"If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care." --Mandela https://archive.is/ef9eo
To be fair nobody in the world is known more for atrocities than the United States. I’m afraid we don’t really have a moral high horse to sit on when it comes to that
There is nobody around today that has a worse record than the US when it comes to unprosecuted war crimes and crimes against humanity. The US military is the #1 cause of death, chaos and mayhem in the world today, without question.
Americans forget that they are responsible for the illegal destruction of countless sovereign states in the last 20 years. Literally, 10's of millions of refugees have been unleashed upon the world due to America's callous actions. Iraq lost 5% of its population.
European armies are being forced (by their NATO captors) to participate - but nobody has come even anywhere close to the level of evil enacted on the world, as the US and its criminal War Coalition cult, which is recruiting children for its needs today.
Inside the US that's true but outside of the US, America has a terrible human rights record. They've supported and armed many of the worst dictators as well as directly attacking many countries too.
I'm not sure any of the victims of CIA secret prisons in Poland [1] would agree with that, nor virtually anyone not fabulously wealth or a drug lord in South America, nor anyone not white in South Africa, considering a former President of ours still revered as second only to Jesus (Reagan) supported apartheid. Most of the Middle East is pissed at us with good reason, and lots of folks in parts of SE Asia still hate our guts. Actually you can pretty much assume anyone from the southern hemisphere is going to have a legitimate beef with the US at this point, excepting Aus and NZ.
It's really easy for Americans to forget the horrors that they have inflicted on the rest of the world in the past, since it always happened so far away. And it's especially easy for Americans to ignore the horrors they inflict on the world now, since they tend not to even hear about it these days through a combination of self-imposed censorship and, failing that, actual censorship of reporting from war zones. And especially the young tend to glorify war and the military, having grown up under a media regime which works at the behest of the Pentagon [2]. No, most folks would say that in the best case US involvement in a thing might be the lesser of two evils, but that usually it is not even that. America has been a blight upon the world since early into the Cold War, often with the full support of its people, and there is no reason to believe it is even capable of getting its act together and acting as a responsible world citizen, at this point.
Remind me again how many wars the US has started under false pretenses? How many groups the CIA has trained in torture? Napalm, MKUltra, Henry Kissinger, support for various fascist and apartheid regimes…
Even Hitler was inspired by the US’s successful genocide of the indigenous population. Not to mention slavery!
The US has absolutely no moral high ground from which to preach.
The USA is the #1 perpetrator of criminal atrocity and acts of war against other sovereign states today. By sheer statistics, it is the most important issue for citizens of the free world to address.
>Why is your country (assuming it's not the US) special?
Because actually, the USA has roped most of the Western states into complicity in its war crimes. It isn't Australia, clamouring for its bomb stocks to be replenished so that a core elite establishment can profit from Lockheed Martin or Boeing or Northrop Grumman or Raytheon stock boosts .. much as Australians might wish they could be invited to that party .. These are distinctly American companies and their grip on the war reigns MUST be wrestled from them. The fate of the world depends on it.
I'm curious why you think acknowledging the US's ills is equivalent to overlooking the countless ills of many other extremely violent nations and despots. The difference between us, perhaps, is that I care about and acknowledge all aspects of global atrocities.
I have no interest in pointing out current US atrocities around the world; there are many. Does any US action past or present invalidate anything? No. But it does make your words overall worthless and hypocritical. As they say, clean your own house first. It's energy better spent.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/nelson-mandela-i...
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