Comment by phyller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phyller | Hacker News Reader

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I'm kind of thinking both the US and now China got there because of economics. At the end of WW2 US GDP was something like 50% of the entire world GDP. Most nations would be happy to do whatever they even thought the US wanted to have a good trade relationship and/or the aid that the US was passing around. And of course now China is the world's factory and more.

Personally, I think once the US is gone and whatever happens afterwards happens, if history somehow remains accurate, I think people will see the last 75 years as a world-wide Pax America with the most benevolent world leadership that has ever existed. I'm sure I'll get downvoted to oblivion for this statement, but, big picture, the US has done more to provide peace and prosperity (and even freedom and justice) for a greater percentage of humanity than any other nation ever.

If you look over human history, the natural human state is generally oppression, warfare, starvation, and disease. We just might be reverting back to the mean.

...except for helping create the conditions to WW2, Vietnam, involvement in Afghanistan 1 and 2, Iraq war prison industrial complex (highest prisoner per capita in the world) war on drugs, supplying weapons to places like Saudi Arabia.

I agree that the USA has impacted many many lives very positively. I don’t think this extends to an overall net “peace and prosperity” claim.

I didn’t downvote FWIW

None of those compare to Napoleon’s rampages or the subjugating of half the world by the British Empire. In the classical world raizing entire cities was not uncommon.

The population growth makes any comparison difficult. For example, the Napoleonic wars killed about the same amount of people as the Vietnam War.

As for razing entire cities, the Korean War saw the US essentially raze a country. To quote General LeMay

>We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too.

If you look at pictures of current wars, we still raise entire cities. Put 'Raqqa' in google image search for instance.

Are you holding the United States responsible for WW2? Your other points I'd say are minor compared to the stability and transfer of wealth that has risen post WW2 under the U.S. world leadership.

Minor? Read the numbers: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

I don’t actually understand how you can even compare “transfer of wealth” and mass civilian casualties, let alone decide that the former is worth more.

The WW2 reference is a bit of a captain hindsight addition and easily the most controversial. I only said contributed, I would leave that out to make my point clearer next time.

American exceptionalism overload

reposting what I've said about this before:

the US was the only country on earth that had nukes for 5 years and was unscathed from WWII. We could have demilitarized and enslaved the entire planet under threat of nuclear death, but instead we gave away billions to help Japan and Europe rebuild. There's never been a more selfless act in human history as far as a country not seizing an opportunity to gain power is concerned. There's probably never been a larger power disparity between a single country and the rest of the world than post WWII USA, and they did exactly nothing to take advantage of that disparity.

US is far from perfect, mainly due to unconstitutional actions by our intel community and military, but as far as superpowers go there's really no comparison.

> they did exactly nothing to take advantage of that disparity

Oh come on, you cannot seriously believe that. Anyhow, I recommend you watch 'The Untold History of the United States' by Oliver Stone [0]. He has done a great job of telling people the stories that are not told in your history classes.

Upvoted. I would strongly second this. Great documentary and offers a perspective of events that counters the common "Merciful America" ideology.

Because of course a propaganda book from foaming at the mouth, dictator-worshiping, and Anti-American hypocrite Oliver Stone would provide truth. /facepalm.

They guy made a documentary, and journalistically speaking, his work checks out. There are no factual errors in his documentary you can point to, so go on, call him a hypocrite or a dictator-worshipper (for which you can show no evidence btw) but know that you come off as an enormous hypocrite yourself. You've been programmed well sir.

Did you watch his Putin documentary? He fawns over Putin pretty obviously IMO and seems to be taken in quite easily by him.

But you did use it to gain power, just not in your "enslave all of humanity" nightmare.

It was nice, sure, but don't confuse it with some greater selfless act.

> It sure was very selfless and noble of America not to wage world war 3 im a quest to enslave humanity, with your limited supply of first gen nukes and increasingly war weary population.

I think that's a rather naive understanding of war. Look at Vietnam, look at Afghanistan. The USA still have by far the most powerful military in the world but that doesn't mean that you can just say "btw you're all your slaves now" and everybody is just going to accept it.

Maintaining a strong, authoritarian grasp on the entire world would require technology that (fortunately) did not exist during WWII and probably still not today. You'd just have civil wars, coups and terrorist attacks every other day. Your military would be spread thin across the globe. You'd basically have hundreds of countries in continuous state of insurrection like Afghanistan right now. It would cost the USA a fortune (and not just economically).

Giving these countries money in order to stabilize them and maintain "soft" influence makes a lot more sense in many cases.

This is utterly naive and bordering on adolescent power fantasy.

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