Comment by LeFantome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LeFantome | Hacker News Reader

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> China massacre thousands of its own

> China massacre thousands

Is the first one worse to you?

> massacre thousands

Does the second automatically seem worse than the third?

The one not called China has shot and killed multiple of its own citizens on the street recently. Perhaps that triggers your morality.

Which one of them has killed thousands of civilians just in the last month or so including hundreds of school aged girls (confirmed)? And can they even articulate a reason for doing so?

Which one decided, made the choice, to kill hundreds of thousands of children by dismantling USAID? And the reason for that was?

I mean, they both have concentration camps where they detain their own citizens without due process. So, I guess a tie there.

And, they both enabled Russia after Russia stole tens of thousands of children from their parents.

So, ya, maybe no clear winner. Neither are the good guys. But China is losing the death count battle in 2026 at least.

If you are trying to say that China is worse because of an event 37 years ago, I am not sure I agree.

Just to add some perspective to this comparison: the US massacred four _million_ people in South East Asia, during the Vietnam war. That is 2/3rds of a holocaust. The Iraq War (second one), cost between half a million and a million lives (estimates vary, and it only includes violent deaths directly caused by American troops -- the war itself caused an increase in crime and murder and out-migration).

I could go on, but Tienanmen does not compare to most of the things the US has done outside of its own borders from 1946 to the present. And no, we (I am American) cannot justify a body count in the millions, just because our victims are communist/authoritarian/theocratic. Note also that we only number 5% of the world's population, and that if we compared body-counts as percentage of populations, instead of as absolute numbers, I doubt we even have enough people to settle that debt.

Even worse, if the world internalizes that it is fine to murder millions of foreigners, just because they are oddballs that their citizens cannot empathize with, the _we_ are going to have a big problem -- we appear much more odd to the world than the world does to us.

I am surprised that our shenanigans have been tolerated for nearly a century.

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