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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

I'm no fan of the US, but too many people here are basically saying "the US does bad stuff too". You're not wrong, your point just irrelevant. 2 things can be bad without either excusing the other...

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Yea, but it gets boring. Nobody is going to call for sanctions on America for anything and you'll never see a constant stream of articles for anything the US does.

When the US drops a record amount of bombs on a country[1] in a war people barely think about anymore and people barely blink an eye, is it really humans (lets not even talk about human rights yet), but rather just our fellow human beings, that people care about.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/28/us-afghanist...

The Afghanistan war is a UN security council sanctioned action (Resolution 1386, creating ISAF, later succeeded by Resolute Support). Since the resolution was unanimously adopted by the security council it would be quite a leap to try to sanction a country for participating in it.

The resolution does not permit the invasion of Afghanistan, and was passed two months after the war had started. Invading a country with out UN approved casus belli is a valid reason for sanctions.

Yes but we must be equally outraged about it. Especially since Americans have more power to change the actions of their own government.

The US also have far more influence on the rest of the world than China (at least for now). As a French, many things happening in the US can have big consequences on my day-to-day life: US military operations directly increases risk of terrorist attacks in Paris (because of NATO or more indirectly), big price moves on the NYSE influence market sentiment in all Western countries, Hollywood movies and Netflix releases change our culture continuously, Google and Facebook privacy changes hits us too, Uber price policy, BLM events actually change perception of police violence in my city within a week, US patent on new cancer drugs, etc. I can't find a single occurrence of a China-centric event that had repercussion on me, my friends or family.

No, we do not, because the crimes of the US are not equally severe and/or are historic and not actively occurring.

There's a difference between systemic racism and state-sanctioned cultural genocide signed off on by the dictator himself.

Who determines they are not equally severe? How can we reliably estimate and compare the damage done in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan to what's happening in China?

There were plenty of disastrous wars, but clearly the US did not intend to commit genocide, and I very much doubt it did, in any war. The same cannot be said for China. Of course, there's the historic case of the native Americans, but again, that's not actively occurring.

Well, everbody thinks they're doing the right thing. U.S was saving Vietnam from communism and later was saving the world from Saddam's WMD or Afghanistans taliban. China is saving their country from civil disintegration and helps create a uniform culture for the greater good. See what I did there?

The Japanese in WW2 were also trying to create an "earthly paradise" in South East Asia.

True. You can't take that away from the U.S, they helped save the free world (together with the allies and Russia). Things are complex.

Right, the US just stumbles into war and genocide like an innocent child while China intends to commit genocide because they are evil etc. etc. It’s a great narrative.

No, the probity of those around you is relevant. It goes to moral credibility when you or anyone speaks.

I think that's bs. If it's not, then before anyone can do anything you need a complete list of every bad thing happening and you need to order it in importance and badness and then you need to get everyone to agree on it. That's a recipe to do nothing but argue. That's what we've been doing for 30 years.

> before anyone can do anything you need a complete list

But nobody works like that. People act on moral confidence, not certainty. If we had certainty, then would we need to worry about credibility?

> That's a recipe to do nothing but argue. That's what we've been doing for 30 years.

I'm making a description and not a prescription, so if you say we've been doing something 30 years, then you already agree to the description.

The point is to illustrate that this article is serving an anti-China narrative, which has been motivated over several years and decades by right-wing politicians looking for a palatable enemy to unite behind (replacing Russia in this role)

China can and does do bad things, but why do we read about that more often and with more emphasis than Western countries doing bad things?

The issue with this is it requires us to look into people's souls and know their motivations. We can't do that. Maybe this is being reported because it serves someone's narrative. Maybe it's honestly because it's bad. Either way it is bad, so who cares why, action should be taken.

Why do we focus on China? Because they're usually doing worse things, and on larger scales, than the West.

They haven't committed crimes on the scale of the invasions of Vietnam and Iraq in the last 50 years.

They did physically invade Vietnam in 1979, whereas the US got involved on one side of a civil war, and never invaded North or South Vietnam. Great Leap Forward induced famines also killed tens of millions of people.

The US is bombing 6 or 7 countries right now. It’s not China who is murdering civilians en masse.

The US simply invaded Vietnam. It was not the case of "getting involved in a civil war". The Chinese invasion was miniscule in comparison.

Yea the cultural revolution where the Red Guard roved the country murdering millions of innocent people was 52 years ago so you are technically right. Get this: they even engaged in cannibalism as an ideological purity test! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre

I'm not gonna deny that happened. What's interesting is how the US downplayed Chinese violations of human rights, which were way worse than Soviet violations at the time (70's) for political reasons. The Soviets were the chief enemy back then.

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