It's very kafka or PK dick or some other surreal author thing. I know there's a genocidal war in Yemen where the Saudis and the US are indiscriminately murdering as many Yemeni people as possible using famine and disease and the destruction of all civilian infrastructure.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, people are finding dead civilians in towns and labelling it genocide.
But the numbers of dead civilians, relative to other modern wars, is very small. Like "The US kills this many people at a single wedding then writes them off as collateral damage" small.
And there's no recognition, reflection, or awareness of this. It's like the War on Terror never happened. It's like Yemen doesn't exist. It's like staring through the internet in to a parallel reality. it's so, so fucking bizarre. And I honestly don't know what to make of it. Pure ignorance? Maybe, people are very uninformed. Racism? Probably, Ukrainians have been promoted to "White People" while Yemenis are firmly brown. Completely guileless hypocrisy? It's okay when our side does it? We're the good guys so our murders are justified while the evil orkish enemy are bad guys and their murders are unjustified?
Fucking bizarre. Just fucking bizarre. And absolutely no mention of similar killings by Ukrainian forces in Donbas.
i mean, these are the same media outlets that all ran "check out these fuckin' nazis in Ukraine" articles a few years ago, but now swear blind that it's Russian propaganda
It's been surreal watching the media narrative go from "Yes, there are nazis in Ukraine but that doesn't justify Russia's invasion" to "What nazis? You mean Azov? They're not nazis anymore, only some of them are, maybe. The real nazis are the Russians. Ukraine is akhshually the least nazi country in Europe you fool, you absolute moron"
Turns out the way to get Americans to care about civilian casualties is to make the victims white and the perpetrators neither the US nor a US ally
Abstract seems to point to a liberal leaning slant, as if to imply that liberal media outlets don't engage in duplicitous behavior themselves. That being said, it's still useful to show how "partisan" hackery within the media shapes opinion.
I was talking with people from my work. They've told me that I should'nt go to Decathlon etc because they didn't pull off from Russia. I've told them Hey, when US killed 1 million people in Iraq nobody was banning their companies. They told me 'but that war didn't affect you personally'. Like motherfucker every major crisis, refugee crisis, war in Syria, surge of right wing in the West, everything is the consequence of this fucking war.
Love to be so explicit that I outright state that 1 million people got killed by my nation and that I and no one I know should care because it didn't "personally affect" me.
Bonechilling
it's the racism (Yemenis are not white, and Ukrainians are )
it's the nationalism (Yemenis are not a US ally, Saudis and Ukrainians are)
it's the capitalism (gotta keep that petrodollar going)
it's the ignorance (people are getting ukraine propaganda beamed into their brains 24/7, while most Americans don't even know Yemen exists unless they like read Jacobin or some shit)
:shrug-outta-hecks:
The four horsemen of all that is wrong in this world
yea I know sexism is missing
That Bad Faith podcast episode posted here had Blumenthal mention that Ukrainians are the white Palestinians for first-world shitlibs to pretend to care about.
Yes it has taken it's illustrious place as a bullet point in the 'china bad' gish gallop
Reminds me of westernerd crying their hearts out about the Syrian refugees but not caring at all about Afghan or Iraqi refugees. Their tears were only in service of the demonisation of Isis as a new threat, and in support for destroying the Asaad government.
There is a long history of this. They basically made the Dali Lama a Saint to demonise China.Lol where I'm from people who don't care about (or, rather, despise) Afghani refugees don't care about Syrians either. And people sympathetic to refugees never made much of a difference.
Who gets political points for acting benevolently towards refugees? I only ever heard dismissive rhetorics directed at that topic.
The welfare of the refugees isn't the important bit. The main thrust is to show how much of a beast their aggressors are.
I'm more used to :frothingfash: thinking that it's a "pull factor" when we don't let Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans drown in the Mediterranean. Geopolitically, it makes little sense to distinguish here, either, IS would never have been a thing in the first place if the US (and their brave, staunchly anti-refugee allies Poland, UK and Australia) hadn't wrecked Iraq.
ofc, that's my perspective as a European from a country that actually took in sizeable numbers of refugees from all of these countries, Americans who've never seen a muslim irl may be familiar with a different discourse around these subjects.
Americans did talk up about ISIS being a new level of threat, like an ultra-terrorist group. But the migrants were discussed as a "European migrant crisis". I seem to remember right wing pundits saying ISIS would sneak into France or wherever to destroy Christiandom. Because 1 poison m&m would spoil a whole bowl of them. (The most American analogy I can imagine).
We’re the good guys so our murders are justified while the evil orkish enemy are bad guys and their murders are unjustified?
Pretty much this.
The usual wording is "nice whataboutism, how late is it in st. petersburg?", but yes, that's always the sentiment behind that. we're the good guys, so just like in the movies, the people we kill probably deserved it or killing them was at least one of these hard decisions you have to make for the greater good.
no matter how hard you keep pushing, as long as the person you're arguing with believes in the "we're the good guys" part, they have a means to deflect what you're saying. it is that believe, in "the West" as a force for good, that maintains cultural hegemony in the US, the EU and their allies. any worthwhile anti-imperialist agitation starts with undermining it.
It's the deepest brain worm and I know so many succs who will criticize American militarism but refuse to be critical of military support to Ukraine.
