georgeob1 wrote:However your basic point has merit. It would benefit some of our liberal critics to compare the harm done by the United States with that done by previously dominant powers, including all of the European colonial empires, and the various former Socialist states.
Oh yes, for sure, that too. But then you'd have to veer pretty far off into the twilight zone of the far left to still find people saying the US was/is as bad as the Soviet Union was.
As for today's events and the focus of public protest, truth is, the Soviet Union is history, and the US still is everpresent. And while more evil regimes than America's hurt their populations in ghastly ways in Birma, the Congo or Uzbekistan, their misdeeds affect the rest of the world little - hence the relatively smaller public focus.
But yes, anyone still falling into the moral equivalency trap (the kind that has one jumping the "well America does things wrong too" gun if some Cuban, Syrian or Zimbabwean state misdeed is pointed out) deserves only scorn. Vice versa, however, I see little merit in a response to any pointing out of American misdeeds that comes down to, "well if you look at the Soviets or Chinese you can see how much worse it could have been". That, too, is an excuse rather than an real answer.
