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> ... the US preying on its neighbors the way Russia and China are currently doing

Well, that's a matter of perspective isn't it? Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Panama, Puerto Rico, Chile, El Salvador, Venezuela, the list goes on. There's a Wikipedia page dedicated to all the US backed coups since 1945 [1] it happens so often.

We've had a post-WW2 history of deposing democratically elected countries (in the Americas and elsewhere) to suit the interests of Western corporations. Who exactly are we protecting?

> ... it was a policy aimed at keeping wars between European colonial powers away from the newly independent countries in the Americas

Where is Moscow?

> ... people in the Americas shouldn't have to die in wars just because one European king insulted another.

Ok, but what about American belligerence? Pinochet and Noriega spring to mind.

Aso, I reject the contention that colonial wars were the product of European kings insulting one another. The interests were and always have been material. Even the Crusades (which were sold on Christian conflict with Islam) were fundamentally materialist in origin.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

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bgwalter 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You better edit the Wikipedia article to remove the propaganda. According to that, since Roosevelt the Monroe doctrine has been repurposed for hegemony in the Western Hemisphere:

Starting at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine#Roosevelt_Coro... and further.

	▲	StanislavPetrov 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		It is clear through any remotely honest reading of history that hemispheric hegemony was the whole point since Monroe. If you go back and read the speeches and literature from ~200 years ago from the time of Monroe it is pretty explicitly stated.

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MangoToupe 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> For starters, this propaganda often mischaracterizes the Monroe Doctrine as the US preying on its neighbors the way Russia and China are currently doing, when in fact it was a policy aimed at keeping wars between European colonial powers away from the newly independent countries in the Americas.

...so we can freely do as we please. Of course we've been preying on our neighbors. We've been invading and deposing all across the Americas to force alignment with our interests for well over a century now. We even have terrorist training camps hosted on our soil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_f...

What, do you think that our invading Grenada, or Panama, is somehow in their interests? It's a flagrant violation of international law and sovereignty. To imagine that this is somehow an abnormal deviation from our "protection" of our neighbors is... well, I honestly didn't realize anyone thought that way anymore.

Furthermore, we didn't enforce this doctrine when France invaded (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_of_Saint_Pierre_and_Mi...), nor in the Falklands war.

Look I can understand not thinking america is "evil" or entirely machiavellian, but it seems just as absurd to take any noble intentions we claim to have at face value. The monroe doctrine is as good an example of this as any.

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corimaith 4 days ago | parent [-]

>Panama

92% of Panamans supported the invasion to despose Noreiga and actually would have preferred the US do it earlier back during his second coup.

Truth be speaking, I would where you are getting your history, if not just from skewed leftist internet Podcasters. Not mentioning the larger context of the Cold War and the opinions of the people on the ground does look more like lying by omission.

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MangoToupe 4 days ago | parent [-]

I read history books like anyone else, the cold war was just straight retarded, and we trained Noriega (at the very school I already linked to). Furthermore just because I want someone to invade and liberate us doesn't mean it's not a violation of international law and sovereignty.

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corimaith 4 days ago | parent [-]

>The cold war was just straight retarded

That's not an opinion that most will agree with, certainly from the USSR and the USA's own perspectives. I do wonder the kind of grades one would get if they wrote that down in a history class in any nation. And the more you understand history, both US and the USSR's actions do make perfect sense given their local contexts that most would be making the same decisions in the same position.

>I want someone to invade and liberate us doesn't mean it's not a violation of international law and sovereignty.

I tend to think more about what is the best course of action that benefits the people on the ground and the long term. The idea of sancrosanctity of "sovereignity" is better understood as a social construct to justify oppressive power structures, as it's reflection in reality is highly contentious. The same with International Law, you are taking a literalist position when International Law is better understood as gentlemen's agreements, which is irrelevant in the context of the ontological conflict between two sides that supercedes the notion of law in the first place.

	▲	jmyeet 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		There's been a lot of revisionist history with the World War 2 and the Cold War that really understates the USSR's instrumental role in defeating Germany. Fascism was popular in the US. Henry Ford shared his thoughts by publishing The International Jew [1]. Hitler was a fan. Ford was mentioned by name in Mein Kampf. We had the Business Plot [2] in 1933. There was a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939. The German American Bund was present until 1941. On the other side of the Atlantic, Stalin had initially sought an anti-German alliance with Britain and France but was rebuffed, leading to the deal with Hitler. The US had ~400,000 casulaties in the European campaign and none really until D-Day in 1944. The USSR lost somewhere between 26 and 30 million people in WW2, something only really revealed by a 1959 census. Had Germany defeated the USSR and taken MOscow in 1941-1942, we would live in a very different world. The result of World War 2 was that Hitler lost but the fascists won. Under the guise of fighting Communism (eg the Truamn Doctrine, leading to the Korean and Vietnam wars). NATO was an imperial project. Charles De Gaulle (in the 1960s) went so far as to say Western Europe was in danger of becoming a US protectorate. We all know about Operation Paper Clip (I hope) but less known is how Nazis found their way into NATO. Adolf Heusinger went from Hitler's Chief of the German High Command to Chairman of the NATO Military Committee. And he wasn't the only one [3]. So when that commenter called the Cold War "retarded", I suspect they're referring to how the US took up Nazi Germany's fight against Communism. The whole Red Scare was terrible for average American citizens. It was used to dismantle the labor movement and unions and ultimately led to Nixon, Reagan and Clinton and the destruction of real wages and living conditions. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_Jew [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot [3]: https://www.historynet.com/these-nato-generals-had-unusual-b...