| piercehawkeye45 |
01-05-2008 04:27 PM |
UT, your graph is skewed, keeping it to government related deaths take out a lot of them. And deaths have nothing to do with Aretha's question.
Classicman, I know Blum's stance and I don't take him to heart but he does put out some good solid stats. And stop being stupid and saying "blame it ALL on America". I have never ONCE done that and I explained that in a different thread yesterday. The US has done a lot of shit to other countries so we do have to take some responsibility for it. We exploit other countries and we do not do what is "good", but what protects our own interests, there is more than enough evidence to back those statements up.
Africa for example, I have a friend that went there to help out and he says all the Western corporations are in control, who sell their resources for extremely cheap prices and then sell back products to them for a bloated price. They also get screwed over by the WTO with behind the counter offers. If you don't think shit like this has anything to do with the welfare of foreign countries, I don't know what to tell you.
For your question, it would be stupid to guess because we are dealing with chaos theory (butterfly effect). If one thing was changed in the 1940's in a particular country, we will have no idea of what big changes would have happened in the 1960s or 1980s. It could be much better than it is today, or it could be much worse.
But we can have some insight in some situations. Iran, for example, why did operation Ajax happen in 1953? What would have happened if we didn't support a coup and replaced a socialist-leaning leader with the Shah? Why did the Iranians vote in Mohammed Mosadeeq? What did he do that turned the British and United States against him? What would have happened if we would have let them go?
I'll throw a guess out. The situation in Iran is very similar to what happened in Venezuela in 1999. A country exploited by Western oil companies decided to kick the corporations out. What is happening in Venezuela today (this is ignoring all the propaganda bullshit from both sides)? What has their GDP changed? How about their poverty rate? Are they better off before or after Chavez came in?
I will go back to my Africa example. What would happen if we stopped exploiting Africa? I will give you my guess. First, local rulers will get very rich and powerful from their resources and our prices will probably go up for various materials. Then because of the new rich and powerful leaders, militarism will be on the rise and we will see many wars and genocides with a scene most likely similar to Europe in the 700s to WWII. Political lines will change and empires will rise and fall. After a while, like Europe, will will finally see some stability in that area. Is that better than worse than what we have now? I don't know but hey, at least they are have more control than now.
We have also helped many other countries out so I can't ignore that. But once again, that gets into chaos theory. Bottom line, I have no idea what the world would be like and anything that claims too, is most likely dead wrong.
I am also tired of the idea that the world would be lost without US's help? We didn't need the British to get to where we are now and I have real doubts that many other countries need us either.
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