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Comment by ryanlol | Hacker News Reader

Or perhaps you guys just need a history lesson, this is all very mild stuff as far as repressive regimes go.

It’s not like as if they’re deliberately blowing up passenger aircraft https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103

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That was in 1988, quite a lot has happened since then. In the aftermath of it, Gaddafi was cowed and sanctioned. Libya became less far provocative and accepted blame for the incident. By the mid-00s, it seemed like the demise or reform of oppressive regimes like Libya was inevitable. America took Libya, still under Gaddafi, off it's list of state sponsors of terror. Gaddafi's reputation never really recovered though, and that reputation probably played a role in his eventual death (nobody cared to save him.) It seemed as though other leaders of repressive regimes were laying low, hoping the same wouldn't happen to them.

What we are seeing now seems like a return to form. Obviously all of this falls well short of the political violence seen in the 20th century. That's not an interesting observation. By that standard, literally everything after WWII has been a huge nothing-burger. That shouldn't stop us from observing worrying trends in the present.

It remains to be seen if there has been an uptick in such activities. I'd argue that they have never stopped, but most of them are lower profile cases that the mainstream barely notice.

There’s only an uptick in reporting.

So what changed and when? Russia never stopped assassinating their enemies in foreign countries, Litvinenko was killed in 2006.

Saudis maybe funded 9/11.

I don’t believe there’s been any kind of a return to form, there was never any quiet period. It’s just pure coincidence that a couple of these stories got reported recently.

The US hadn't recently decorated anyone for blowing up passenger aircraft either, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655.

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