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Comment by energy123 | Hacker News Reader

China kept backing Khmer Rouge despite the millions dead and even invaded Vietnam to protect them. Amoral, self interested actor at best. There's nothing North Korea could do to their own people to change the support.

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In fairness, the US kept indirectly funding the Khmer Rouge even after evidence of their atrocities came to light for their own strategic geopolitical reasons.

The realpolitic of international relations very often follows the words of the British prime minister, Lord Palmerston: "We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."

So there is a universe out there where the US would have supported/allied with Nazi Germany had it been convenient?

Sure. If Smedley Butler has been less disillusioned by his work history and successfully carried forward the business plot it’s pretty easy to imagine.

Hardly difficult to imagine when you look at when WW2 began vs when the US became involved, and why.

I mean the US had no problems selling Nazi Germany arms at the start of the war. The US only really took a side after Germany told the US to stop also supplying war materials to their enemies, which Germany viewed as merely prolonging the war and deaths, and when the US ignored them because they were making too much money Germany stopped buying and doubled down on blockading material support to allies.

>I mean the US had no problems selling Nazi Germany arms at the start of the war.

This claim doesn't appear to be true: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k6yi1z/comm...

It's both frustrating and all too common to see blatant historical falsehood being casually thrown around as if it's well known fact. Doubly frustrating knowing that in order to rebut such falsehood, you have to either do your own lengthy research to find the evidence of __absence__ (which is a lot harder comparing to the evidence of __existence__), or hopefully someone else already did said research and more hopefully you can unbury it from the increasingly enshittified google search.

And by the time you managed it the falsehood already netted a few dozens/hundreds/thousands more victims in the best case scenario where the rebuttal actually managed to attach itself right next to the falsehood.

Regular folks just can't compete with professional disinformation spreaders and their horde of victims.

My idea is a little "!" which pops up on the comment byline if the comment fails an AI fact check. AI fact checks are obviously far from perfect, but at least it would be a start. @dang

Yes, this one.

What do you mean? Some US companies did business with Nazi Germany, famously IBM and of course Ford, and of course there were nazi sympathizers in the US, but to my knowledge the US never supported Germany at that time.

But Palmerston's quote isn't about convenience. It is not at all clear to me that supporting Nazi Germany would've served the US's broader global interests. For example, fascism and capitalist free market ideologies are somewhat at odds with each other on multiple points.

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