Dan Minette wrote:
>
>>AFAIK, there was no case where the USA or the USSR *directly* ruled
>>a foreign country. It's easier to find Qislings to do the dirty job.
>
>Japan was directly ruled by the United States for several years after WWII.
>
But that was an exception...
>>There are horrible examples in both sides. The USA-sponsored
>>Argentinian dictatorship of the 70s killed 30,000 citizens. These
>>were *individual* deaths, not those abstractions like "1 million
>>dead by hunger". Each one of those 30,000 citizens was
>>arrested, tortured, killed, and their bodies vanished. And there
>>was a huge CIA support in those opperations.
>
>Without getting into the specifics of how much the CIA was involved in that
>operation, I'll accept for the sake of arguement that 30k were killed over
>about 10 years. That is a reasonable example as an example of a large
>number of people killed by a US client government. In the same decade, Viet
>Nam, after the fall of Saigon killed 750k,
>
Uh? Really? How did they kill those people?
>and the Pot Pol killed about 2M.
>In the great leap forward and the cultural revolution, estimates are that
>China killed 40M to 80M.
>
Fight with fairplay! We are comparing USA and USSR, not China!
Pol Pot was maoist.
>
>There was also, during the late '70s, 500k killed in Uganda. Again, these
>are not abstract numbers, but numbers killed by direct government actions.
>There seems to be order of magnitude differences in the numbers killed (with
>China 2 orders of magnitude...it is a large country, which accounts for the
>second order of magnitude.)
>
But,again, were those people killed *by* the commie g*v, or by disastrous
actions taken by the commies?
>> But does the fight for "democracy" require the support >of
>> "dictatorships"???
>
>Well, what choice did the US have?
>
What Carter did. Support only democracies.
>There weren't that many democracies in
>the third world.
>
Yes - because those fragile democracies that were eventually
installed were sabotaged by the CIA and the KGB :-P
>
>The United States has tremendous institutional safeguards against
>dictatorships. Among them was the drafted army. A second is the National
>Guard units under the supervision of the governers. If the generals in the
>army staged a coup, and the National guard was called out to protect the
>constitution, how likely would it be for the average GI to fire on the
>national guard units fighting for the Constitution. I would argue that that
>probability is virtually nil.
>
Ok, but those institutions might be mined by a constant support to
foreign dictatorships.
Alberto Monteiro
