re: #36 lostlakehiker

Moral considerations DO enter into it. But there are heavy weights in the scales on both sides. The rise to power of communism around the world has been attended by mass murder on a scale utterly dwarfing what tinpot south american dictators get up to.

If you’re averting another Killing Fields, then it is scarcely possible to do enough harm that you ought to have just allowed it instead. Other communist regimes were not that insanely evil, but they were all deliberately and systematically evil. Castro included.

Stopping something like that may require harsh measures, including assassinations. Singapore’s president Lee Kuan Yu saved Singapore from a communist takeover but it wasn’t pretty. Greece was kept out of the communist orbit and again it wasn’t pretty. But ugly or not, sometimes fire must be fought with fire.

Then why didn’t we assassinate Jorge Rafael Videla? I think we know the answer to that. You want a killing field look at Argentina and Jorge Rafael Videla. 30,000 dead. But yes, these crimes were committed in the name of anti-Communism.