Hacker News Reader

Comment by tome | Hacker News Reader

Yes, my evidence is the whole history of Russia from the Tsars, through communism, to post communism, plus the history of the US from the War of Independence onwards.

The US played a huge role (though not quite as much as Americans would like to think!) in freeing Western Europe from Nazism, freeing Asia from Imperial Japan and freeing Eastern Europe from communism. It played a huge role in reconstructing Europe after WWII and I guess the same is true of Japan.

Unfortunately the HN mix of American libertarians and European liberals is rather myopic on this issue.

View on HN

> freeing Western Europe from Nazism

Here I was thinking it was "World War II" not "America saves the world II".

> freeing Asia from Imperial Japan

Yeah Russia had NOTHING to do with that one (except for pushing them out of china, and being as pivotal as the US bombing of Japan in it's ultimate surrender).

> freeing Eastern Europe from communism

Because communist are evil and all that other crap US propaganda teaches us.

> It played a huge role in reconstructing Europe after WWII and I guess the same is true of Japan.

Well yeah, it played a huge role in destroying them as well...

Any more cherry picking you'd like to ad to that list? Invented freedom perhaps?

As much as I think it's futile to respond to details when it's the big picture that is far more relevant ...

> Here I was thinking it was "World War II" not "America saves the world II".

America had a huge role in this, not as significant as Americans like to think, but huge nonetheless.

> Yeah Russia had NOTHING to do with that one

Russia declared war on Japan one week before the war was over.

> Because communist are evil and all that other crap US propaganda teaches us.

No need to build a strawman. Just ask yourself whether you would have preferred to live in Western Europe or a Soviet satellite.

> Well yeah, it played a huge role in destroying them as well...

Err .. what?

The USSR/Warsaw Pact was evil. I don't think you can even debate that, unless you want to claim Hitler and Pol Pot were misunderstood as well.

I've got some bad news for you about the US and Britain. I assume you know about Churchill's prefered method for dealing with 'uncivilized tribes', poison gas?

I don't understand the line of argumentation that, because one entity is (partly) very bad it can't be much better than another entity.

I’ll just leave this here. "The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan... Stalin Did" http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_di...

> Yeah Russia had NOTHING to do with that one (except for pushing them out of china, and being as pivotal as the US bombing of Japan in it's ultimate surrender).

The USSR defeated the Kwantung Army in Khalkin Gol in like 1939 and then sat on their ass with regard to Japan until August 1945.

Certainly the declaration of war came as a shock to Japan, but Japan would have been much better prepared for war with the USSR had the U.S. not been pushing the Empire back to the Home Islands for the 3.5 years preceding that!

What you're saying here is like saying that Italy had anything to do with defeating France just because they managed to declare war and get some troops across the mountains into France before France finally capitulated to Germany.

Speaking of myopics, are you including the large number of Indian nations that the US conquered and stole the land of - sometimes even signing a treaty that they later ignored? Or the huge swathes of Mexico they annexed? The bits of Spain they nicked? All the puppet governments installed?

That slavery in Russia was abolished 50 years before the US even existed - and even then that was only indentured servant-type slaves, as mass-agricultural slaves were banned 50 years before that?

I don't agree that Russia is less oppressive than the US, but you are cherry-picking your moments in history.

EDIT: forgot to mention the modern-day economy of benefitting greatly from illegal alien workers while ostracising them. And the immense incarceration rate, which is almost 50% higher than Russia's (which is also really high)

As I said in my reply to veidr[1] I am indeed aware of all that. One doesn't have to be blind to the massive abuses that the US has committed to still come out in its favour regarding a comparison to Russia.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6178285

One doesn't have to be blind to the massive abuses that the US has committed to still come out in its favour regarding a comparison to Russia.

One wonders why you cherry-picked then, instead of presenting a more balanced view.

I didn't expect my argument to be taken in such bad faith.

You pointed to a 20-year highlight period of US history as being representative, and handwaved away criticisms as 'I'm aware of all that'. As it stood, your presentation of US history was extremely one-eyed and selective, and then you had the gall to call the rest of this community myopic. Your argument was presented in bad faith.

Ironic that you bring up WWII for how the US is better than the Soviets. The Soviets won that war. We helped, some.

American contributions were certainly significant, but it's not the same magnitude. Without American involvement, the Nazis still lose. Without Soviet involvement, we're all speaking German.

Sigh... and without the US involvement, we in West Europe would at best have learned Russian in school just like they had to in the enslaved East Europe.

Not even the Nazis were uniquely evil.

(For instance, I have been in Romania a bit and have heard/read the stories about how they were broken, after the WW. They had it easier even under the Nazis a few years earlier.)

But you knew all that.

Edit: My point was that if the Soviets really had won the war themselves, as mikeash wrote, we in West Europe would have lost -- more or less as badly as if the Nazis had won.

I wonder if that would have happened in a hypothetical world where the US didn't enter the war. It's impossible to say for sure, but the Russians may not have had enough left in them to take over the continent.

In any case, the point would be better made to say that the US prevented a Soviet takeover of Western Europe, not that the US defeated the Nazis.

Sure, US played a huge role in freeing Europe from Nazism.

Which doesn't mean they played a bigger role in it that URSS.

EDIT: >> However I am grateful I am from a country that fell under US influnce than one that fell under USSR influence.

As a Western European, I can relate. I am just pointing that picking WW2 intervention is not the best way to crown US over URSS.

That is indeed true. However I am grateful I am from a country that fell under US influnce than one that fell under USSR influence. YMMV. Still, many of those who are now lauding Russia here will actually be glad they didn't grow up in the former Eastern Bloc, and that strikes me as a somewhat inconsistent viewpoint.

Not sure why you edited your post rather than replying to mine, but ... [EDIT: Perhaps it's because the 'reply' link seems to take a while to appear. If so I always get around that by clicking on 'link' and then replying there!]

> As a Western European, I can relate. I am just pointing that picking WW2 intervention is not the best way to crown US over URSS.

It's not the intervention per se, but the spirit of the intervention, what its aims were and what it led to. Those of the US were far superior to those of the USSR from my point of view.

Couldn't find the reply button (new account, first post, after two years as a leacher)

With my limited knowledge in history, I can't objectively compare the spirit/motivations of USA/URSS intervention.

Also, being raised in Western europe, I may be prejudicied, because of the "winners write history" stuff.

> Also, being raised in Western europe, I may be prejudicied, because of the "winners write history" stuff.

That doesn't invalidate the possibility that the winners might have actually been in the right though. It just means you cann't use the fact that a nation won to implicate that the nation was therefore morally right.

Well, the big difference is is that the US didn't retain defacto control of the part of Europe that it drove the Nazis from in the way the USSR did.

Those are some pretty solid achievements, so uh, USA! USA! I guess.

But, I think that historical lens you are looking back through time to the War of Independence with might have a little smudge on it obscuring that whole deal with the negroes and the injuns...

I'm well aware of that whole deal. I don't believe the USA is a beneficient entity in any absolute sense. I was making a comparison to Russia.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com