What?

Still not enough - I'm not even including general drought and starvation caused by Mao in those numbers - one of his five-year-plans alone killed (roughly) six million people. That woulda certainly caused a bigger spike than shown there.

I don't follow your math, Ibram: 6 million over five years is a little more than a million a year. The graph shows that for about 1947-1953, 1958-1963, and 1966-1970. And the years in between aren't that far below a million a year, either.

Well, the graph starts in the 20th century, so it does not show deaths in the 19th century to the American Indians, deaths from government-condoned slavery, and, if war is included, the Civil War and War of 1812.

It also only counts deaths directly attributed to a government. As one of the world's top weapon suppliers and a supporter of numerous repressive regimes and insurgent groups, the US would certainly show up on the map if we accounted for that.

We didn't score the goals but we certainly should be credited for the assists.

The map doesn't even appear to list the Korean and Vietnam Wars, although there is a set in the 1970's for the Cambodian genocide.

By some accounts, the U.S. dropped 8 million tons of bombs onto Vietnam (and Cambodia), and according to that chart, we didn't hit anything. Either the chart is wrong or someone needs to go back to flight school.

You mean you didn't serve with Mobile Army Surgical Hospital 4077?

According to the other lying administration, we killed everyone in Nam three times over. Therefore the chart must be wrong. Nixon (like George Jr) would not lie.

It so funny to watch you guys struggle to apply "original sin" to your own country. Here's a hint for you: when we were arming insurgents and supporting regimes the most, we were actually fighting the schools of thought which produced a lot of the biggest areas of color you see on the chart. The numbers that we armed did not produce big areas of color.

Oh, haha, that flew over my head.

I wonder if it'll be good luck if it shits on you...

So as long as we are fighting people who are evil, we can never do anything wrong? Sorry to exaggerate but that is exactly how you are coming off. Fighting evil with evil doesn't equal good UT.

But, I mean, we can never do anything wrong. I mean we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan to save lives right? (hint: no)

I don't know how you take my attitude as, but I do not think America is good but I do not think it is pure evil either. There is always some balance. The United States is not a "good" country, those do not exist, we are only protecting our interests like every other country in this world. We just have the power to do it more covertly.

.........I doubt it.

That you really feel that way is truly sad.

That you feel that way is truly ignorant. Patriotism for patriotism's sake is nothing but self-blinding anti-intellectual brainwashing.

Thats bullshit Ibby. What is sad is that neither you nor PH have any idea of how awesome a country America is.

I may be a lot of things, but on this subject, ignorant is not one of them.

Pierce, it seems you've missed the Hiroshima-Nagasaki calculus. It's all out there in Estimate Land, but roughly 225,000-250,000 deaths from those two strikes were the price of not taking an estimated one million casualties on the Allied side of the ledger alone, with approximately two to three million estimated for the Japanese. Concomitant general damage for Operation Olympic would have made Kyushu and Shikoku look like a giant rake had gone over those islands from one end to the other. Tokyo was hoping to stop a very experienced army whose every soldier had a semiauto rifle plus support weaponry of every description and complete air supremacy with war emergency manufactured matchlocks and bamboo spears. Such army as they had left had boltaction rifles, badly designed machine guns, and plane crashes by way of cruise missiles.

Any question what would have happened, or of the eventual outcome anyway? If you want to put it romantically, Hiroshima and Nagasaki died that Japan might live. It did take the Emperor Hirohito's word to convince Imperial Japan that it had suffered quite enough, but even so, one plane, one bomb, one city was easy math to do.

I'd say it's pretty well proven that we did save lives that way, simply enough by the shortening of the war.

If we are fighting people who are evil, who cares if we do something wrong? Frankly I do not, and I have trouble believing in the honesty of those who do. Inerrancy on our country's part is not something I'm going to expect -- though I might expect fewer errors from one group, contrasted with another. Wars have errors in them. The idea is to make the other poor dumb SOBs collapse under theirs. Patriotism may be the last refuge of the scoundrel, but one-note anti-Americanism is the first property of the moronic. I make a hobby of demonstrating my intellectual power before those who are absolutely desperate not to credit me with any. It's fun watching them squirm and choke down their just deserts, and watching the cherished delusions they thought were an adequate philosophy of life trickle away.