I liked the meditations on empathy, etc. I have no objections to the vast majority of the article... until it talks about current events, stripped of context. The article was perfectly good until it started talking about the present war in ukraine in a totally amaterial and unexamined way.
Quote:
The brutal British empire, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the current Russian invasion of Ukraine—in each case, the perpetrators think of themselves as acting rightly against an evil enemy.
This is how the soldiers might be taught to think of themselves, but this is not how the leadership thinks of themselves. The leadership does not trouble themselves with morality, only strategy. Putin does not believe he is acting "rightly" against an "evil" enemy. He believes he is defending the Russian border from NATO expansion. Anything beyond that is rhetoric.
we are just as reluctant to apply serious self-scrutiny as Vladimir Putin is to question his bizarre fantasies about the need to “de-Nazify” Ukraine.
denazification of Ukraine might be a cynical rhetorical justification for Putin's broader strategic goal of preventing NATO expansion.... But the need to denazify Ukraine is not a "bizarre fantasy" for the people DPR/LPR when the USA has been in bed with Ukrainian nazis since WW2, and has been overtly using them as pawns in their geopolitical games since 2014. The need to denazify Ukraine is not a "bizarre fantasy" for the LGBTQ+, the Roma, the Jews, and the Proletarians of Ukraine, who are victims of far right violence just as much as the breakaway republics. Even Zelensky preferred peace to the present situation, but has had US-backed fascist guns to his head this whole time, preventing him from pursuing this the way he may have wanted to.
I liked the meditations on empathy, etc. I have no objections to the vast majority of the article... until it talks about current events, stripped of context. The article was perfectly good until it started talking about the present war in ukraine in a totally amaterial and unexamined way.
Quote:
This is how the soldiers might be taught to think of themselves, but this is not how the leadership thinks of themselves. The leadership does not trouble themselves with morality, only strategy. Putin does not believe he is acting "rightly" against an "evil" enemy. He believes he is defending the Russian border from NATO expansion. Anything beyond that is rhetoric.
denazification of Ukraine might be a cynical rhetorical justification for Putin's broader strategic goal of preventing NATO expansion.... But the need to denazify Ukraine is not a "bizarre fantasy" for the people DPR/LPR when the USA has been in bed with Ukrainian nazis since WW2, and has been overtly using them as pawns in their geopolitical games since 2014. The need to denazify Ukraine is not a "bizarre fantasy" for the LGBTQ+, the Roma, the Jews, and the Proletarians of Ukraine, who are victims of far right violence just as much as the breakaway republics. Even Zelensky preferred peace to the present situation, but has had US-backed fascist guns to his head this whole time, preventing him from pursuing this the way he may have wanted to.