United States involvement in regime change | Hacker News Reader

United States involvement in regime change

en.wikipedia.org

35 pointsdroptablemain15 comments

A joke:

Why there aren't any coup d'etats in the US?

Because in the US there isn't embassy of the US.

Reminds me of another joke, about how communism never works in practice because eventually you get taken down by the CIA.

people who actually experienced a communist state probably won’t laugh at that joke

I personally am a a pretty strong capitalist but this argument is a bit tired. Communism was never reached in any of the countries known for 'Communism'. They were all authoritarian regimes, mostly some form of dictatorship

The problem with communism is that it requires a lot of trust in a central authority. Capitalism only requires trust that the capitalist system keeps working. It's a very low bar and there are countries that still fail to meet it. If you raise the bar via communism, aren't you bound to fail?

One way to express the difference between capitalism and communism is that capitalism is discrete, it mostly works at first but when it doesn't it accumulates government failures until it fails completely, while communism is experiencing a continuous government failure all the time.

Given a sufficiently good government both could succeed but reality is imperfect.

When you have the potential for economic growth then the early years are the most important. Early failures compound by a lot. The later you fail, the more you gain through economic growth. If you 4x your wealth does it matter when it shrinks by 50%? On the other hand, if you only made 2x then a 50% crash will set you back as even a stable 1% gain would be enough to stay ahead. The opportunity cost is growing exponentially! Early failures compound! The cards are stacked against communism.

The boring answer is that we need to find a way to undo government failures in capitalism. We need the next incremental step, not a new system.

By the way, by government failures I not only include the things the government did wrong but also all the necessary things that the government did not do. Today capitalism is mostly suffering from inaction.

Have you thought about why that is? Not having passwords would make it much easier to use the internet. All that you need is to trust that no one will access someone's account without their permission. For some reason, no large site ever successfully managed to do that. I wonder why?

Indeed, they're mostly still too angry at US interference destroying their countries to find it funny.

Arguably the JFK assassination was a coup.

When you read that page, it's important to look at historical context. Ask yourself:

- was it a Communist govt? (ie. South America, SE Asia)

- was there anybody else that should have intervened? (ie. timid Europe refusing to police the Balkans)

- was there significant public support?

- was the US required to intervene as the sole superpower to maintain order?

- did a neighbor ask/pay for the intervention? (ie. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait paid the US to invade Iraq)

- did a neighboring country fail to maintain order (ie. Pakistan failed to police Afghanistan)

Also, note that Roosevelt ended English, French, Italian, Dutch and German colonialism. Most of their colonies can thank the US for their independence, most notably Indonesia.

The US has probably the world's smallest colonies for a superpower - Rome was nothing but colonies. How leftists twist that into America being evil is absurd.

How does the former government being Communist justify anything?

Edit: A lot of people fall into the trap of 'US foreign intervention is unequivocally evil both in outcome and intent' but it is also important not to fall into the opposite trap.

No one is twisting anything. No matter how comprehensive a list you draft, it will fail to justify the damage done by US sponsored regime changes.

The first acronym for regime change in Iraq was OIL: Operation Iraqi Liberation. Later got rebranded to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

We did free Iraqis from living on earth. And for that matter we continue to commit genocide all over the non-white world.

John Stockwell, the former CIA officer, talks how only the non-white world is targeted for genocides and regime change:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?10353-1/secret-wars-cia

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2xuxv5

https://www.amazon.com/Search-Enemies-CIA-Story/dp/039300926...

Over 4 million people were killed in Indonesia to overthrow Sukarno and in the aftermath. This was considered a major success.It was called the Jakarta Method and that playbook was rolled out to other countries.

We still do the same today all over the world. Our media just ignores it, or lies, or glosses over it, or just puts the blame elsewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jakarta_Method

Millions were killed in Laos in the clandestine war. More bombs were dropped in Laos than in all of World War II:

“U.S. aircraft dropped more ordnance on Laos than on all countries during World War II, leaving Laos with about 78 million pieces of unexploded ordnance (UXO) by the end of the war.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laotian_Civil_War

Obama got the Nobel and he committed genocide in multiple new countries adding to the legacy of W Bush.

Is Italy [0] non-white world nowadays? Please keep race outta this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_general_election,_1948

Funding the opposition is a whole lot different from staging a bloody coup while millions die in the process

The concept of white has expanded over the last half century

The US version becoming - and remaining - the most inclusive and ambiguous

It’s been more about who is currently in power globally and an association with correctness, expanding from Northern European influences to recently including more marginalized groups such as Irish, Jewish, Syrians like Steve Jobs, Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans - less visually pale people across the entire European subcontinent and beyond

Phenotypes present in the Middle East, and the entire former Soviet

The history is too nuanced to simply “leave race out of it” with an example from southern europe

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