Ms. Cox, No need for this to degenerate. So quickly, and to conclude, nothing I said is apologia for the atrocities of our own nation, which I have spent much of my adult life researching and protesting (Central Am, Gulf War, etc.). Nor did I deny that the US's military interventions in the Third World dwarfed those of the Soviet Union, which had only a limited foray into Afghanistan and which lent, thankfully (and whatever its motives) gave military, economic, and political support to certain liberation struggles in conflict with US imperialism. Why then impute either view to me? The first is particularly offensive in its presumption of my naivete as "an American who cannot accept the harm done by his/her own nation" (or whatever its precise phrase) and has no textual basis. The "body count" of all the victims of US foreign policy since WWII is indeed shocking and something Americans must be made to confront, as you rightly point out. But these scales of destruction do not lend themselves to any simple equatiion between the US state and the Nazi regime or the Holocaust and AMerica's domestic and exported violence. You've done nothing really to defend your very tenuous comparison. And you were mum on the means by which Stalin and other Soviet leaders waged an effective war on vast segments of the USSR's population, whose death toll is itself in the millions. I have never quite figured out why for some on the left radical criticisms of our system seems to require apologia for the evils of other systems, along with the short-fused response of equating efforts at making historical and categorical distinctions with apologies for our system. Being "radical" need not entail the self-annihilation of the intellect. out. Jeremy
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