Do you guys compare more recent tragedies to some past event to try to gauge the level of atrocity? When 9/11 happened did people in the UK say this is 6 times worse than the troubles or some shit? Or is that just an American thing?

  • arymandias [none/use name]
    ·
    1 year ago

    The MH-17 airplane downing over the Ukraine (2014 I think) was compared to 9/11 in The Netherlands, percentage wise it came quite close and because the Netherlands is a small country many people knew people that died. But it did not lead to a 9/12 kind of response mostly because the Netherlands is not really capable of ‘dealing’ with Russia.

    Also interestingly, lots of time was spend figuring out who exactly shot down the plane, but I don’t really remember any active inquiry into why a passenger jet was allowed to fly over an active conflict zone.

    • GriffithDidNothingWrong [comrade/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      1 year ago

      That's interesting. Did it impact the treatment of Russian immigrants living in The Netherlands? Or were there nationalistic songs written by the Dutch equivalent of country music artists or anything like that?

      I remember hearing about MH-17 but it was kind of a blip on the anti-russian radar in the states

      • arymandias [none/use name]
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        As I did not know any Russian at that time, it is hard for me to answer that with certainty but I suspect not. I currently live in Berlin and know many Russians and even with the Russia-Ukraine war going on, Germans seem to be quite good at separating Russians from the Russian government. So I suspect that was the case as well in The Netherlands.

        As for nationalist music, that concept is so culturally foreign here that you would not be considered to be mentally 100% if you listened to or wrote such a song.

        • GriffithDidNothingWrong [comrade/them]
          hexagon
          ·
          1 year ago

          Huh. Good to know, thanks. Americans go hard with the patriotism. Like, do you have sports team fans that are so into their team that its their whole identity? We have people that are like that with the country, loads of them. They put flags everywhere and, sadly, they write songs. Not good ones mind you