| | [Mr. Gregory:] "See, he [Dr. Rummel] is advocating World War II-style censorship. No friend of liberty would do that."
Are you saying that the American government who fought and defeated the evil Hitler was not friend of liberty? What were the "friends of liberty" doing then? Were the authentic good guys asking the murderous Hitler please to stop killing?
[Mr. Gregory:] The U.S. murdered hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodians, creating the perfect conditions for Pol Pot to come to power.
Of course the U.S. Gov policies could be very wrong. But we must not lose the historical perspective: the central fact here is that neither Pol Pot, nor the Khmer Rouge, nor the Vietnamese Communists, were born from the American ideals, but from Communist ideals.
[Mr. Gregory:] And then, after Pol Pot proved himself to be quite possibly the worst human being ever to slither on the face of this earth, at least in terms of per capita murder rates, Reagan and Thatcher assisted him and the Khmer Rouge against the considerably less murderous Vietnamese Communists,
Are you attacking America through defending the Vietnamese Communists?
[Mr. Gregory:] The U.S. directly slaughtered hundreds of thousands of them [Cambodians] in Nixon's illegal bombing campaign,
That's really wrong. But not for "legal" reasons, of course.
[Mr. Gregory:] and then became friends with Pol Pot!!
If so, that's damned wrong.
[Mr. Gregory:] Regarding World War II, the Nazi regime was a product and a result of war.
No: war is a political tool sometimes required (unless you are a Pacifist).
The Nazi regime was a product of the Nazi ideals put into practice. Every individual has a conscience. The Nazi individuals were responsible of what they were doing, not the American government, nor the Americans.
[Mr. Gregory:] Beating up the bad guys in World War I and finding the Germans collectively guilty for the war,
Every contender knew from the beginning that the consequences of losing or winning the war were collective. Those were the rules of that war.
[Mr. Gregory:] as if all 20 million dead were killed by their hands, in the form of the Versailles Treaty and the murderous starvation blockade right after the war, were direct causes of Hitler's rise to power.
Nazism was an evil ideology. The deeds of Nazism can't be justified by the wrong deeds of anybody else.
[Mr. Gregory:] And in that supposedly Good War, the U.S. sided with Stalin
America fought against Nazism, not for Stalinism.
[Mr. Gregory:] and actively helped him expand his empire of oppression, often in ways that even the most bloodthirsty realist with the least bit of intellectual honesty would admit were unnecessary to defeat Hitler,
Then nobody really knew if the War was to be won. You judgements here are anachronistic.
[Mr. Gregory:] but only for the benefit of getting on Stalin's good side so as to make him help FDR and Truman create the United Nations—an organization which was from the beginning, and still is, no more than a method for certain Western Powers, most particularly the U.S. government, to maintain hegemony over the world under a fig leaf of multilateral diplomacy.
I agree with you that that was a wrong decision. But perhaps the decision you or I would then have taken was not better. We will never know.
[Mr. Gregory:] So when I think of Reagan, Truman and FDR chumming up with the likes of Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and Joe Stalin, I tend not to think of our past presidents and their foreign interventions as all too heroic.
Unfortunately, they were often very wrong. Now think about the then possible alternatives. Perfection is not an option. The judgement of past facts is a very easy exercise. They had to make the decisions then. They often erred.
[Mr. Gregory:] I am not a violent person, but if I were sitting in the same room as Stalin it would be hard for me to keep myself from lunging at him in an attempt to kill him.
The fact is: you did nothing effective to kill him. Moreover, very possibly you did less than President Reagan to defeat Communism.
[Mr. Gregory:] He was the face of evil, and FDR just toasted him with vodka and champaigne at Yalta, splitting up Europe and Asia among the new two empires that would rule the world and wage a Cold War against each other using proxies througout the globe as if they were pieces on a chessboard. Millions of chesspieces with minds and bodies were killed, totally unnecessarily, by the U.S. government in the 20th century. Millions.
Yes, that's really sad.
[Mr. Gregory:] U.S. foreign policy is not simply far from perfect. It is concentrated evil.
All wars are terrible. But you can't assume that the mistakes of the American governments put the American ideals at the same level than the Communist ideals of yesterday, or the Islamic ideals of today.
Today, as yesterday, freedom requires to be defended. The real question is not if, but how. America-bashing, of course is one of the best suicidal policies.
Best regards,
Joel Català
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