[Aeolun]

> Peoples who were ethnically cleansed at scale to facilitate settler or US commercial expansion or currently suffer under US-backed dictatorships will tend to have a negative view of the US as an empire.

Obviously. But would they have been happier if it was a different country doing it?

I can think of a few countries that would probably have been better, but none of them are in a position to actually do so. I can think of many countries that would have been worse, some of which could have, but didn’t do so.

> It would be like arguing to a Polish person whose entire family was executed in stalinist trials of the 1940s that the Soviet Union was in aggregate benign because of all the aid they gave out to peoples fighting wars of liberation from european colonial dictatorships, which in aggregate killed far more people than Stalin did.

While it would be a boneheaded thing to do if you had any social grace, would it make it any less true (assuming it were true)?

On the whole I’m just less likely to trust the good intentions of a (near) dictatorship than that of a democracy.

That may be because I grew up in one, but I can’t exactly change that.