Cuba: Maybe We Should Give Them a Chance

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Again... communism did horrible things, yes. Fighting fire with fire as you say, and tolerating and funding and supporting genocide and mass murder against genocide and mass murder is justifiable (but have those crimes been committed against the USA?) would make the second country go down to the same level as the first, assuming it was in a higher level on the first place.
The thing is, in many cases the war against communism was an excuse to make US citizens feel better, while the real motivations were economical or political, and the US intervened against countries who had done nothing against the USA besides, in an example, daring to ask US multinationals to *gasp* pay taxes and give fair wages to their workers. During the XX century, the USA government was very proactive at backing US multinationals with their military, and countries had to either comply or risk getting intervened.
And to talk a bit about communism, as there were some cases where the US intervened because a country had democratically elected a president with communist tendencies, did they have the right to do that, and put in power US friendly brutal dictatorships instead?

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Yes, your right. We Americans are horrible for ever wanting to keep those wonderful communists at bay.
Shame on us.

Communists stick in Raptor's craw

As schneekugel said some time ago, it is not about "you Americans" but about actions taken by your government. Could a socialist system have worked in those countries? We'll never know. But we do know the atrocities that capitalistic dictators committed in those countries with US support, dictators that the US government put there in the first place, and yes, I believe your government was horrible for doing that. Also, there is such a thing as a right for self-determination, which the US failed to respect.

And what about the first case, where communism was not involved but economic interests were?

Yeah man, kill a million or so people in Vietnam to keep the communism that inevitably came at bay.

And we wonder why the world is mad at us? We're just our own USSR with a less crappy economic system and better luck and location (ie, we can't really be invaded in any way except for a naval invasion.)

We are so hated that millions risk injury, hardship and death to come here.

ruveyn

Thank those timid limp-wrists in Washington for that, especially that idiot Johnson.


Actually, I don't care.


For starters, if this were the USSR you'd be in a Gulag or dead for expressing your views.

Very little.

ruveyn

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It's a start.

Hey, Raptor, you don't care if the rest of the world hates you, well, I hope you are accepting of being killed by "the rest of the world" should that possibility become clearly imminent. "I accepted that we played a game entailing risks of this happening, so I accept my death in the name of the American Empire".

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Oh I'm just so scared.

He does have a broader point:

Basically, as 1000Knives said, parts of the world are mad with the US. And cases have been shown by different people, included me, where the US screws over other nations and their people for it's own benefit. Such countries have good reasons to be mad at the US then. And rightly so, I hope you can see that.

The US gets away with it thanks to the military; that's where my comparison with a bully, came from. Most countries can't hope to win against it, but they still resent it, and will try to get back at it in some way. Many terrorist acts and insurgency come from there; many Iraqui insurgents, for example, are not in it because Jihad, but because from their point of view the US has invaded their land and taken their resources and ruined their life. Although I abhor terrorist acts that kill and harm innocent people in order to archieve some goal (the US has historically supported their fair share of those too, mind you, as Kjas said) the motivations behind some of those terrorists are sometimes genuine, they just want to be left alone, and the US won't give them that, and then they turn to whatever means they can even if they are wrong.

The US is not "right". Sure, it's the land of Liberty and Free Speech and such, and in fact I must admit it's commendable how free US citizens are compared to many other parts of the word, but the keyword here is "US citizens". Because the rest of the world can get screwed for all the US seems to care, and I'm sure it doesn't give a s*** about the freedom of, let's say, sugar plantation workers in Latin-America during the past century, or about rare-earth miners in Africa, if they did things would get way too expensive and that would be bad for the economy. The scary part is that I can see how for you, an American citizen, would this state of affairs be advantageous. The US is a selfish country in this regard, and I guess that would make you selfish, but I wonder, do you think being selfish is a bad thing? Do you believe it is justifiable screwing over other countries, and the human beings that live in them, if it is on your country's interests?

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Actually I don't lose much sleep over it and never have.
That aside, we give out our fair share of foreign aid to include humanitarian .
That and our potential as a protector.

By now it should be obvious that your attempt to make me fell like a naughty American isn't working.

I got called a Bolshevik by an elderly relative when I was 12,I think it was from reading Dostoevsky.I thought she meant something about bull$hit.

Not really, one of my main goals was establishing some things about just how comfortable you felt with being a "naughty american", and one of the possible outcomes had always been that you could be perfectly fine with it. Selfishness makes logical sense. But there are some logical consequences too, which I already described, and you should be prepared to deal with them. Wouldn't be too hard, actually, that huge military must be certainly helpful in that regard. And also, it would make your country the righteous one only to the extent that "might is right" is true.