> As bad as the US prison industrial complex is, the
> treatment of Liu Xiaobo could not have happened
> in the US.
The US prison complex is the largest in the world by far in terms of numbers and per capita. It’s much worse than you think. No other country comes close. As for Liu Xiaobo, I think Chelsea Manning would be jealous at how tenderly he was treated by comparison. Furthermore, in the US many high profile activists have been assassinated and, at least, we know they’ve been under continuous FBI surveillance and so we can ask, how come all those assassinations succeeded (Martin Luther King, Malcom X, John Lennon … )?
The prison and police brutality must be considered part of the government pacification of people. In Russia and China, it’s more honest and at a much smaller scale than in the US. The US preempts activism by subduing a huge percentage of the people through intimidation by police action and the prison system. What they can’t break, they find a way to kill.
> And when it comes to American war crimes, they are
> kind of different from what Russia is doing today. The US gets
> into wars a lot because of ignorance, arrogance,
> stupidity and misguided idealism rather than malice.
Really? Are you serious? Sanctions on Iraq even before the criminal war on Iraq killed half a million children! When Madeline Albright was asked about this, she responded that she thinks it was worth it! You’ld think after about say 100,000 children are massacred, they’ld realize what a mistake that was. Measure it in your country with someone killing 500,000 children in Norway ‘because of ignorance’. You may step on an anthill and kill a hundred ants by mistake but killing 500,000 children and saying it was worth it is satanic malice. Your statement is truly insulting.
It truly is awe inspiring how much you’ve internalized this ‘good us’ and ‘bad them’ when all the evidence points otherwise.
For example, in the case of Saddam Hussein, you fail to say that Saddam was built-up by the US. At one time, he was a paid CIA assassin. The US supported Saddam for many years and it was the US that provided Saddam with poison gas to use against Iran and others inside Iraq. He was the US darling for many years. The report provided by Saddam on WMD was heavily censored with less than 10 percent remaining of the report because most of it showed that it was the US that armed Saddam and that provided him with poison gas. Of course, he got rid of it (they didn’t find as much as a thimble) because he wanted to avoid being removed. And you’re wrong about it being better now than under Saddam. Some things were very bad under Saddam but others were very good. Now, Saudi Arabian/US terrorists use car bombs in mosques, in crowded streets and everywhere to massacre people and to keep Iraq unstable. Under Saddam, the people had free education up to and including college, they had free health care and retirement benefits. When Saddam declared he wanted to sell oil in Euros and set the day, the US attacked on that very day!
The US did not screw up countless times. That is an idiots analysis. The US is an empire and acts purposefully. They destroyed Vietnam and killed at least 6 millions people and poisoned one-third of the land to make an example of Vietnam and not to establish democracy. It is like a mobster ordering a particularly brutal kill to terrify the rest. The nuclear bombs that they dropped on Japan at the end of the war were for the same reason. The US doesn’t have over 750 bases outside the US by ‘mistake’.
As for building democracies, the US doesn’t care about democracies. If they truly cared, they would have it at home. They care about domination. If they can corrupt a country then they can control it and it doesn’t matter if it is a corrupt democracy, oligarchy or dictatorship. Look at the US’s serfs in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and the Emirates are KINGDOMS. Can anything be farther from a democracy? A person who OWNS his people as property? In Iran, the US deposed a duly elected leader and replaced him with a SHAH (a king). The number of dictators they setup is enormous.
As for China, deep poverty rate is zero while it is not zero in the US, France and the UK but is around 10% or more. Even in Norway it is 0.5%. And China started from an extremely low level to what it has reached today. No other country tried that hard to eradicate poverty.
Finally, a word about democracies. There are no democracies in the world today because all countries rely on voting. As Aristotle observed, voting leads to oligarchy. Voting allows various influences or biases to affect the selection of representatives (primarily the covert and/or overt use of money) and the effect of incumbency is very high. This kind of dynamic will almost always lead to representatives that will not reflect what a random poll will tell you the people want. By contrast, a random selection of representatives would do that and would then (by sampling theory) represent the will of the majority of the population, in other words democracy. As Aristotle said, a random ballot (or its equivalent in Aristotle’s time) leads to democracy. The only modern country that may have found a way around the voting dynamic is Denmark, but their election system is so very convoluted, it is hard to understand by an outsider. In addition, even if the political system was democratic, which it isn’t, the workplace almost everywhere is definitely dictatorial. People spend their lives at work and not at voting and so democracy is a sham today.
In any case, democracy is a means to an end. What humanity truly aspires for is self-determination. The necessary but not sufficient requirements for self-determination are to have your basic needs met. Self-determination in a country must be measured by how many have it and not by whether the billionaires do. For meeting the basic needs of the vast majority of people, the nordic countries do that best. China does it reasonably well and is getting better at it as they pull themselves out of the abject poverty from which they started. The US does it very poorly in spite of being the world power (but hopefully, not for long).
Beyond the basic needs required for self-determination, we must look at involvement in decision making … I have studied that facet and yes, the nordic countries also do that reasonably well. As for China and the US, I will leave that discussion for another time … perhaps.
