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What Hacker News says
- > haven't gone through the kind of reign of terror that Scott's interlocutors claim they should have
I'll comment on this separately because it goes deeper into the central claim of the arrticle. If you're going to make this claim, you need to ask whether the UK and US have actually avoided such things, or merely made sure they happened in other countries instead.
The US under Woodrow Wilson enabled the Soviet Union to exist by failing to support the Kerensky government, even though the US had troops in the area, and by discouraging the other allied powers from helping on the grounds that everybody was already too exhausted after four years of war. (Not to mention that Communism wasn't of Russian origin; it was exported to Russia by American and British intellectuals, such as Jack Reed. And one of their reasons for doing so was that Communism was supposed to be more "democratic".)
The US, UK, and France created the conditions for the Nazis to take power in Germany by imposing such harsh terms in the Treaty of Versailles (terms which were nothing like what the Armistice had implicitly promised).
The UK under Chamberlain, along with France, enabled Hitler's Germany to conquer Eastern Europe by pursuing a policy of appeasement.
The US under FDR allowed Stalin to take over all of Eastern Europe at the end of WW II (which, btw, made WW II a failure in Europe since the stated objective was to free Eastern Europe from tyranny, and Stalin by any measure was a worse tyrant than Hitler) because FDR wanted to suck up to Stalin and be his friend. (For example, read the historical book Stalin's War.) And even before that, FDR and his administration (and the press, such as the New York Times) systematically lied to the American people about the true nature of Stalin's regime, which was well known to the US government (and to reporters who were there) in the 1930s. If the American people had known what was actually happening in Stalin's Russia, they would never have agreed to having the USSR as an ally in WW II or allowing the USSR to take over Eastern Europe.
The US allowed Mao and his Communists to take over China by withdrawing support for Chiang Kai-Shek. If the US had supported Chiang, the entire country of China would have a government that's basically the government Taiwan has now (since Taiwan is where Chiang and his supporters went when Mao drove them out of China). Imagine how much better the geopolitical situation would be if that were the case.
Sure, if you want to make hairsplitting distinctions, none of these counted as "state-sponsored violence" against the people of the US or UK. But Scott's central claim in the article is that it is repressive monarchy, not "democracy", that causes reigns of terror. Before making such a claim and exonerating "democracies", one should at least examine the possibility that the "democracies" actually enabled the reigns of terror. And when you examine that claim historically, you find that, yep, "democracies" were doing exactly that.
- Writing a Go Interpreter
Writing a Go Compiler
No One Cares about Crazy People
I Heard You Paint Houses
UNIX: A History and a Memoir
Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
How Asia Works
The Dream Machine
Black Earth
The Fabric of Reality
Behave (tried twice, maybe third times a charm?)
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Genius: The Life and Science Richard Feynman
Super Thinking
Man's Search for Meaning
The Cooking Gene
The Vital Question: Why is Life The Way it Is (re-read)
The Case Against Sugar
The 15 Decisive Battles of the World
The History of the Peloponnesian War
The Beginning of Infinity
The Book of Why
