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Comment by knz | Hacker News Reader

Are you European by chance? If so, don't worry, your country also likely has a long history of meddling on local affairs either through colonialism or parts of the cold war, especially if you are British!

Yes, the US has meddled in international affairs but let's not pretend that US is unique in doing so or that Russia is some benign country that has no history of actively working against the interests of Europe/US/NATO or that Russia doesn't have its own agenda.

For all of the faults of the US/Europe I'm glad I grew up in the "west" rather than behind the Iron curtain. I also don't see millions of people who fled western nations to Russian states - the single direction of political and economic migrants over the last 70 years speaks for itself.

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"But they did it, it's ok"

please, are you going to use that argument to bring back slavery? trite and baseless.

Who said anything about slavery? We are talking about meddling in the political affairs of other countries and espionage. That's been going on ever since lines were drawn on a map.

Correct, your defence of the US Govt's meddling was "but Europeans did it"

Which is an absolutely incorrigible position.

I didn't say anything about it being justified. I said "let's not pretend that US is unique in doing so" to someone who implied the US deserves it...

First there are many countries in Western Europe with no significant colonial history. Greece for example. Italy's colonial history is insignificant.

As to being glad that we grew up in Western Europe during the cold war, I have an Albanian friend who is now a professor of economics in the USA. He said that, although living in communism as an adult (Albania had the worst communist, btw) would have sucked, he wouldn't trade his childhood for anything.

I've never met tougher mofos than my Albanian friends or my wife. They know how to have fun, how to behave in groups and nothing scares them. By comparison how many of my peers (or myself) suffer from anxiety, are anti-social (being on your phone in public is very anti-social) or just weird?

Most do have a colonial history though, a history often partly responsible for much of the strife we see today - was Italy not involved in Ethiopia/Eritrea/Somalia? And Greece certainly had political strife during the Cold war and world wars.

Libya and Ethiopia would like a word with you.

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