4 million innocent people murdered in illegal wars is a lot of blood on the hands of the American people. And, we all know how much they hate to be embarrassed by such things ..
I remember after 9/11 I grabbed a bunch of books about the Taliban from the library, and my dad said ‘look, the government is going to put you on a list now’, and I naively said ‘No dad, this is America’ (he was an immigrant).
Sad stuff, they did put people on a list.
Ironically Snowden tweets about freedom of information from Russia, where Putin literally kills journalists
"Trump is a Russian agent" is a meme designed to protect fragile American ego's from the truth, which is that America, through its unhindered asymmetric, illegal wars, is the #1 cause of violent, murderous upheaval in the world today - and therefore actually kind of deserves the orange buffoon tearing things to pieces. When war criminals are allowed to roam free, eventually the society they choose to rule becomes their target.
That said, I don't love/hate Trump as an idol, either way. He is the least of America's problems.
You're right though, we will trigger a great deal of animosity from the Trump-hating(,-loving) collective when we point this out. Agitprop is designed to push the collective mind in a desired direction - all the hating of Trump right now is doing, is preventing Americans from inspecting the real, legitimate war crimes and crimes against humanity that their nation has been committing - Trump-hatred is an Emmanuel Goldstein-like distraction mechanism. "The Party" (Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CFR) still gets away with murder, whoever is the figurehead...
Here's a recent article from a right-wing outlet, PJ Media, which I feel is at least somewhat representative of Trump's base: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/05/28/...
If this wouldn't draw readers, why would they write the article?
Here's a counterpoint article from the left-wing outlet Politico: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/28/pelosi-pulls-fisa-b...
To get a flavor of what his base thinks, you can look through replies to some of his tweets on the matter: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12660175121620377...
Not sure how you came to your conclusions, please elucidate me.
The Evo Morales grounding incident showed what happens if Snowden tries to leave russia. The US pressured France, Spain, and Italy to forced the airplane of the Bolivia government on the mere suspicion that Snowden may had been onboard. Afterward all three countries basically said "ops, sorrrrry, we was ordered by the US to do this".
Julian Assange later claimed that it was he who told the US about the flight in order to distract the US agents, which resulted in the Bolivian ambassador to Russia demanding that Assange apologize for putting their president's life at risk. Illustrates nicely how the game of politics works.
Never forget that he unveiled a domestic and international surveillance and spying program which is unparalleled in all of history. The fact is, for all Russia’s brutality towards journalists, the scale of Snowden’s findings of US crimes against free expression and privacy dwarf anything Putin has ever done - he wishes he could have a domestic spy agency as effective and popular as the NSA.
China
DDR was much smaller than US and his program was more limited than any actual one, given the advancements in technology of the past decades.
And yet, STASI was much more effective and disruptive than many other similar projects before and after.
At its peak STASI employed around 2% of the entire East Germany population.
With the information gathered and the prevention of external influences, they could literally convince people that they were living in the best World possible using just a tiny wall and propaganda.
Those who denied it, doubted about it, had contacts with western entities or were suspected of conspiring against the SED, were incapacitated, it doesn't imply they were killed on the spot, but they were made harmless, arrested, hospitalized, institutionalized in psychiatric wards or "disappeared" in concentration camps.
Iceland and Switzerland are free countries as well and refuse extradition to US
Unless Snowden is proclaiming the virtues of being in Russia, then where he is has little bearing on the validity of what he's saying.
Either making it to Iceland or Switzerland is logistically challenging (see: Bolivia), or the downsides of being in Russia aren't particularly bad when you're not speaking out against Russian interests.
He chose to go there
Would it be ironic to move to a city where police is brutal, knowing very well it is, by accepting an invite from the major of the city and then tweeting about police brutality in other parts of the World?
Yes it would.
I live 30kms away from Switzerland, it's really not that challenging to go there.
Maybe being in Geneva to secretly investigate the Swiss bank system working for CIA, writing that Switzerland is like "living in an opposite World" just because your own country is living a financial crisis (2008) while Swiss were shielded by their government from it and refusing to testify against NSA while Switzerland offered asylum in exchange for cooperation, didn't work too well for him
When it became clear that there was no ground to make it a political case, they dropped the offer
Switzerland provides political asylum, not criminal asylum
(Whether Snowden is a criminal or not is not relevant)
You've mentioned this number a few times, but I can't find a source for it. Can you point me in the right direction?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
If we include Afghanistan, we could be in the million range.
https://www.psr.org/blog/resource/body-count/
Focusing on Iraq alone:
--
"From the relation between the current number given by IBC and the one given for the end of June 2006 (43,394), it concludes that the number of Iraqis killed up to September 2011 is at around 1.46 million"
...
"This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million. Not included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen. The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated by the media and major NGOs. And this is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely."
--
And then .. there is the situation in Yemen. Americans are very, very quiet about that. And there is an evil reason for that. 2 million people have starved to death as a result of American-supported genocide by the KSA.
That's very simplistic, and ignorant. Those deaths were the result of the dissolution of a regime forcefully (ie. using terror) to hold together an unstable populace. Sure, it was triggered by US actions, but that's really not the same thing...
This phrase has always bugged me. How do you carry out a 100% legal war? War is by its very nature an uprooting of the normal system where we resolve conflicts in a peaceful and organized fashion.
As for what happens in war, we can take a look at what Geneva convention tried, but that’s not the debate.
Grab some books on the Iraq war.
There’s plenty of money involved in making and buying rockets to throw at a country (defense industry), then rebuilding said country (defense contracting), then securing that country’s resources (oil industry), all while winning re-election (Politics).
In Medieval (Antiquity too? Goes pretty far back) terms, this is often called Plundering. There’s a real market for it.
(i) it does not pay to wage war because it has become highly resource-intensive and technologically sophisticated, and often involves protracted low-intensity campaigns against asymmetric guerrillas.
(ii) it does not pay to win wars because we now realise that land is not the principal variable of national economic growth, but the place of an economy in the global value-added supply chain.
I think the first motive was moral and political (along the lines of neoconservatism), and the second reason was a geopolitical vision of a reconstructed Middle East pliable to American demands, open to democratic reforms, and aligned with the interests of Israel.
"But the other kids do it too" is never going to work in the ICC. Which explains why the refrain is so common, and why the USA is terrified of the ICC.
For the 2003 invasion of Iraq, people argue that it was illegal because there was no UNSC resolution. The U.S. and U.K. argued that it was authorized under the UNSC resolution that blessed the first U.s. invasion of Iraq. I think that sounds like nonsense, and particularly when you factor in that the actual pretenses for the 2003 invasion were false and probably fabricated by the aggressing parties—it seems like not a stretch to call it an illegal war.
Obviously the 2003 Iraq Invasion doesn't itself get you to OP's 4 million body count, but I hope this is a helpful start.
It was very illegal to put it quite frankly.
As much as I oppose to US military politics, I think that in the past 100 years there have been much worse crimes than US wars in the middle east.
If I think of the worst criminal of the modern era (post WW2) the first name that comes to mind is Vladimir Putin.
For once: he wiped a tenth of the entire Chechen population, it's like if someone ordered the killing of 34 millions of US citizens.
Lucky us the red army is not the red army anymore.
He founded and promoted terrorism in Ukraine, shot down civilian airplanes, bombed refugees camps, used chemical warfare, prohibited by international treaties, on civilians
He also ordered the assassination of a number of journalists
But Snowden is his guest, so he must be a good man...
Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin
Putin's regime carried out these crimes in the Caucasus in the 21st century (and earlier), and they are continuing even as you read this comment...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_government_censorship_...
Chechnya has been essentially cut off - considering its recent history, any guesses why??
I'll say it plainly: Russia has no place in the Caucasus. Get the hell out, and mind your own damn country.
And if this was a general rule, we'd have a lot less conflict in the world.
or Franco and the regime of the colonels in Greece, because dictatorship is not a communist's only trait, as US like to think.
But I think Putin is different
He s not crushing only his own people, like those dictators did, he acts like the leader of an international terrorist organization with full power over an entire nation resources (from energy to army, from media to industry) and when he's not directly in charge, he puts one of his puppets there, changing the constitution or bending the law if he needs it, and that's why I think he's more dangerous.
Putin is a Trump who made it.
(Hint: it isn't Putin.)
He's not actively involved in the war, he's sitting on it
Even Wikipedia acknowledges it
> Russia has supported both the Yemen Arab Republic and the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen on several occasions and established close relations with them.
Or in a recent study published on February 2020
> This chapter explores the antecedents for Russia’s solitary abstention vote on UN Security Council Resolution 2216 in April 2015, by analyzing the Russia-Yemen bilateral relationship under former president Ali Abdullah Saleh and Russia’s handling of the 2011 Yemeni revolution that heralded Abdurabbo Mansour Hadi’s presidency. It then examines Russia’s reaction to the outbreak of war and shifting positions on conflict resolution within the context of Moscow’s strategic interests in Yemen and regional power projection ambitions.
Counter evidence?
The first Chechen war did not happen under Putin.
> down civilian airplanes
I doubt that he gave his personal command to do that.