Trump is right; America is far from innocent when it comes to killing, even when compared to Putin’s Russia
Let’s start this off by saying that we are in no way supporters of Vladimir Putin. People who say America’s presidents are evil while forgiving Putin’s obscene abuses of power are as dumb and hypocritical as those who demonize the Russian government while pretending America is a Bambi-eyed cherub. A lot of American lefties seem to think there’s some sort of progressive trophy to be won by condemning the abuses of their own administrations while forgiving the transgressions of all others, which is just another kind of myopia. The ex-KGB autocrat is not a friend to USA or to Europe. This should be obvious. Moving on.
The President of the United States saying “You think our country’s so innocent?” to Bill O’Reilly on Fox News was one of the best things that’s ever happened in the US. For years Republicans have been moronically bashing Obama for a completely made up “apology tour” wherein they pretend the President went around apologizing for America’s war crimes and heinous abuses, and meanwhile Democrats were rightly calling Bush a bloodthirsty monster while wrongly ignoring Obama’s bloodbaths all across the globe. And now the establishment Democrats are eagerly embracing the leftover evil neocons from the Bush administration as they form an alliance against Trump. The President’s statements (which included a condemnation of the Iraq invasion) were a big, fat slap on every single one of these people, and they needed it. If Donald Trump has a stronger moral compass than you, you need to seriously rethink your life.
Predictably, the liberal media seized upon Trump’s quote with their trademarked righteous indignation, saying he was “defending Putin” by bringing up America’s extensive history of insatiable bloodlust when O’Reilly called Putin a killer.
How dare he? America isn’t perfect, but to compare its track record of killing to that Russian dictator’s is ridiculous!
Well guess what, snowflakes? It’s not.
If you take every single war that Putin has overseen, either as President or as Prime Minister, and include his extrajudicial killings and assassinations of political rivals, you still get nowhere near the body count of the Bush and Obama administrations. Adding the least conservative estimates of the total death tolls of the Second Chechen War, the Russo-Georgian War, the undeclared warfare in Donbas and elsewhere in Ukraine, the insurgency in the North Caucasus, Russia’s involvement in the Syrian conflict, and a sprinkling of assassinations and disappearances, you get around three hundred thousand deaths. The least conservative estimates of America’s Iraq invasion alone are over a million deaths, which is five percent of the population of the entire country.
That’s more than enough to make the point, but feel free to add in the tens of thousands of killings in Afghanistan, the tens of thousands killed in America’s unforgivable toppling of Gaddafi in Libya, the unknowable number of people killed in Obama’s drone strikes (ten times as many as Bush’s), and the hundreds of thousands killed in the Syrian conflict, largely due to America’s fanning the flames of insurgency and actively arming terrorist groups with the goal of toppling the Syrian government, and any of the seven countries Obama has dropped tens of thousands of bombs on every year.
So maybe when someone suggests that America has no room to talk when it comes to the subject of killings, they’re not doing something outrageous or unreasonable. This doesn’t excuse the actions of Putin, but the rest of the world would be grateful if America could go ahead and drop the holier-than-thou schtick when it comes to violently ending people’s lives. A lot more self-awareness from the most powerful military force on the planet can only be a good thing.
yogaesoteric
March 28, 2017