Comment by throw10920 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw10920 | Hacker News Reader

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> The US has just done far worse.

How many people have been killed in US wars vs. the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution?

Remind me where the US has implemented a concentration camp of about a million individuals based on ethnicity alone and then continually denied its existence against overwhelming evidence from the international community.

Which foreign companies did the US use spies to steal foreign IP from during peacetime and also categorically deny?

Oh, and what's the name of the US system that censors wrongthink in real-time from all US-based social media, or the name of the system that controls US resident access to the internet?

What were the names of a few US citizens whose families were threatened if those citizens didn't stop badmouthing the US and returned to their homeland?

How many companies and people abroad did the US threaten with economic repercussions if they didn't stop claiming that an island nation wasn't just that?

And where's the paid army of anonymous internet commentators that the US uses to astroturf foreign websites?

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The US, while having done a great many bad things, at least has a democratic process - there is the potential for the citizens to positively affect their government's actions, weak as it might be. China doesn't even have that - it's a tyrannical dictatorship, full stop.

> How many people have been killed in US wars

Easily in the millions. And that’s innocent civilians, not combatants. Not to diminish the suffering that happened there under Mao - but the lives ruined by US wars continue to add up. People are still born to this day with birth defects and cancer due to the chemical weapons we used in Vietnam, for example. And if we’re counting the 20th century, how about the fact that Hitler was inspired by America’s treatment of Native and Black people when he started the Holocaust? Eugenics got its start in the US. Genocidal forced sterilization of minorities was still happening here well into the 20th century. The list of atrocities goes on.

> Remind me where the US has implemented a concentration camp of about a million individuals based on ethnicity alone

Native Americans for the entire history of our country, until we finally put them on land that white settlers didn’t want. Japanese during WW2. Prison/torture camps all over the world during the “war on terror” which scooped up Muslims indiscriminately under the guise of fighting terror. These were all either officially denied, or admitted and openly justified at the time.

And forget corporate espionage - how about the well-known fact that US intelligence agencies have outright overthrown and assassinated democratically elected leaders all over the world? We even did it to Australia, an ostensible ally.

I’ll give you that China has a horrible record of harassing and imprisoning people who criticize their government, as well as censoring media. That’s one thing the US has going for it.

But as far as democracy goes, the things we’re talking about here - data collection, spying, extralegal evil acts committed by governments in secret - aren’t things that we get to vote on in America. Not one of us idiots arguing online has any say in what data the NSA collects and how they use it. Neither does any elected representative even bother talking about that anymore. Most of them don’t know what the NSA does, either. Them and the CIA are entirely unaccountable to democracy and that’s by design. It’s marginally better because we can at least talk about it, but that’s only because we’re powerless to stop it, so our opinion really doesn’t matter.

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