planned Lebensraum after being inspired by ‘Manifest Destiny’ and modeled the Nuremberg laws after the Jim Crow. I suggest you read a book.
I’m not disputing US atrocities, I’m saying that claiming it’s worse than the Nazis were will invite heavy, imo legitimate scrutiny.
I am once again telling you to pick up a history book on US imperialism. You fucks just care about atrocities more when it’s inflicted on white people more than when it’s inflicted on colored people. The US literally preserved fascism in the western hemisphere to prevent the spread of Socialism.
I am taking atrocities against people of colour into account. These were genocidal and unequivocally horrible. But one really shouldn’t start understating the crimes of Nazi Germany to make the US look worse. It already looks terrible, comparing it to the Nazis makes it look comparatively better which is the opposite of what you’re trying to achieve (seriously, just the number of people killed in the Soviet Union is insane conceptually).
US atrocities, crimes and genocides can stand on their horrible own and be sufficiently terrible to convince people that the US is shit.
If anything, it exposes how inhumane and cruel the US Foreign policy has been. Why are you so fixated on making the American Empire look less harmful which is contradictory to the historical reality? Are you an Ameriphile?
I hope you take a moment and reflect on why you insist on approaching comparative history in this way.
Maybe it’s because this is a comment thread about comparative history being performed in the same manner?
The post does not go into kill counts as a direct comparison. It simply states that the us will be remembered as worse than nazi germany. So no, that is not the reason. I’m calling out your behavior specifically as problematic.
Because that’s what Dessalines did, and I literally mentioned they probably shouldn’t do that.
Bullshit. One single US (+EU) policy, economic sanctions, has murdered 38 million in the past 50 Years and keeps murdering 500k yearly. One single policy.
You should know that these figures are fairly disputed. This specific study comes from a Venezuelan think-tank specifically set up to advocate for sanction relief. It also has some findings that go against previously established literature (such as stating that UN sanctions are less harmful than US sanctions, whereas previous studies found the opposite (eg https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/215035/1/cesifo1_wp8033.pdf). There’s also debate as to how much of this is causation and how much is correlation. Plus there’s no analysis regarding improved life expectancy after sanction relief compared to a scenario where no sanctions were instated in the first place.
Also, be aware that historically these arguments were used for example to seek sanction relief for Apartheid South-Africa.
According to you, is there Apartheid in Venezuela? Hell, the US and Israel tried to keep the regime in South Africa going for as long as they could, so it doesn’t even make much sense. Not only that, but sanctions STILL cause the deaths of over 500k people a year. People like you and me. Stop defending imperialism and mass death.
Again, these numbers are seriously disputed. And while there isn’t apartheid in Venezuela, there is significant suppression of freedom. 20% of the country packed up and left, a stark contrast with the Chavez days when Venezuela saw huge immigration instead.
There are other countries than the US and Israel you know.
Yeah nazi Germany was around for 13 years ish. I’m not saying there’s no comparison, I’m just saying there’s no comparison, yet.
The US nearly completely wiped out the indigenous people who lived there
When European settlers arrived in the Americas, historians estimate there were over 10 million Native Americans living there. By 1900, their estimated population was under 300,000. Native Americans were subjected to many different forms of violence, all with the intention of destroying the community. In the late 1800s, blankets from smallpox patients were distributed to Native Americans in order to spread disease. There were several wars, and violence was encouraged; for example, European settlers were paid for each Penobscot person they killed. In the 19th century, 4,000 Cherokee people died on the Trail of Tears, a forced march from the southern U.S. to Oklahoma. In the 20th century, civil rights violations were common, and discrimination continues to this day.
Multiple millions of people were captured in Africa and sold as slaves as well
Surely we’d attribute most of those murders to the British Empire and the other colonisers at the time, no? The vast majority of these people died before the US even conceptually existed.
Again, not disputing that all of this is fucking horrible, but it’s not somehow “worse” than the sum of crimes committed by Nazi Germany (as far as comparing atrocities goes that is, which feels like something one shouldn’t compare too much. Each one is one too many after all).
Germany didn’t write the holocaust out of their history like Americans did.
To mock the line I keep seeing in this thread full of apologists: Nazi Germany wasn’t quite there yet. They would have been as bad as the US if they had time.
I think it’s not unreasonable to think that Nazi Germany was worse than the US. Given time, it wouldn’t have even been a contest, absolutely true.
You’re also very right in criticising the US for not properly owning up to their atrocities. Germany has indeed done much better on that front.
Nazi Germany literally modeled their society off of the United States from Jim Crow apartheid to the frontier genocide.
You’re wrong. It’s not a contest. If they had been allowed to ‘let things that happened a hundred years ago fade away’ like they were planning THEN it would be a contest because they would have succeeded in creating a European America.
The project of Nazi Germany is literally the same project as Israel is literally the same project as America
It is exactly one thing: Settler colonialism and the only difference is the conditions of when and where and who. But that only goes as far as the particulars.
That’s what I said, maybe explain that to Dessalines who started this comparison.
There’s a bit of a difference though between settler colonialist states and Nazi Germany. As much as Nazi Germany also sought to colonise towards their east, they also attempted to genocide “undesirables” at an industrialised pace, murdering even ethnic Germans if they had some kind of disability. Racial and genetic purity was paramount to them, to a far greater degree than the US.
Again, none of this is denying the atrocities committed by any of these states.
Disgusting take, acting as if genocide was not colonial policy. You desperately need to read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - an indigenous people’s history of the US.
Thanks for the recommendation comrade, I’ll add it to my list
Of course it was colonial policy. But it doesn’t stand to reason to primarily attribute those to the US as an entity, rather than the British, French or Spanish empires who instituted these policies and were responsible for them.
That’s not to say the US doesn’t have its own share in this history, but attributing the entire genocide to the US makes little sense since they didn’t exist for the majority of it.
Gosh, I guess we should talk about the British then as well.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians
Yes. They are the predecessor to the American empire.
They also partook in widespread ecocide to starve the natives. They deliberately killed every buffalo they could and let them out to rot.
Simply trying to compare kill counts like history is call of duty only serves to dehumanize the victims.
In my view, just one aspect of the U.S. makes it the worst country ever: its role in the ecological crisis. The us is like three corporations in a trench coat, and a us corporation knew about anthropogenic climate change and kept that internal, and that’s just one instance of fuckery where there are plenty more. That’s the international elephant in the room which nobody seems willing to talk about. We need to also consider all the future atrocities as well as those in the past.
Fully agreed that comparing “kill counts” is dehumanizing. Hence why I commented saying you shouldn’t invite these comparisons in the first place, because people will find an argument and you’ll get lost in the weeds.
Killing 6 million jewish people?
Why do you only mention the Jewish people and not the Roma, the homosexual, the transgender, the socialist, the communist or the many other groups targeted? Far more than 6 million were targets of genocide by the Nazis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_the_United_States - 4+ million Native Americans killed in a time when overall populations where much lower. If that number were scaled to the 20th century population it would be an order of magnitude higher.
Killed an entire continent of peoples and enslaved millions of people from another one to make agricultural commodities.
Also during ww2 the US refused a ship of jews fleeing nazi germany and made them return.
They also won’t make anti-semitism illegal cause freeze peach, so US cops often protect white supremacist groups during protests from righteously outraged ppl. US cops also often recruit directly from those groups, and use them to carry out illegal things actions they don’t want to be responsible for. There isn’t enough space here to even get into the US’s anti-semitic past.
At once, in a assembly way or specifically targeting Jewish people?
Plus it’s not like they were cool with those trying to escape Germany. And chance would have sided with Germany if Britain had fallen.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/exploring-hate/2022/03/14/today-in-history-antisemitism-an-american-problem/