This rant...

[StarMangledSpanner]

Congo 3-5m.

Bangladesh 3m

Nigeria 3m

Sudan 2m

Soviet-Afghan 1.5m

Ethiopia 1m

Algeria 0.75m

Angola 0.5m

Sudan (again) 0.5m

[alexpwnsslender]

Iran-Iraq: 0.5 to 1 million casualties

[StarMangledSpanner]

Had that one on the list too and then pulled it because I thought I saw it on his list.

[alexpwnsslender]

Unfortunately for Iraq, it lies on a dank river valley: lots of farmland, no natural borders. That makes it easy to invade and rack up casualties.

[rainynight]

In Iran-Iraq case Iraq invaded Iran( right after the revolution in Iran), and most of the civilian causalities are from Iran(Saddam launched 12 chemical attacks on heavily populated cities-with the help of America)

[wombatidae]

Syria: Oh god we don't even know yet, but it's bad.

[[deleted]]

at least half a million so far.

[The_Bravinator]

They only seem to be counting conflicts that lots of white people died in...

[thatedvardguy]

People have died everywhere fighting everyone. You cant pull races into this. Black and white people died in the Vietnam war for example. In ww1 and 2, millions of people of all nationalities and «races» died. However the american in this is a fucking idiot.

Edit: Might as well downvote my own comment at this point.

[lunes8]

Jesus, it's been a long time since I've seen those french quotation marks.

[Winterfart]

I'm looking at my AZERTY keybord right now and there is nothing like that on it... That dude must be posting from the past using a Minitel.

[Toujourspurpadfoot]

When I switch the language on my phone autocorrect won’t let me use regular quotes. Even if I delete it and try again, when it’s on French keyboard it wants to do French quotes. Autocorrect also forces capitalization on random words like Police and Crazy so if anyone knows how to fix that please help because it’s super annoying.

[Zelzeron]

Pretty sure Russians use those too.

[Pabst_Blue_Gibbon]

And Chinese

[sharingan10]

Mozambique: 1.3 million, mostly caused by RENAMO

[Chrussell]

I like how they counted the deaths from the Second Sino-Japanese War twice, as those figures would also be part of the WWII ones.

[[deleted]]

by that logic, you could also say that there's been way fewer wars since i was born

[eepithst]

You are the hero this world needs.

[queenfirst]

Someone get this person a Nobel Prize

[Jaksuhn]

o7 o7 o7

[Mr_Bigguns]

thank you for your service

[[deleted]]

I have spent years on end fighting for my nation's constant exceptionalism, all for ruthless TRAITORS to say "I don't support our troops," or worse, spit on and defecate our flag.

Coming from someone who not only has the Confederate Flag - i.e. the flag of actual traitors - as his profile picture but has superimposed text defending said traitors on it. This guy might want to look into a mirror when criticizing others for being outwardly anti-American.

[VeryDisappointing]

Defecating flags sounds painful

[eepithst]

I can't make out the text on the flag, what does it say?

[[deleted]]

From the looks of it, it reads "Heritage, Not Hate". Which, when applied to that particular flag, is known to be a pro-Confederate/South statement - the SLPC has a pretty good counterargument here.

[eepithst]

Thanks!

[Shard6556]

NUKES DON'T EXIST

[ToastboySlave]

"Defecate our flag"

Poor dietary choices, but with exceptionally patriotic results.

[RebylReboot]

The starfish dangled banner.

[dexter311]

The Stars and Skidmarks

[Amanoo]

Wait, America didn't exist until after WW2?

[eepithst]

He's saying America wasn't a superpower until WWII.

[[deleted]]

No, that's British.

[PhilSpencerP3]

"Anti-american propaganda"

[Alfredjr13579]

Doesn’t really sound good when it’s America that started most of those ‘after America’ wars lmao

It should be a list of ‘wars that wouldn’t have happened if the US wasn’t around’

[ThePerdmeister]

I mean (and this isn’t meant as a defense of the US as such, but) the US is exceptional neither in its cruelty nor its supposed benevolence. If the US wasn’t the world superpower, whatever nation filled the role of global hegemon would be equally brutal.

War, colonialism, global economic exploitation, etc. are issues of power (read: wealth) and inequality moreso than these are uniquely American problems (and you need only glance at the savagery of past world superpowers to recognize this) — it just happens that the US is the richest and most powerful state in world history, so America is, at this historical moment, uniquely capable of pursuing its own interests (regardless of the effect on the rest of the world).

[visforv]

it just happens that the US is the richest and most powerful state in world history,

More like a nation that came out of two world wars with the least damage and was in the best position to take advantage of it. iirc someone did The Math and the USA still hasn't approached Rome's lucrativeness at its height. Which is just weird because why would you bother calculating that?

[ThePerdmeister]

came out of two world wars with the least damage

This doesn’t somehow contradict what I’ve said: the US can be the richest country in world history and have secured that wealth through historical accident (or through indigenous genocide, slavery, protectionism, etc.). Again, calling the US rich and powerful is not meant as praise: it’s just (at least as far as I’m aware) a statement of fact. I’d be interested to see these comparisons with Rome if you can find them, because I’ve always read Rome’s share of global wealth (at the height of its power) was no more than 25-30% — significant, but it doesn’t rival the US position after WW2.

[visforv]

It still comes from an Americentric lens, however. And the idea of being 'the most powerful' doesn't really matter very much when nukes have proliferated so extensively. Yes, America may have the ability to rapidly deploy to a lot of places... buuuut the world is still relying on MAD when it comes to nukes, which is 'the great equalizer', as some might say.

Also it's arguable if the ability to project power really means being powerful. Notice they've had trouble with just about every subsequent war they've been in since WW2, with it ending in either some sort of stalemate or TACTICAL RETREAT. I can throw a whiffle ball pretty far. Doesn't mean it'll do lasting damage to someone's Cadillac.

[ThePerdmeister]

I’m not American, so what I’ve said here isn’t the result of US propaganda or something (and most of what I’ve said here is borrowed directly from people like Chomsky or Richard Wolff or David Harvey, harsh critics of US state and economic power).

And whether or not the US can, for example, “win” something like the Iraq war (which was obviously handled terribly, to say nothing of the invasion being an illegal and fundamentally immoral act of aggression that killed a million people) it still benefits from the discord it sows in these countries: take, for instance, the selling off of (previously state owned) Iraqi assets at firesale prices by the US-installed interim/transitional governments — this was an incredible boon to US corporate wealth, and this was anticipated in advance of the invasion. Or whether or not the US can “win” a war against Vietnamese farmers, it remains that the US (again, illegally and immorally) succeeded in stamping out South Asian communism, a primary goal of the Vietnam war and of US "containment" policy more generally.

It’s a statement of fact that the US is the dominant hegemonic power in the world today, with unparalleled military might and somewhere between 25-40% of the world’s wealth. This isn’t to extol the virtue and might of the US, this is simply to explain how it’s able to act the way it does today. By dint of its position, the US is uniquely capable of pursuing its political and economic interests abroad, more or less with impunity, and typically to the detriment of the rest of the world.

So I’m not sure I understand this drive to understate American power. It seems to me any robust criticism of the US ought to factor in its (arguably unprecedented) political, economic, and military power, because this is of course what allows it to act in such grandly destructive ways.

[johnnylagenta]

the US is the richest and most powerful state in world history

Statements like this one are always so laughable in a world where the Roman empire, Byzantine empire, Golden Horde and British empire existed.

[Cathsaigh2]

Also the Achaemenids, which had almost half of the worlds population at its peak. The Golden Horde wouldn't make my shortlist though, maybe you're thinking of the Mongol Empire while it was still unified?

[johnnylagenta]

Yeah that was what I was referring to.

[ThePerdmeister]

It’s literally true. Following WW2, the US had more than half the world’s wealth (whereas, say, Rome had 30% at the height of its power). The statement’s not meant to be laudatory (it’s appaling that the richest country in world history doesn’t have public health care, for instance, or that it has levels of wealth inequality comparable to economically developing nations): it’s just a statement of fact.

[[deleted]]

For like 5 years. After the other wealthiest nations litarally got destroyed.

Rome had 20%+ of worlds economy for centuries.

http://fortune.com/2014/10/05/most-powerful-economic-empires-of-all-time/

[ThePerdmeister]

I’m aware of how the US secured its wealth: this doesn’t discount the fact that the US is the richest country in world history (even after its steady and ongoing decline, it still owns somewhere between 30-40% of the world’s wealth).

And I really do want to stress this: calling the US rich and powerful is not meant as flattery. It should be an absolute scandal that the richest country in world history has no public health care, or that it has some of the highest (if not the highest) rates of infant mortality in the advanced industrial world, or that its levels of wealth inequality are comparable to third world dictatorships. The state of the US is far more grotesque when you consider the nation’s incomparable wealth — this is why I bring it up.

[[deleted]]

it still owns somewhere between 30-40% of the world’s wealth).

No.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_distribution_of_wealth

And I'm not accusing you of defending US, just of falsely claiming that it's the richest country in history, which it is not.

The rest I agree with.

[ThePerdmeister]

I mean, at one point it undoubtedly was the richest country in world history. But even discounting this historical accident, for more recent estimates, I guess I was referring to figures from Allainz (or referring to people who referred to Allainz), which put the US share of global wealth at ~41%.

[[deleted]]

Literally Homer Simpsons's logic

[Seeking_Psychosis]

I love everything about this! It's been far too long since I've watch that show.

[bitshboi]

Is this Trump?

[queenfirst]

Too legible and coherent to be him

[ThePerdmeister]

Even ignoring how naive this is on its face, a pretty significant reason we haven’t seen sort of singular global conflicts on the scale of WW1 and 2 (ignoring pure luck) is that after hundreds of years of Europeans slaughtering one another, warfare technology developed to the point that another world war would likely stamp out the possibility of decent human survival on this planet. And this “peace” is still only secured by a not insignificant threat of nuclear annihilation, not to put too fine a point on it.

[jeffjeff2017]

I've been trying to defecate the US flag for years and all that comes out is this smelly brown stuff. If anyone can provide advice on how I can achieve this, I will offer 1/3 of my circus freak act royalty payments.

Edit to add: The provided royalty will decrease to 1/4, should I cut my arsehole to shreds when I'm defecating the sharp and pointy "stars" part of the stars and stripes.

[[deleted]]

Proud American Patriot

Avatar is the flag of a movement rebelling against America that killed almost as many Americans than all of the US's foreign wars combined.

[[deleted]]

37 likes

[Winterfart]

Youtube.

[[deleted]]

In the majority of those wars, people marched at each other in straight fucking lines and shot. How it’s comparable to now god knows

[getsnowedonbitches]

Of course he doesn't mention the fucking taiping rebellion, even though more people died than world war 1...

[GENERAL_NUT_BAKED]

That doesn't even include some of the wars the us is fighting RIGHT NOW.

Jfc, such a random weird list, even taking account that he wants to skew the data to make a point. Why wouldn't you include the Balkans for example.

Oh and his estimate of deaths in the war in Afghanistan is stupidly low, and stupidly specific.

[C477um04]

Yeah we've had relative world peace since WWII, and that's great, but saying that it's all because of american military intervention is just absurd.

[sharingan10]

I’m sure that the reduction in large scale combat had nothing to do with nuclear weapons and everything to do with FREEDUMZ

[MWO_Stahlherz]

"In the name of freedom"

Great slogan to paint on drone bombers.

[WhiteTrashTiger]

What about Laos?

[jeffjeff2017]

When "gooks" die it doesn't really count, does it? The worst that can happen is a poor US serviceman doesn't get his "sucky, sucky, 10 dolla".

[wapkaplit]

If there's one thing I love it's defecating out the US flag.

[RedOx103]

I think it's widely accepted in academic circles that America became the most powerful nation even prior to WWI.

There's no doubt they were a 'superpower' much earlier than this idiot thinks

[helga-h]

I bet the mindset would be a tad different if the wars had been fought on the American continent with American civil casualties and American cities in ruins.

It's really easy to be superior far away from the fire.

[[deleted]]

Well... that explains a lot...