2) By the same simplistic reasoning, Americans killed 20-30 million [1] just by themselves. I'm not sure what the totals would look like after adding in the British, French, Dutch, etc. empires.
3) I'm almost certain that that 100 million figure includes revolutions caused as a direct result of imperial powers meddling in the affairs of local populations. E.g. Cambodia [2]. That's the part that's "overly zealous".
Counter-examples abound: the US actively suppressed democracy in Latin America and elsewhere when it didn't suit American business interests, hence Guatemala.
Likewise, a great number of deaths at the hand of Communist leaders were due to utter incompetence and mismanagement, such as in China's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward.
My rule of thumb is that it's basically a bad thing when somebody dies who shouldn't have (if people were fair and compassionate).
Entirely. In the vast histories of famines, for example, there were far more times where food was available and denied to the desperate, than there have been times where there has not been enough food for everybody.
During the food cost crisis that preceded the Arab Spring, I and everyone around me in comfortable America ate quite well. If we as a species cared for every human life, such suffering would have been avoided.
"And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’"
-Matthew, 25:40
18 million would be on the high end for the estimated indigenous population of pre-Columbian North America. 90% of those were wiped out by imported diseases before the United States even existed. It would be quite a trick to murder 100 million people based on a starting population of only 1.8 million (not all of whom, or even most of whom, were killed, by any means).
It is not reasonable to blame the United States for things that happened before it existed.
Also, it is pretty much accepted nowadays that killing off indigenous people is a Bad Thing. Unfortunately, the same is not true of communism. There are still plenty of people who think it's a wonderful idea.
Please don't treat divisive, inflammatory topics as mere ammunition for trivial internet arguments. That's a common pattern, and it makes discussion both uncivil and unsubstantive.
Sure. But the US doesn't care until it thinks it can use the opportunity to threaten the USSR/Russia. And "overzealous" (not sure how I managed to type overly zealous instead) means staging myopic, sometimes protracted wars or military action of dubious to no (or negative) benefit for the American people: Panama (because a corrupt dictator wasn't following orders anymore), Cambodia, Vietnam, and now Afghanistan, Iraq.
That is, it's all under guise of "fighting communism", or more specifically, the Russians, which could be believed if they were actually deterred by it and didn't just think the US was a war-hungry power bent on global domination. Well, in the few cases the military action was actually successful instead of turning out to be a national disgrace.
This all seems to trace back to Eisenhower's stiffing aid post-war to Russia and further by the Truman Doctrine. I say that Russia has never had an interest in invading the US, but our ballistic foreign policy has only emboldened them to replace us as the foremost world power.
2) By the same simplistic reasoning, Americans killed 20-30 million [1] just by themselves. I'm not sure what the totals would look like after adding in the British, French, Dutch, etc. empires.
3) I'm almost certain that that 100 million figure includes revolutions caused as a direct result of imperial powers meddling in the affairs of local populations. E.g. Cambodia [2]. That's the part that's "overly zealous".
[1] http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-mill...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_s...