Were they, though? Which nation was primarily responsible for escalation of tensions during that time? And for whom were the stakes high enough to justify overthrowing democratic governments in favor of brutal dictators?
Careful, this is literally Moscow's reason for its invasion of Ukraine -- to prevent the rise of a hostile fascist entity in its frontyard.
Clearly Ukraine is not fascist and Korea would have been. There is a difference.
The main problem with fascism in Nazi Germany, Zionist Israel, and Banderite Ukraine is that these fascist states have overt policies of ethnic cleansing.
IOW the "fascism" part isn't necessarily bad (unless you are a liberal chauvinist), it's the ethnic cleansing part that is bad.
This is something that... doesn't really exist today? I mean, sure there are still nazis in Ukraine, even in its government and military, but by and large it doesn't seem that they're anywhere near a majority or have significant influence... despite what Putin's propaganda would like us to believe.
> IOW the "fascism" part isn't necessarily bad (unless you are a liberal chauvinist)
If you truly believe that, I don't think you're going to have a productive discussion on this topic here. Most people here (myself included) would not characterize hard-right authoritarianism that way. I believe that form of government is objectively bad for the people under it, at least those outside the ruling class.
Of course; many folks here are ideologically hyper-individualists, liberals, liberal anarchists, libertarians, etc. The idea that various collectivisms including "fascism" are okay is offensive to those ideologies.
However, the onus is not on me to pander to their ideological limitations.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, they also semi-regularly engage in armed conflict with South Korea, killing usually tens of people, and they occasionally kidnap foreign nationals. Admittedly small fare for a rogue state. They also have nukes but it must be fine since they haven't used them yet.
Ukraine is (well, sadly, was) in danger of becoming more democratically- and West-aligned, which Putin (irrationally, IMO) feared, but my take on it is that he's really motivated mostly by fallen-empire envy. (Granted, that's just my opinion; I don't know what Putin is actually thinking.)
The hostile part has been obvious for 8 years, and escalated last year. 14,000 dead, war declared on Russian Crimea last year, etc.
"In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge were largely supported and funded by the Chinese Communist Party, receiving approval from Mao Zedong; it is estimated that at least 90% of the foreign aid which was provided to the Khmer Rouge came from China."
> In 1970, the United States had orchestrated a coup to oust Prince Sihanouk, and installed Lon Nol, a general who was supposed to be Cambodia’s Suharto. His forces trained in Bandung, not far from the site of Sukarno’s 1955 Afro-Asian Conference. During Lon Nol’s rule the United States continued to bomb the country indiscriminately, killing hundreds of thousands of people, mostly peasants, in a futile attempt to stop Vietnamese communists from moving through the countryside. The United States dropped three times the tonnage on Cambodia that fell on Japan during World War II, atom bombs included.
> [...]
> The disregard for life was staggering, and well understood in Southeast Asia. Traumatized refugees flooded Cambodia’s cities. After the US-backed coup that deposed him, the ousted prince, Sihanouk, published a book of memoirs titled My War with the CIA. “We refused to become US puppets, or join in the anti-communist crusade,” he wrote. “That was our crime.” He threw his support behind the small, shadowy, and strange group of Marxists he had repressed while in power. The Khmer Rouge, as he called them in the old colonial language, were the only ones fighting against Lon Nol and the US Army, which was wiping out entire swathes of the population.
Pol Pot was convinced of the necessity of armed struggle by the annihilation of the PKI in Indonesia. There ~1 million people were killed with the encouragement of the US and Britain, who supplied arms, kill lists, and promises of economic development.
[2]
> In a “historical lessons” document composed in early 1977, Pol Pot looked back on the 1966 period as follows: “If our analysis had failed, we would have been in greater danger than [were the communists] in Indonesia. But our analysis was victorious, because our analysis was agreed upon, because most of our cadres were in life-and-death contradiction with the enemy; the enemy sought to exterminate them constantly.”
After Vietnam invaded Cambodia and put a stop to the Khmer Rouge's Killing Fields:
[3]
> The United States chose to recognize the remnants of the Khmer Rouge at the United Nations, keeping its tiny regime alive, and refusing to recognize the Vietnamese-allied government. This would last for years. Partly, it was a way to appease Carter’s new ally in Beijing. But Benny knew that it was something else too. “They hated Vietnam too much,” Benny said. “They couldn’t forgive them for winning the war.”
[4]
> And to insure that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge would fight the Vietnamese occupiers, the Carter Administration helped arrange continued Chinese aid.
> "I encourage the Chinese to support Pol Pot," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser at the time. "The question was how to help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could."
> At the United Nations, the United States, along with most countries of Europe and Asia, gave the Cambodia seat to the Khmer Rouge Government by itself and, after 1983, in coalition with other anti-Vietnamese Cambodian groups.
> All attempts even to describe the Khmer Rouge regime as genocidal were rejected by the United States as counterproductive to finding peace. Only in 1989, with the beginning of the Paris peace process, was the word genocide spoken in reference to a regime responsible for the deaths of more than a million people.
[1][2][3] - The Jakarta Method, chapters 2, 4, and 10 (also contains more detailed sources)
[4] - https://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/17/world/death-of-pol-pot-th...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States...
If your goal is to compare the West or the US in particular with its dictatorial rivals, it's probably not very enlightening to account only for Western errors. You need to account for the errors and contributions of both sides. Unfortunately, this seems like hidden knowledge because virtually this debate is nearly always framed in the "only enumerate Western errors" fashion.
So not absolutely perfect angels at all times? Harsh criticism.
The US started the thermonuclear arms race, and escalated it until it consumed a large part of the economy, based on literal calculated lies about the "missile gap."
> If your goal is to compare the West or the US in particular with its dictatorial rivals
The goal should be to point out its dictatorial tendencies, and its preference for predictable dictatorial regimes all over the world that it is willing to spend huge amounts of resources to install and preserve, bathing countries around the world in blood.
China is not doing that, Russia is not doing that, Iran is not doing that, North Korea is not doing that.
Russia has been propping up the brutal dictatorship in Syria for a very long time, and several others before it across the Middle East. It has also propped up both the Belarus dictatorship and the authoritarian regime in Kazakhstan, and those are merely very recent examples.