Response to an American jingoist

We have gotten far off the original topic and now you're just spewing lies and straw men, exactly as I expected you to do when confronted with the simple facts sur...rounding the issues you're trying to speak about.

Even if we accepted your lies, the fact that anybody or country does some good things does not excuse their murderous crimes any more than bin Laden's crimes could be excused because he supposedly fought for freedom in Afghanistan. This is a tautology. I've mentioned it in earlier posts but apparently you disagree.

What you're saying is exactly like Teddy Rooselvelt, who argued that

“The expansion of the peoples of white, or European, blood during the past four centuries. . . has been fraught with lasting benefit to most of the peoples already dwelling in the lands over which the expansion took place.”

Lie#1: "eradication of the Native Americans, an event which occurred before there was even such a thing as the United States."

The genocide of the Native Americans was certainly not complete before 1776. At that time, the British settlers were confined principally to the east, as you undoubtedly learned about in elementary school. The rest of the continent was still left to "eradicate," as you phrase it.

Nor was there any equivocation amongst the earlier presidents that genocide was taking place.

Jefferson wrote that

"However our present interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern, continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface. Spain, France, and Portugal hold possessions on the southern continent, as to which I am not well enough informed to say how far they might meet our views. But either there or in the northern continent, should the constituted authorities of Virginia fix their attention, of preference, I will have the dispositions of those powers sounded in the first instance. The West Indies offer a more probable and practicable retreat for them. Inhabited already by a people of their own race and color, climates congenial with their natural constitution, insulated from the other descriptions of men; nature seems to have formed these islands to become the receptacle of the blacks transplanted into this hemisphere."

Washington wrote that

“I am very clear in my opinion that policy and
economy point very strongly to the expediency of being upon
good terms with the Indians, and the propriety of purchasing
their lands in preference to attempting to drive them by force
of arms out of their Country; which . . . is like driving the wild
Beasts of ye forest . . . when the gradual extension of our
settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to
retire; both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.”

John Quincy Adams felt sorry for

“that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidous cruelty, among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring to judgement.”

Lie #2: The US brought down the Soviet Union.

There is no evidence of this. The primary forces causing the Soviet collapse were internal.

Lie #3: The US "stopped ethnic cleansing in the Balkans."

Actually, you've got the history backwards. The worst ethnic cleansing was precipitated by the US bombing and happened AFTER the US war, not before.

Lie #4: The US "spared thousands of lives in Rwanda."

There was no intervention here, so this seems to be made up out of thin air.

Lie #5: The US "saved thousands of lives wiht [sic] our actions in the war on terror."

There is absolutely no evidence for this. NONE. The war in Iraq has killed hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps more than a million, in addition to the thousands of civilians in Afghanistan. I think it is the most elementary moral point to state that killing innocent people is wrong even when the leaders say it is right. It is wrong to kill innocent people when the Soviets do it, when the British do it, when the Americans do it, when bin Laden does it, when a serial killer does it, or even if Mother Teresa did it.

Straw man #1: Of course the United States stopped the Holocaust, though not as successfully as Stalin. I never said anything differently. A typical tactic of those who support unlimited state violence is to pretend those who object are somehow supporting Hitler, or bin Laden, or whoever. This is a clear fabrication.

The rest of your post that isn't transparent falsity is just devoted to repeating patriotic slogans.

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