Comments by "Alan Friesen" (@alanfriesen9837) on "" video.
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@jack72379 The U.S. spent forty-five years as team captain in a conflict of ideologies. Americans were expected to believe in the superiority of our system, and not believing meant having one's patriotism questioned. Most of the top brass in American government (and other organizations) grew up in that environment. And even the younger ones grew up in an environment in which we believed we won that conflict which proved conclusively that our political system was superior to all others.
Only there's one problem. Sure, not every country is going to be willing to embrace our system because "there will always be dictators who care more about their own personal power than they do about their people." But these days, when a country that doesn't embrace our system becomes highly successful and radically improves the living conditions of their people, well, that's kind of a threat to the idea that our system, and only our system, is unambiguously the best. A lot of Americans just don't want to believe that there is another way, and a lot of it is at a subconscious level. We look for reasons to find fault in countries with other systems, we make life difficult for them, and then we point out how terrible they are for using draconian measures to deal with those difficulties, for which we further punish them. It's a vicious cycle powered by our preeminence in the world, and it's sad. Our system is great for us (at least for forty-four out of forty-five administrations), but our unwillingness to accept and work with countries that have chosen other options has caused untold misery across the world. While I don't think we should be ignoring blatant human rights abuses, I think our policies designed to promote unrest in other countries exacerbate (if not not outright cause) much of those abuses, and I think if we worked with countries instead of against them to improve the lives of their people then we'd have a lot more success in alleviating so much of that global pain. But it's hard to break that Cold War mindset.
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@joeylewis9434 I don't doubt for a moment that many human rights issues are fabricated, but not for the reasons you stated. America is not looking for countries to invade, but many Americans feel that countries that are non-democratic should be destabilized so that a democratic revolution can take place. Accusations of human rights abuses act as further justification to actively sabotage a nondemocratic government for hardliners. It also works well to bring more dovish westerners into line because they genuinely empathize with the supposed victims of these abuses. Because this works so well with both sectors of western society, exiled dissidents and separatist organizations are constantly pointing out both real and fabricated instances of human rights abuses to push the United States and other western nations to support their agendas and the disruptions that they cause.
There are genuine human rights abuses and some of them are egregious. That is the case with nondemocratic countries, but it is also the case with many democratic countries, including the United States. It is important to identify genuine human rights abuses and to try to eliminate them. It is my opinion though that trying to undermine a regime only makes it more paranoid, which leads to greater human rights abuses. For people that only care about tearing down the existing government that's fine, but for people who genuinely care about the fate of the vulnerable, I believe it's counterproductive. I think a much better approach would be to help the existing governments provide for their people and discuss concerns candidly with them as friends, though you could point to a relationship like that between Saudi Arabia and the United States as an abject failure of this approach.
As for human rights abuses within these countries, at least in the United States, the population is deeply divided between those two camps listed above. Half the country doesn't acknowledge internal human rights abuses, the other half tries hard to eliminate them, but unsurprisingly, the more aggressive camp is better at controlling policy. It is a good thing though for outside observers like some of the folks posting here to call out human rights abuses within the United States and to call out the hypocrisy. But that admonition of hypocrisy shouldn't be coupled with calls for western democracies to stop complaining about the human rights abuses in other countries, but merely to work a little harder at cleaning their own houses as well, and to be a little more critical when it comes to promoting the organizations that are constantly feeding them instances of human rights abuse, especially in countries where these folks have a vested interest in the failure of government.
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