Have you any evidence to back up this claim? I would wager that the list of countries attacked, invaded or 'freed' as they like to say, is way higher for the USA than Russia. That in my book makes the USA much more oppressive than Russia.
Russia's just put a dead lawyers on trial to cover up government corruption.
Like to admit it or not but the USA still has a functioning system of laws and an independent judiciary. Disagreeing with those laws or the judiciary is very different from living in a state like Russia.
Aaron Swartz, Eric Snowden, Bradley Manning et al all knew the laws they were breaking and the likely consequences. Those laws are harsh yes, but they chose to fight them by breaking them - they didn't have to. There are legal avenues for whistleblowing, regular criminal prosecutions of government corruption etc.
It's also blissfully ironic that this article praises Russia "following the law" when it comes to refugee status, yet the UK's similar stance re Assange and why he's being kept inside the embassy is lambasted on here.
"Secret courts" - no, there aren't. The FISA system is about surveillance warrants not trials. It's nothing like the "secret courts" in countries that have given term its meaning.
Again men established those laws and run the "global spying" system. The USA isn't like Russia in terms of the state security apparatus controlling elections. Indeed Hoover's FBI days even managed to pale into comparison with what the Russians are up to today.
FISA and surveillance could be voted out by the elected representatives at any point, indeed it almost happened.
No one has been able to bring down those (illegitimate) parts of the system yet, but some are trying. Although I have been defending the US in this thread but I know there are many, many things about it that need challenging. I am (for some reason) optimistic enough that its citizens will challenge it, and change it for the better.
Yes, my evidence is the whole history of Russia from the Tsars, through communism, to post communism, plus the history of the US from the War of Independence onwards.
The US played a huge role (though not quite as much as Americans would like to think!) in freeing Western Europe from Nazism, freeing Asia from Imperial Japan and freeing Eastern Europe from communism. It played a huge role in reconstructing Europe after WWII and I guess the same is true of Japan.
Unfortunately the HN mix of American libertarians and European liberals is rather myopic on this issue.
Here I was thinking it was "World War II" not "America saves the world II".
> freeing Asia from Imperial Japan
Yeah Russia had NOTHING to do with that one (except for pushing them out of china, and being as pivotal as the US bombing of Japan in it's ultimate surrender).
> freeing Eastern Europe from communism
Because communist are evil and all that other crap US propaganda teaches us.
> It played a huge role in reconstructing Europe after WWII and I guess the same is true of Japan.
Well yeah, it played a huge role in destroying them as well...
Any more cherry picking you'd like to ad to that list? Invented freedom perhaps?
> Yeah Russia had NOTHING to do with that one (except for pushing them out of china, and being as pivotal as the US bombing of Japan in it's ultimate surrender).
The USSR defeated the Kwantung Army in Khalkin Gol in like 1939 and then sat on their ass with regard to Japan until August 1945.
Certainly the declaration of war came as a shock to Japan, but Japan would have been much better prepared for war with the USSR had the U.S. not been pushing the Empire back to the Home Islands for the 3.5 years preceding that!
What you're saying here is like saying that Italy had anything to do with defeating France just because they managed to declare war and get some troops across the mountains into France before France finally capitulated to Germany.
I've got some bad news for you about the US and Britain. I assume you know about Churchill's prefered method for dealing with 'uncivilized tribes', poison gas?
Speaking of myopics, are you including the large number of Indian nations that the US conquered and stole the land of - sometimes even signing a treaty that they later ignored? Or the huge swathes of Mexico they annexed? The bits of Spain they nicked? All the puppet governments installed?
That slavery in Russia was abolished 50 years before the US even existed - and even then that was only indentured servant-type slaves, as mass-agricultural slaves were banned 50 years before that?
I don't agree that Russia is less oppressive than the US, but you are cherry-picking your moments in history.
EDIT: forgot to mention the modern-day economy of benefitting greatly from illegal alien workers while ostracising them. And the immense incarceration rate, which is almost 50% higher than Russia's (which is also really high)
As I said in my reply to veidr[1] I am indeed aware of all that. One doesn't have to be blind to the massive abuses that the US has committed to still come out in its favour regarding a comparison to Russia.
You pointed to a 20-year highlight period of US history as being representative, and handwaved away criticisms as 'I'm aware of all that'. As it stood, your presentation of US history was extremely one-eyed and selective, and then you had the gall to call the rest of this community myopic. Your argument was presented in bad faith.
Ironic that you bring up WWII for how the US is better than the Soviets. The Soviets won that war. We helped, some.
American contributions were certainly significant, but it's not the same magnitude. Without American involvement, the Nazis still lose. Without Soviet involvement, we're all speaking German.
Sigh... and without the US involvement, we in West Europe would at best have learned Russian in school just like they had to in the enslaved East Europe.
Not even the Nazis were uniquely evil.
(For instance, I have been in Romania a bit and have heard/read the stories about how they were broken, after the WW. They had it easier even under the Nazis a few years earlier.)
But you knew all that.
Edit: My point was that if the Soviets really had won the war themselves, as mikeash wrote, we in West Europe would have lost -- more or less as badly as if the Nazis had won.
I wonder if that would have happened in a hypothetical world where the US didn't enter the war. It's impossible to say for sure, but the Russians may not have had enough left in them to take over the continent.
In any case, the point would be better made to say that the US prevented a Soviet takeover of Western Europe, not that the US defeated the Nazis.
That is indeed true. However I am grateful I am from a country that fell under US influnce than one that fell under USSR influence. YMMV. Still, many of those who are now lauding Russia here will actually be glad they didn't grow up in the former Eastern Bloc, and that strikes me as a somewhat inconsistent viewpoint.
Not sure why you edited your post rather than replying to mine, but ... [EDIT: Perhaps it's because the 'reply' link seems to take a while to appear. If so I always get around that by clicking on 'link' and then replying there!]
> As a Western European, I can relate. I am just pointing that picking WW2 intervention is not the best way to crown US over URSS.
It's not the intervention per se, but the spirit of the intervention, what its aims were and what it led to. Those of the US were far superior to those of the USSR from my point of view.
> Also, being raised in Western europe, I may be prejudicied, because of the "winners write history" stuff.
That doesn't invalidate the possibility that the winners might have actually been in the right though. It just means you cann't use the fact that a nation won to implicate that the nation was therefore morally right.
Those are some pretty solid achievements, so uh, USA! USA! I guess.
But, I think that historical lens you are looking back through time to the War of Independence with might have a little smudge on it obscuring that whole deal with the negroes and the injuns...
Well, the USSR is currently criminalising a whole class of people based on what they chose to do with their genitalia in private. That sounds pretty oppressive to me.
It is probably a bad law, but it certainly not criminalizing people for what they are doing with their genitalia in private. He was probably thinking about Saudi Arabia or Iran, but there is strangely little outrage against them.
There are a lot of people in the US who'd like the US to be equally oppressive. Really, not the best of examples here.
On the whole, it seems that the US is somewhat less oppressive than Russia, but a lot more than most European countries. Particularly disgusting is that many European countries haven't condemned US behaviour regarding Snowden, and even seem willing to act as US vassals.
