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by wunderland 990 days ago
Maybe this is because you are ignorant to the extent of American war crimes?
3 comments

> Maybe this is because you are ignorant to the extent of American war crimes?

I think you may be ignorant to the extent and type of crimes that Russia is committing in Ukraine.

>> “There are examples of cases where relatives were forced to witness the crimes," he added. "In the cases we have investigated, the age of victims of sexual and gendered-based violence ranged from 4 to 82 years."

US has been responsible for similar and worse at a much larger scale, even just in my lifetime. All war is a crime, and the US is always at war.
Of course if one is to learn about war crime denialism, who better to learn from than Cambodian genocide denialist Noam Chomsky?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...

Here we have a person denying eyewitness testimony of Genocide. Surely we all have to learn from such a great individual

I didn't know this. I'm in shock right now. I already knew that "America bad" was a blind spot for him, but this is another level.
Such as?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes

Or just a top 5:

- Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

- Battle of Okinawa (and just the habit of American soldiers on Okinawa to rape and kill the locals in general)

- No Gun Ri massacre, Korea

- The use of Agent Orange in Vietnam

- My Lai massacre, Vietnam (really, most of the Vietnam War and Korea. Americans really do like killing Asians in the most violent and horrible ways it seems.)

- Haditha, Iraq (and arguably the entire Iraq war, which was waged under false pretenses to redirect American bloodlust after 9/11 towards the neocons' existing goals to "democratize" the Middle East and distract the public from Saudi involvement in the attacks.)

- Abu Ghraib as a runner up just because stacking pyramids of naked, tortured prisoners of war is just kind of banal compared to everything else.

Now does any of this mean other countries also don't commit war crimes? No. But the US has arguably committed more war crimes than any other country, going back to the continent-wide genocide against the natives. Is this because the US is more evil than all other countries? Subjectively, yes, but I would argue that the US as a nuclear superpower simply has no external limit on its capacity to commit war crimes and therefore commits the most simply because it can get away with it. If other countries were in America's shoes, they would probably be committing war crimes just as often.

Grasping at straws using the A-bomb and Battle of Okinawa as examples. The carpet bombing of Laos and Cambodia would have been better.
I don't think either is grasping at straws, but fine. It's a sizeable list however you choose to sort it.
It's not a war crime, but slavery and the genocide of Native Americans was not super great either. Doesn't count if you do it within your own borders!

Outside of strictly defined "war crimes", we have a very long history of interventionism, imperialism, support of coups, installation and support of dictators, overthrow of governments, military actions with foreign nations to install our own form of government / economy / morality. We've destabilized whole regions and nations, birthed massive terrorist organizations, overthrown countries, annexed territories and sovereign nations, and we continue to invade any nation that doesn't have nukes with our special forces (or to support foreign special forces) to attack targets of value.

Stalin was a mass-murdering fuckhead, for sure. But the USSR's actions look a whole lot like the New Imperialism every other major nation has been practicing since the 19th century. Putin is a new Stalin, for sure. But in the time between Stalin and now, we, the USA, have pulled wayyyyy more heinous shit on the world than Russia has.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_imperialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_United_States_for... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_state-sponso... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_killing#Use_by_the_Un... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_U... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone