Thanks for this comment.
It feels surreal to see Americans pretend they have any moral high ground.
It feels surreal to see Americans pretend they have any moral high ground.
Huh? It's notorious for doing just that. From the bizarro workship of the founding fathers, to celebrating people like Custer, to the whole Confederacy thing in the South, and so on. All kinds of dark history, from the treatment of Chinese in 19th century, to the mass murders of immigrants and workers fighting for their rights (e.g. at Ludlow) are swept under the rug.
>We acknowledge that the wholesale destruction of first peoples was a horrific act of violence, and the US does not cover up the ugly parts of its history. We talk about it openly.
Only in the sense that people don't go to jail for talking about them. Otherwise, the official histories and accounts all sidestep the ugly parts of history, wash them out in official narratives, and so on, and it takes people like Howard Zinn to make them somewhat known.
Heck, people are still taught the nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagashaki where "necessary" and used to "stop the war".
American government is killing thousands more people yearly then Chinese for a long, long time.
Still, all things considered, I truly believe that America is relatively good, fair, and just, given the circumstances. Just imagine what the world would be like if positions were reversed, and China or Russia were the unchecked world superpower. I suspect such a reality would make you yearn for the balance we have today.
As a Latino and living in Brazil, I'm hoping for this to happen (and is happening). Brazilian business with Chinese and Russians are a lot more fair to our side than business done with US. And they don't use military force.
Now if I talk as a citizen of the world, I think the US is one of the greatest superpower of all history and brought insurmountable amount of human development (in pair with Egypt). But as a Brazilian, some if not all of our worldly known issues are because or related to the way our economic elite do business with the US.
No, what I'm saying is that Americans can't point fingers to China and Chinese while America state has a much more tighter grip on the world than China state. If you wanna fix human right problems in the world, you can have a lot more impact doing it at home than abroad.
"Vociferously" as in "some pundits talk about them but nobody really cares about those things, no politician resigned because of them, no mass demonstrations anywhere, and even when people talk it's the usual hypocrisy show (when it's not just about the costs and the toll on our own soldiers), meanwhile things get on as usual..."
>Americans who believe in human rights are somehow not credible when they criticize other governments in addition to their own. That is absolutely nonsense.
Actually sounds very valid.
Makes sense, to get one's house in order before they can talk about others. In fact that's where they should have more impact (and more moral responsibility to get right).
But it's also the case that such "criticizing other governments" is used by their own government as justification for all kinds of interventions.
It's this "criticizing of other governments" that was used to justify the wars and interventions that made Iraq and Libya from stable if autarchic regimes into today's hell on earth, for example.
2) The US is a democracy, is pretty diverse in terms of opinions, and the US government does things that the people don’t like (just like in China). I don’t hold the individuals of China accountable for egregious and unacceptable human rights violations of the Chinese government. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of US society to say that the people of the US are inseparable from their government’s decisions.
3) You still have yet to seriously engage the notion that the Chinese government is perpetrating wholesale oppression of a class of people simply for having a different identity. Whatever the US does doesn’t change how morally reprehensible that is. What-about-ism doesn’t change the moral calculus here one iota.
The US systematically does the same to its black portion of the population since always, sometimes in extreme ways, other times in soft ways.
Chinese currency has Mao's face on it, and he was a much bigger mass murderer that Hitler. The party he ran is still in power, and still actively violating basic human rights of its citizens.