USA: More Repressive Than North Korea

[Brad De Long]

>You know, this go around is really rather silly. If someone wants to 
>engage in a body count along the lines of Rudolph Rhanda, a right 
>wing political scientist who does this, then are ways to do it: you 
>establish criteria for what deaths to attribute to what factors, 
>then apply the factors. Otherwise, everyone here acknowledges that:
>
>1. American, and more broadly capitalist imperialism, has a bloody 
>record, particularly abroad, but also against the Indians and blacks 
>at home, while at the same time:
>
>
>I think that with qualifications the above propositons are obviosu 
>and incontrovertible. I think everyone agrees with them, although 
>Charles, say, might grumble about the blunness of my 
>characterization of the Stalinist USSR and Brad might think I have 
>overstated the bruality of capitalsim imperialism.
>
>
>--jks
>

Look: it was some of *my* ancestors who shot the local Abenaki chief 
in the back when he protested their engrossing of the best 
corn-growing field on the Westbrook River. And it was some of *my* 
ancestors who were among the few slaveholders in Maine. The record is 
bloody.

I would, however, suggest that the American foreign-policy record is 
more mixed than you say: awful in Latin America, bad in Africa 
(remember the days when Daniel Patrick Moynihan was extolling UNITA 
in Angola as the defenders of the free world?), on balance positive 
in north-east Asia (unless you are insane enough to think that Kim Il 
Sung ought to have ruled South Korea and Mao Zedong ruled Taiwan), 
awful in southeast Asia (the nadir being Carter administration 
support for the Khmer Rouge when the Vietnamese turned on them), 
extraordinarily positive during World War II, and extraordinarily 
positive after World War II in Western Europe...

Brad DeLong