Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria are all debated vociferously in this country, and though they have taken a back seat to the shitshow of our current presidency, they are absolutely contentious issues in academia, foreign policy circles, and in public. To say that the American people somehow don’t have these discussions is absurd. Furthermore, your implication seems to be that because the US government does things that are morally wrong, Americans who believe in human rights are somehow not credible when they criticize other governments in addition to their own. That is absolutely nonsense.
> Furthermore, your implication seems to be that because the US government does things that are morally wrong, Americans who believe in human rights are somehow not credible when they criticize other governments in addition to their own. That is absolutely nonsense.
No, what I'm saying is that Americans can't point fingers to China and Chinese while America state has a much more tighter grip on the world than China state. If you wanna fix human right problems in the world, you can have a lot more impact doing it at home than abroad.
>* Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria are all debated vociferously in this country,*
"Vociferously" as in "some pundits talk about them but nobody really cares about those things, no politician resigned because of them, no mass demonstrations anywhere, and even when people talk it's the usual hypocrisy show (when it's not just about the costs and the toll on our own soldiers), meanwhile things get on as usual..."
>Americans who believe in human rights are somehow not credible when they criticize other governments in addition to their own. That is absolutely nonsense.
Actually sounds very valid.
Makes sense, to get one's house in order before they can talk about others. In fact that's where they should have more impact (and more moral responsibility to get right).
But it's also the case that such "criticizing other governments" is used by their own government as justification for all kinds of interventions.
It's this "criticizing of other governments" that was used to justify the wars and interventions that made Iraq and Libya from stable if autarchic regimes into today's hell on earth, for example.
1) autarchic and autocratic mean two different things. The word you’re looking for is autocratic.
2) The US is a democracy, is pretty diverse in terms of opinions, and the US government does things that the people don’t like (just like in China). I don’t hold the individuals of China accountable for egregious and unacceptable human rights violations of the Chinese government. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of US society to say that the people of the US are inseparable from their government’s decisions.
3) You still have yet to seriously engage the notion that the Chinese government is perpetrating wholesale oppression of a class of people simply for having a different identity. Whatever the US does doesn’t change how morally reprehensible that is. What-about-ism doesn’t change the moral calculus here one iota.
> You still have yet to seriously engage the notion that the Chinese government is perpetrating wholesale oppression of a class of people simply for having a different identity. Whatever the US does doesn’t change how morally reprehensible that is.
The US systematically does the same to its black portion of the population since always, sometimes in extreme ways, other times in soft ways.
