>>> Brad De Long <delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU> 05/23/00 12:03AM >>>I agree with you that Afghanistan would be much, much better off had
the U.S. never used it to try to inflict a Vietnam-in-reverse on
Russia. But is that supposed to be an argument that Kim Il Sung and
Kim Jong Il are nice guys?
If you can't even call a totalitarian megalomaniac a totalitarian megalomaniac, you have no business trying to do global politics.
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CB: "Totalitarian megalomaniac" is the ideological doublespeak of the world's actually existing Totalitarian Evil Empire. U.S. imperialism. The human rights crimes of the U.S. leaders today are an order of magnitude or two worse than that of the leaders of North Korea.
The latter is a legally rigorous claim. Those who charge Korea with a worse human rights record than the U.S in the year 2000 don't know the legal definition of human rights, as developed out of the Nuremburg trials etc.
The U.S. war on Iraq , a Crime against Peace, is the worse human rights violation in international law. Crimes against Peace are classified as worse than Crimes against Humanity ( Although the U.S. history of racism gives it a bad record on genocide, as defined in the UN anti-genocide law. See _We Charge Genocide_ by William Patterson and Paul Robeson, for one legal pleading against the U.S.) The U.S. is the leading war criminal in the world in the year 2000.
An objective human rights prosecuter would indict the leaders of the U.S. before indicting the leaders of N. Korea.
For the U.S. to "police" another country today for human rights violations is absurd. Like having the Mafia police petty criminals , as I said before. That is not an exaggeration from a strict international law standpoint, the only rational source of definition of human rights.
CB