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Talking about someone having 'been beaten' by US while China literally puts 100's of thousands in concentration camps merely for being of a specific ethnicity .
by jariel 6y ago
Talking about someone having 'been beaten' by US while China literally puts 100's of thousands in concentration camps merely for being of a specific ethnicity ... as their organs are nabbed by the elite via 'body part' black markets.
All these issues have to be put in context: the scale, the type of abuses, the proportionality, the context, the risk etc..
9/11 was a 'very scary' moment in history, the likelihood that others were planning to do the same was very high, and legit terrorist organizations were operating around the world.
The response to 'non-uniformed irregular attack' was necessarily going to have to be equally as asymmetric, i.e. getting at bad people in the locations they were working form, as opposed to a battle field.
It gets a little bit pedantic to discuss 'human rights' when in conflict, people are exterminated 'in accordance with all UN/International laws and rules' sometimes pretty arbitrarily. For example, the teenager Omar Khadr who killed a US Medic on the battlefield was injured, and about to die. It was US special forces who them saved him, ironically so he could spend a long time in Guantanamo.
The paradox of the fact that were he not of 'special interest' - he would be 100% dead, and nobody, not 'Amnesty International' or the UN would put up a fuss, as he was shot lobbing grenades at medics.
US and EU laws are not designed for acute, wartime scenarios, the only real question is how rational and reasonable the management of force can be applied without breaking too many humane boundaries, and, how many 'mistakes' we are willing to make.
The CIA black cells are definitely a stain, but in the grand scheme of history, it's nothing. Civil, lawful and humane order was otherwise broadly maintained.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThis is just more whataboutism, and if you think that the US atrocities are excusable because of scale, you should ask the 37 million people displaced in the Middle East, and the relatives of the ~3 million dead. Or you could also go to Vietnam and Laos, and notice the kid that gets blown up by a US mine every few days, or go notice the damage of Agent Orange, or go to the mass graves where millions lie buried. How is that for scale?
- jariel 6y agoProportionality is relevant in this, but I won't bother to respond to your fiction regarding historical events. You might want to ask the mass murdering regimes of those regions, many of whom continue to operate today, about those issues.
- ftfp 6y agoYou've got your head in the sand. Do remember to wash the all the blood of those stars and stripes once you've finished waving them about.
- dang 6y agoCould you please not create accounts to break the site guidelines with? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jariel 6y agoI'm not American, I'm not even 'Pro American'. That anyone would assume that only highlights their own myopia and relevant triggers.
- sudosysgen 6y agoYou mean, like the mass murder of millions of innocents the US has perpetrated abroad? If you believe in proportionality and not utilitarianism, I shudder to think what you find commensurate. Certainly much more than I would. How many people did Vietnam murder since the end of the war? How many did Laos?
- jariel 6y agoFighting opponents in war, is not 'murder'. Before American intervention, the Vietnamese Communists had already murdered up to a million of their own citizens in various purges and 'land reforms', including deaths in forced labour camps. During the war, there were mass arbitrary detainments, forced labour and killings by the Communists both of their own citizens, and execution of S. Vietnamese families and officials by subterfuge. The North Allied Viet Cong routinely executed civilians for political purposes. After the war, the North Vietnamese Communists dragged 10's of thousands of S. Vietnamese out into the streets and executed them in cold blood. They then put 100's of thousands into forced labour camps. By at least one historians estimation (see below), about 250 000 people died due to impoverished conditions. That very often people don't know these things says a lot about the lazy, 'comic book' intellectualism regarding such past events that basically makes it impossible to take anything more seriously than a random reddit-thread argument. And even worse, that anyone would even dare compare mass murder on this scale to terrible events like 'Mai Lai' (which actually were isolated however terrible) or even US government action more broadly is completely ridiculous. Here is the range of democide in Vietnam during this era [1] and the tabulations [2] And Vietnam in 2020, Human Rights Watch [3] [1] https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM [2] https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB6.1A.GIF https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB6.1A.GIF [3] https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/vietnam https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/vietn...
- ftfp 6y agoAll this comment shows me is that some people will defend any horrible manner of things as long as it's done by 'their side'.