The U.S _has_ to be the source of all evil.

I see this shit "USA kills billions opf people every second since capitalism is evil but stalin never did anything bad." every single day on lemmy.
- That's because no one ever did anything bad in the USSR. If you doubt this we can ask my old boss why he spent part of his childhood in a gulag. My boss to this day doesn't know because he never witnessed his trial.
- Yeah, Lemmy is full of genocide supporters sadly.

In a world that paints only in absolutes, the fine nuances are all too often overlooked. But without it, you loose a part of the ability to accurately represent reality, like painting only with three colors that won't mix.

I used to think America was the worst but I gained maturity when I realized America is made up by humans and that humans are the worst.
Everyone is terrible in their own horrible unique way.

The main thing the USA is ALWAYS responsible for is preventing the threat of a "Good Example" by destabilizing every socialist government for almost the past decade.
- True, though this post is mostly about stuff like modern support of Russia.
  
  "Russia's defending itself from NATO incursion" - Tankies on Ukraine
  "The Uyghur Genocide is western propaganda"
  "Tiananmen Square doesn't even make sense. It's all western propaganda"
  Tankie positions, everybody.
- Which is real fun when you realize the consensus is that the USSR fell entirely due to their own incompetence. It makes the "USA prevented the success of socialism" a lot more questionable
  
  Yeah cause the USA did nothing at all to undermine the USSR during the Cold War....

Just below this post on /all : https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/37200034

This is true.

Jesus Christ those hashtags
- If you're thinking what I think you're thinking, tumblr's tags are usually used to put a hidden message/note into the post.
- Wdym?

My late father would say...
"You can tell how evil a country is by how many laws it has."
And honestly, I don't think he was wrong.

We're Babylon this rhyme around.

Westoid tankie's entire world depends on alternative facts... It seems every narrative works like this though, their's is just extra offensive

- Yes, the U.S is bad. Supporting Russia because they are bad is stupid, because Russia is worse, though they have less ability to do harm.

So I don't think I'm a tankie. I'm certainly a socialist, but I'm not an authoritarian. I feel this post though. Like, I've lived and breathed the evil of the American empire. I grew up across various us military bases and eventually got a related job and security clearance. I've seen it with my own eyes, and I even got some of the blood on my hands while I still thought it was heroic.
The evil of other nations though? I've heard and read about it, but I've barely actually seen any of it. What I have seen is an absolute unending torrent of propaganda being firehosed at me and everybody I've ever known for my entire life by the American government. I feel like I find out at least once a month that some deeply held belief I have about a different part of the world is a fabrication of my own government meant to keep me worshipping at the altar of American exceptionalism, or some bit of racism that never got stamped out of military culture.
I'm old enough to understand that the world is a gray place, and enemies of America aren't good by default. I certainly understand questioning if any of them are as bad as I learned growing up though
- The evil of other nations though? I've heard and read about it, but I've barely actually seen any of it. What I have seen is an absolute unending torrent of propaganda being firehosed at me and everybody I've ever known for my entire life by the American government.
  Really? Like, putin's invasion of ukraine? Or the gaza genocide? Or the myanmar civil war and rohingya genocide? Or the sudan civil war? Or the tibetan oppression?
  Like i get it, you hate the propaganda machine feeding you some half-truth and you don't know what to believe, but still, just because you've done some evil under the name of USA doesn't mean it's all propaganda feeding.
  
  I think that's more a reference to some who think China's government is just like the US government and never tries to help Chinese society whereas most national governments are in fact trying to improve things the notion that governments are always ineffective is very much an American ideal.
- The point of the post wasn't that the west can't be criticized. Far from. More that for Leninists, there institutions are incapable of evil. Further, that any appearance of evil isn't actually evil. It's just a response to the wests evil decadence influence poisoning the minds of the proletariat. In ways only a massive tank can undo.
  Tiananmen Square being a specific example. First of all it didn't happen. But if it did happen, they all abandoned their bicycles and ran off to an alley. Where they were safe as the tanks went through. No one was killed, everyone had fudge. But then again maybe it did happen the way you say, but it was only because the decadent West poisoned their minds. This is literally the batshit stuff leninists have to twist themselves into pretzels over to justify themselves.
  If you assert that they aren't perfect, that their systems are as flawed as the ones they want to overthrow. Skreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

The direct US post WWII foreign intervention kill count is at around 8M right now (Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria), and that's not counting the mass killings it has orchestrated indirectly, like the genocide in Indonesia in the 60s and the genocide in Guatemala in the 80s, and the killing of the Kurds in Turkey in the 90s, and the killing of people of Timor from the 70s through the 90s, and of course the current ongoing genocide in Gaza, and so on and so forth. Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining, the US' impact on the world has been absolutely devastating, and claiming otherwise is outright ahistorical.
- I know, I'm not claiming that, and nor is OOP.
  Supporting states like Russia just because they oppose the U.S hegemony is wrong.
  
  Ah yeah fair enough, I completely read past that, my bad. To say that the US is responsible for the Pakistan-China border dispute would be silly. But to ignore the influence of NATO expansion on the illegal invasion of Ukraine, as foreign policy experts have been predicting since the late 90s, would also be silly.
- Facts like "the number of people killed by x military" are always listed as a range because we don't know precise numbers. Combining multiple conflicts should give a wide range for number of deaths. Anything that says 8 million is likely a poor source.
  
  I added the middles of the ranges, some sources go as high as 12M for the total. When someone says 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, do you also raise this objection? Or just when it's about the good guys doing the killing