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.

  • Metalorg [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • newerAccountWhoDis [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.

        • newerAccountWhoDis [they/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Who gets political points for acting benevolently towards refugees? I only ever heard dismissive rhetorics directed at that topic.

        • Metalorg [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          The welfare of the refugees isn't the important bit. The main thrust is to show how much of a beast their aggressors are.

    • AcidSmiley [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • Metalorg [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        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).