Darth Wong wrote:
By what standard? That of past tyrannical empires, or present western democracies? It's easy to beat a low standard.
Well, Mike, the genesis of modern western democracy is in, what, the French Revolution? That screams bloodshed right there. The next available opportunity to pin down modern western democracy comes in 1848, the so-called "Year of Revolution" which resulted in more years of bloodshed, though it did get through some permanent reforms (if it was less successful than many of the revolutionaries fighting the old autocracies of the time desired).
Okay--so what did these new European governments do, which had in various ways allowed for extended franchise to their populaces, and would continue to expand said over the course of the coming decades? Well, of course, they went out and fought over chopping up the Ottoman Empire, and expanded vast colonial Empires which included mass slaughter of populations. Germany--which at the time had universal manhood suffrage for elections to the Reichstag (which controlled taxation, hardly a body without any power as some have claimed)--managed to kill three-fourths of the population of one people in German Southwest Africa, to cite one example.
I could use the more glaring example of what the Weimar Republic turned into, but I grant there are mitigating circumstances there.
Even by the standards of western democracy, I'm saying, the USA's actions have so far been rather good. Certainly our actions during our colonization of the PIs were worse by far, to cite one example where we were hardly guiltless, and if you wish to criticize the USA for colonial activities, you could.
