I know this is a highly charged topic, but that makes it more important to follow the guidelines, not less.
"My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that: namely, I can do something about it. So even if the US was responsible for 2% of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2% I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences.
"It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century."
That doesn't apply at all to the US failing to denounce e.g. Indonesia.
This is what he means by ethical value of these judgments.
The argument from the beginning was not about where the U.S. ranks in goodness vs. evil compared with other countries.
Many people say Chomsky is full of it when he focuses his criticism on the U.S. for actions he believes to be state-level crimes because, these people say, other countries are the true evil ones.
Chomsky's response is that even if you think the U.S. government is responsible for only 2% of the crimes in the world, it is this 2% that falls on his shoulders (and yours, and mine) as a U.S. citizen. His efforts on that 2% can have meaningful impact that can't be had on the other 98%.
But I'd feel a lot better about saying that if I didn't expect that this isn't just a rhetorical gateway to turn around and ignore the high-body count crimes in favor of the politically-fashionable ones again, since "of course not" is the only dialectal response possible.
Is people being killed ever a good thing? Almost never. Human life is inherently valuable. But is it at least more understandable when it is done in the name of trying to rid the world of a dangerous and destructive ideology? Yes it is.
That depends on who wrote the history book you're reading. By the accounts of the millions of innocents slaughtered by both sides, neither side was in "the right".
This is factually wrong, the cold war was about imperialism and spheres of influence. The US was tearing down democracies and propping up dictators left and right to counter the Soviet Union.
From 1939-1945, we sent tons and tons of weapons, cars, and rolling stock to Stalin. Were we justified in supporting him?
If you say yes, then how do you decide which murderous dictators to be willing to support? Those who will oppose more powerful murderous dictators.
I mean by that logic people will believe Marx belongs to the realm of evil thinkers because history proves that a political theory is "dangerous".
History and politics is built on nuance and precise facts, not some broad idea of how to define an ideology. Ideology can be shaped in any form and is subject to interpretation, that's why it belongs to the realm of propaganda.
I'm not defending communism nor those leaders, but saying "communism is evil because mao and stalin were murderers" is just poor argumentation.
Must be a nice life.
If Hitler murders 5 Million and Stalin murder 5 Million, we substract Hitler vom Stalin and End up with zero million. Nothing ever happened! So all we need, is enough crimes to substract from our owns, and we get away with clean hands.
And there i was muder was bad, when all i had to do, was get my muder victims family to shoot back in the general direction and hit somebody.
PS: Mugabe, Pol-Pot, Mao, Stalin are all crimes, where the US did not intervene.
It's only a crime because a victor chose to label it so, a different victor would have labeled a different thing the crime, it's all quite arbitrary in the end.
Phillip K. Dicks The Man in the High Castle is a very interesting thought experiment in that regard.
As enjoyable and gripping as the Amazon show might be, having the same show set in our reality would mean you'd be rooting for a couple of Neo-Nazis trying to revive the Third Reich. Would such a show still be as enjoyable to us? I doubt it.
No, they are not, they are only a matter of definition and framing. You defined who's worse by the number of people killed, that's one way to do it but not the only one, it also leaves a lot of wiggle room with "indirect people killed", that's where all objectivity breaks down.
Case in point: Your local hardcore communist would argue that the global capitalistic system is not just killing magnitudes of more people every year, it's keeping the remaining ones literally enslaved for life.
The moment you think it's as clear-cut like that, that's the moment you should question your position because the reality is never as clear-cut or convenient as that. It's naive to assume that the reality in which we live is the "good one" where always and only "the good guys" win and that's why we can talk about the bad guys being the bad guys, but that's exactly what you did there with your allusive "Raegen presided and encouraged the advance of human civilization and these other guys did just want to see the world burn".
Like it's something that could only happen because of Raegan and all alternative outcomes, not involving Raegan, are automatically assumed to be worse or not possible at all. I for one can imagine a number of alternate realities where Raegan would never have been the president, where the US lost the cold war, and we'd still be sitting here arguing just like this but in a slightly different setting, but "human civilization" could have advanced nonetheless.
Some of these alternative realities could be "worse", others could be "better", but I'd say the vast majority of them would be rated as "normal" for people living in said realities because without being able to experience these alternative outcomes it's pretty much impossible to build a frame of reference which ones of them are actually the "best" or the "worst".