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Comment by anthonyarroyo | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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."

If it were so easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else, then you'd expect to have fewer people willing to stand by and cover up for Harvey Weinstein and all the similar cases. It seems more correct to say that it is easy to denounce the atrocities of someone you already dislike, or somehow see as 'other'.

This misses the point, because the people standing up for Weinstein would be more like people in his own state in Chomsky's example. They were close enough to do something about it.

People didn't stay quiet about HW because of some general difficulty of denouncing atrocities, they did so because he wielded significant influence and they didn't want their careers to suffer. This is sadly true of the victims as well: more than one of them has said that they wanted to go loud and public with it but were afraid that it would completely wreck their career through being blackballed, etc (and some of them have said that this _is_ what happened as a result of coming out with allegations).

That doesn't apply at all to the US failing to denounce e.g. Indonesia.

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.

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.

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

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.

You might want to re-read the post you're criticizing.

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

That doesn't make him wrong about the criticisms he does make.

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.

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.

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.

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