5 ms·

Do you actually consider the crimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol-Pot, Castro and Mugabe to be minor?

by anthonyarroyo 9y ago

csallen 9y ago
Absolutely not. But those are not the examples I would point to to show that the media exaggerates our enemy's crimes.
- baldfat 9y ago
  BUT those are what you just did. You are just as guilty of what you were excusing of others. You just made MAJOR hundreds of millions of people's deaths and called all of these little.
  - ashark 9y ago
    You might want to re-read the post you're criticizing.
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  Don't delude yourself about Chomsky's objectivity. As late as 1969 in debate with William F. Buckley he refused to believe that the Chinese Communists were killing people with failed economic policies and authoritarian crackdowns.[0] [0] https://youtu.be/vaR-T_hqRSM?t=2793 https://youtu.be/vaR-T_hqRSM?t=2793
  - icebraining 9y ago
    That doesn't make him wrong about the criticisms he does make.
    - lr4444lr 9y ago
      Right. It calls into question his intellectual honesty and the morality of his intellectual preoccupations. Not to mention the pension he pulls from the MIT endowment which is heavily invested in the military industrial complex he supposedly despises, but not to my knowledge has ever used his clout among the MIT faculty to protest in formal petition. Must be a nice life.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
maxxxxx 9y ago
I don't think that's what he is implying. But it's also pretty clear that a lot of people died in questionable anti-communist conflicts like Vietnam or in Central America.
freeflight 9y ago
It's a moot point considering that in a slightly different world we'd be talking about the crimes of Raegan and some other US presidents in exactly the same way. It's only a crime because a victor chose to label it so, a different victor would have labeled a different thing the crime, it's all quite arbitrary in the end. Phillip K. Dicks The Man in the High Castle is a very interesting thought experiment in that regard. As enjoyable and gripping as the Amazon show might be, having the same show set in our reality would mean you'd be rooting for a couple of Neo-Nazis trying to revive the Third Reich. Would such a show still be as enjoyable to us? I doubt it.
- navigator01 9y ago
  That's pretty naive to say. Reagan killed (directly or indirectly) orders of magnitude fewer people than the dictators mentioned. Reagan also presided over and encouraged the advance of human civilization, while misguided fools like Mao and Pol Pot actively tried to dismantle modern civilization. The differences are pretty clear, they are objective, and have very little to do with who won or lost.
  - freeflight 9y ago
    > The differences are pretty clear No, they are not, they are only a matter of definition and framing. You defined who's worse by the number of people killed, that's one way to do it but not the only one, it also leaves a lot of wiggle room with "indirect people killed", that's where all objectivity breaks down. Case in point: Your local hardcore communist would argue that the global capitalistic system is not just killing magnitudes of more people every year, it's keeping the remaining ones literally enslaved for life. The moment you think it's as clear-cut like that, that's the moment you should question your position because the reality is never as clear-cut or convenient as that. It's naive to assume that the reality in which we live is the "good one" where always and only "the good guys" win and that's why we can talk about the bad guys being the bad guys, but that's exactly what you did there with your allusive "Raegen presided and encouraged the advance of human civilization and these other guys did just want to see the world burn". Like it's something that could only happen because of Raegan and all alternative outcomes, not involving Raegan, are automatically assumed to be worse or not possible at all. I for one can imagine a number of alternate realities where Raegan would never have been the president, where the US lost the cold war, and we'd still be sitting here arguing just like this but in a slightly different setting, but "human civilization" could have advanced nonetheless. Some of these alternative realities could be "worse", others could be "better", but I'd say the vast majority of them would be rated as "normal" for people living in said realities because without being able to experience these alternative outcomes it's pretty much impossible to build a frame of reference which ones of them are actually the "best" or the "worst".
jccc 9y ago
Somewhat related, from Chomsky: "My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that: namely, I can do something about it. So even if the US was responsible for 2% of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2% I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. "It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century."
- navigator01 9y ago
  The crimes of the United States measured in human lives destroyed are significantly less than Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc. We can very easily look at history and make this judgement. Equivocation here is not high intellectualism. It's intellectual dishonesty.
  - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
    Should those crimes be excused just because someone else racked up a higher body count?
    - navigator01 9y ago
      They should be understood in context. The US was engaged in a war against dictatorial USSR style communism for nearly 50 years. History has shown the US to be on the right side of that conflict. Is people being killed ever a good thing? Almost never. Human life is inherently valuable. But is it at least more understandable when it is done in the name of trying to rid the world of a dangerous and destructive ideology? Yes it is.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - 9y ago
louithethrid 9y ago
Ah, the other side was evil too- helping to get away with it ever since you hit Tommy with the shovel in the sandbox. If Hitler murders 5 Million and Stalin murder 5 Million, we substract Hitler vom Stalin and End up with zero million. Nothing ever happened! So all we need, is enough crimes to substract from our owns, and we get away with clean hands. And there i was muder was bad, when all i had to do, was get my muder victims family to shoot back in the general direction and hit somebody. PS: Mugabe, Pol-Pot, Mao, Stalin are all crimes, where the US did not intervene.
dang 9y ago
This comment breaks the HN guideline which asks: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." There's a plausible (indeed obvious) interpretation of csallen's comment that doesn't say anything like that. I know this is a highly charged topic, but that makes it more important to follow the guidelines, not less. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
jokoon 9y ago
Well constantly putting leaders who resulted in deaths into one basket, and naming one political ideology as an assimilated "source of evil" or "axis of evil" is one problem. I mean by that logic people will believe Marx belongs to the realm of evil thinkers because history proves that a political theory is "dangerous". History and politics is built on nuance and precise facts, not some broad idea of how to define an ideology. Ideology can be shaped in any form and is subject to interpretation, that's why it belongs to the realm of propaganda. I'm not defending communism nor those leaders, but saying "communism is evil because mao and stalin were murderers" is just poor argumentation.

Do you actually consider the crimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol-Pot, Castro and Mugabe to be minor?

csallen 9y ago

Absolutely not. But those are not the examples I would point to to show that the media exaggerates our enemy's crimes.

baldfat 9y ago
BUT those are what you just did. You are just as guilty of what you were excusing of others. You just made MAJOR hundreds of millions of people's deaths and called all of these little.
- ashark 9y ago
  You might want to re-read the post you're criticizing.
lr4444lr 9y ago
Don't delude yourself about Chomsky's objectivity. As late as 1969 in debate with William F. Buckley he refused to believe that the Chinese Communists were killing people with failed economic policies and authoritarian crackdowns.[0] [0] https://youtu.be/vaR-T_hqRSM?t=2793 https://youtu.be/vaR-T_hqRSM?t=2793
- icebraining 9y ago
  That doesn't make him wrong about the criticisms he does make.
  - lr4444lr 9y ago
    Right. It calls into question his intellectual honesty and the morality of his intellectual preoccupations. Not to mention the pension he pulls from the MIT endowment which is heavily invested in the military industrial complex he supposedly despises, but not to my knowledge has ever used his clout among the MIT faculty to protest in formal petition. Must be a nice life.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

maxxxxx 9y ago

I don't think that's what he is implying. But it's also pretty clear that a lot of people died in questionable anti-communist conflicts like Vietnam or in Central America.

freeflight 9y ago

It's a moot point considering that in a slightly different world we'd be talking about the crimes of Raegan and some other US presidents in exactly the same way. It's only a crime because a victor chose to label it so, a different victor would have labeled a different thing the crime, it's all quite arbitrary in the end. Phillip K. Dicks The Man in the High Castle is a very interesting thought experiment in that regard. As enjoyable and gripping as the Amazon show might be, having the same show set in our reality would mean you'd be rooting for a couple of Neo-Nazis trying to revive the Third Reich. Would such a show still be as enjoyable to us? I doubt it.

navigator01 9y ago
That's pretty naive to say. Reagan killed (directly or indirectly) orders of magnitude fewer people than the dictators mentioned. Reagan also presided over and encouraged the advance of human civilization, while misguided fools like Mao and Pol Pot actively tried to dismantle modern civilization. The differences are pretty clear, they are objective, and have very little to do with who won or lost.
- freeflight 9y ago
  > The differences are pretty clear No, they are not, they are only a matter of definition and framing. You defined who's worse by the number of people killed, that's one way to do it but not the only one, it also leaves a lot of wiggle room with "indirect people killed", that's where all objectivity breaks down. Case in point: Your local hardcore communist would argue that the global capitalistic system is not just killing magnitudes of more people every year, it's keeping the remaining ones literally enslaved for life. The moment you think it's as clear-cut like that, that's the moment you should question your position because the reality is never as clear-cut or convenient as that. It's naive to assume that the reality in which we live is the "good one" where always and only "the good guys" win and that's why we can talk about the bad guys being the bad guys, but that's exactly what you did there with your allusive "Raegen presided and encouraged the advance of human civilization and these other guys did just want to see the world burn". Like it's something that could only happen because of Raegan and all alternative outcomes, not involving Raegan, are automatically assumed to be worse or not possible at all. I for one can imagine a number of alternate realities where Raegan would never have been the president, where the US lost the cold war, and we'd still be sitting here arguing just like this but in a slightly different setting, but "human civilization" could have advanced nonetheless. Some of these alternative realities could be "worse", others could be "better", but I'd say the vast majority of them would be rated as "normal" for people living in said realities because without being able to experience these alternative outcomes it's pretty much impossible to build a frame of reference which ones of them are actually the "best" or the "worst".

jccc 9y ago

Somewhat related, from Chomsky: "My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that: namely, I can do something about it. So even if the US was responsible for 2% of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2% I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. "It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century."

navigator01 9y ago
The crimes of the United States measured in human lives destroyed are significantly less than Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc. We can very easily look at history and make this judgement. Equivocation here is not high intellectualism. It's intellectual dishonesty.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  Should those crimes be excused just because someone else racked up a higher body count?
  - navigator01 9y ago
    They should be understood in context. The US was engaged in a war against dictatorial USSR style communism for nearly 50 years. History has shown the US to be on the right side of that conflict. Is people being killed ever a good thing? Almost never. Human life is inherently valuable. But is it at least more understandable when it is done in the name of trying to rid the world of a dangerous and destructive ideology? Yes it is.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - 9y ago

louithethrid 9y ago

Ah, the other side was evil too- helping to get away with it ever since you hit Tommy with the shovel in the sandbox. If Hitler murders 5 Million and Stalin murder 5 Million, we substract Hitler vom Stalin and End up with zero million. Nothing ever happened! So all we need, is enough crimes to substract from our owns, and we get away with clean hands. And there i was muder was bad, when all i had to do, was get my muder victims family to shoot back in the general direction and hit somebody. PS: Mugabe, Pol-Pot, Mao, Stalin are all crimes, where the US did not intervene.

dang 9y ago

This comment breaks the HN guideline which asks: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." There's a plausible (indeed obvious) interpretation of csallen's comment that doesn't say anything like that. I know this is a highly charged topic, but that makes it more important to follow the guidelines, not less. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

jokoon 9y ago

Well constantly putting leaders who resulted in deaths into one basket, and naming one political ideology as an assimilated "source of evil" or "axis of evil" is one problem. I mean by that logic people will believe Marx belongs to the realm of evil thinkers because history proves that a political theory is "dangerous". History and politics is built on nuance and precise facts, not some broad idea of how to define an ideology. Ideology can be shaped in any form and is subject to interpretation, that's why it belongs to the realm of propaganda. I'm not defending communism nor those leaders, but saying "communism is evil because mao and stalin were murderers" is just poor argumentation.