Comment by goodbyesf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by goodbyesf | Hacker News Reader

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> I don’t really see US foreign policy in that era as imperialistic.

US has been imperialistic from birth. Heck the revolutionary war was fought to secure our right to be imperialists and commit genocide against the natives. Our reason for existence is imperialism. Or maybe history is right and a bunch of racist slavers wanted to birth liberty and freedom into the world.

> That’s giving it too much credit as it implies a degree of even Machiavellian intelligence.

From a ragtag group of 13 colonies, we've taken over the world. Not only that, we've taken over the world while having the world believe we are the liberators. There are idiots all over the world who legitimate look to the US as saviors and liberators. Doesn't get any machiavellian than that.

> turning billions away from Western democracy and toward backward totalitarian ideologies that are in the end more hostile to us than the USSR was.

'Western democracy' was the excuse invented to invade and murder tens of millions across the world in the 20th century. Whereas the brits advocated 'white man's burden' in the 19th century to murder and steal. We came up with democracy. Nothing more imperialistic than the cause of spreading democracy.

> Like I said in another reply it was mostly driven by paranoid overreaction to communism.

No. Communism was just an excuse to continue our imperialism. If communism never existed, we'd make up another excuse. What's our problem with Iran now? The USSR has been gone for 30 years and our relations with Iran is as bad as ever?

Stop accepting what dumb historians on TV or news tell you. Try to think for yourself and see if an assertion makes any sense.

> Or maybe history is right and a bunch of racist slavers wanted to birth liberty and freedom into the world.

While this is logically inconsistent, it is not without a historical precedent. Ancient Athens, during the classical Greek period of the Peloponnesian War when Athens had its empire in the form of the Delian League, was one of the major slaver societies of the entire era, rivaling perhaps even Sparta in the magnitude of slave ownership (though Sparta's slavery was of a very unique form). This is all the while they were decrying Persia's imperial ambitions and touting their fight for liberty against the oppressor. Consider that ancient Athens was the birthplace of democracy, and had one of the purest forms of democracy for what is considered an advanced civilization, to a fault — generals were getting executed for breaking the protocol on burial after the battle they had won (probably how they ended up losing the war). Given all that, one would be right to ask how they could justify promoting liberty and democracy on one hand, and being a slavery-based society on the other. The answer is always that a group of slavers simply does not consider the group that gets enslaved as worthy of having that liberty extended to them — that is the privilege of the "worthy" citizen class. In-group vs the out-group, tribalism and all that.

To go back to the sentence this comment replied to, it is unfortunately entirely believable that a group of racist slavers can be busy promoting liberty for people like themselves while enslaving those who they (conveniently choose to) see as lower than human. Logical consistency and evidence is not required, they are simply different in some way, and thus all is justified.

It’s easy to see what’s wrong with this if you apply it to others.

Did the Soviets really believe in Marxism or did they just want to take over in place of the Tsars? Do the Iranian Mullahs believe in Islam or are they just making up excuses too? Did the Pharoahs believe in their mortuary cult or did they just make that stuff up to con people into stacking up big rocks?

One thing I’ve learned in my time around here is that most people actually do believe what they say they believe and if you listen they will tell you who they are.

The British mostly did believe that their great empire was destined to civilize the world, and the Americans believed they were creating a new Atlantis and that what they were doing to the natives wasn’t actually as bad as it was. They thought they were bringing them the light and saving their souls. Made perfect sense to them at the time given their beliefs. Pharaoh really thought a big pile of rocks would make him immortal.

The problem isn’t that we are all sociopaths making up fake motives to justify crimes. Some people do that, but most don’t. The real problem is that a whole lot of what we believe is deeply flawed and we aren’t smart or experienced or objective enough to see it. We get caught up in self reinforcing ideologies and in systems that become ends in themselves. We also get ridden around by our brain stems and driven by emotions and urges that we rationalize so well we con ourselves.

Hence the saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Conspiratorial models of history are comforting. It’s more comforting to believe it’s all just evil sociopathy since that suggests that if we can just get good people in there they can give us some kind of utopia. The reality is that if we get good people in there they will fuck up, be corrupted by power, or delude themselves. We know this because we’ve already tried many times.

We are just not that smart.

Most car accidents are not the result of homicidal maniacs trying to run people down. Most of them happen because we are bad at driving cars. We are even worse at setting grand historical visions to create utopias.

This is why the best systems we’ve come up with are full of checks and balances and are designed to be deliberative and cautious. It’s a way of protecting us from ourselves.

Getting back to US foreign policy, the real problem is that while our country’s founders did a good job creating such a system for domestic affairs they left foreign policy under specified. This left it as a domain where “good” people high on their own supply could embark on adventures without appropriate peer review.

Government of all things with its monopoly on force should be as boring and bureaucratic as possible. Adventuring should be allowed in limited consensual domains only.

> Did the Soviets really believe in Marxism or did they just want to take over in place of the Tsars? Do the Iranian Mullahs believe in Islam or are they just making up excuses too?

Who cares? Your example has no relevance to my assertion. The difference is that the soviets and mullahs started out as marxists and muslims. The british empire didn't start off 'to civilize the world'? For hundreds of years, the brits were stealing land, transporting african slaves, invading countries before they started peddling the 'civilize the world' propaganda.

> The British mostly did believe that their great empire was destined to civilize the world

No they didn't. They made that up that nonsense in order to justify or rationalize their barbarity. Stealing is bad. Killing is bad. Even the brits understood that. It's only after a few hundred years of murder and theft that the brits invented the 'civilize the world' or 'white man's burden' nonsense.

> and the Americans believed they were creating a new Atlantis and that what they were doing to the natives wasn’t actually as bad as it was.

Nope. We never believed that nonsense. The city on a hill nonsense is justification to hide our own greed and imperialism. We knew what we were doing to the natives. Just like we knew what we were doing to the slaves was bad. We did it anyway because of our selfish interests.

> The problem isn’t that we are all sociopaths making up fake motives to justify crimes

No. It's not that we are sociopaths. It's that we are greedy. It's all too human and it's all too mundane.

> Hence the saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

That's the point. There was never any good intentions. You act like the brits started their empire to do good in the world. No. The british empire, for the first 200 years, was looting, stealing land and transporting african slaves. It was all greed. It's hundreds of years into their empire(s) that the brits invented the 'white man's burden' nonsense.

Not to be a cynic, but what have the people with good intentions actually achieved? The only thing I can think of is rights that were fought for as concessions from those in power. Building something new from scratch, it's failed every time.

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