ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I mean, regardless of the truth value of that statement, I’d say I agree with Hasan. Anyone outside of the Western cultural sphere of influence (and not in Eastern Europe) will default to that position because their countries have been f’d, to one degree or another, by American/Western imperialism. It’s a very understandable position, right?
PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 1 week ago
Not really. The two have nothing to do with each other.
"The Chinese government shouldn't have shot all those people in Tienanmen Square." "Yeah, but you have to remember Western imperialism."
"The Khmer Rouge shouldn't have killed a quarter of their country's population." "Yeah, but you have to remember the Vietnam War."
"Ireland shouldn't have covered up for sex-abusing priests." "Yeah, but you have to remember Protestant oppression of the Catholics..."
The whole premise is nonsense. I do know people from outside the US who took this attitude to Putin, I can think of specific ones of them that I talked with about Putin and they told me I was an ignorant American, more or less, and Ukraine's not innocent and the US intentions in Ukraine are not good either. They thought it was hilarious that I was all heated up about Putin and (in their minds) not heated up about the US government doing more or less the exact same thing in their region of the world for the last several decades.
And then the 2022 invasion happened.
And as soon as it was apartment blocks and hospitals blowing up, power plants, shelling Chernobyl, kidnapping kids and taking them back to Russia, they all of a sudden got real fuckin' quiet about Putin kind of being an admirable guy because, what the hell at least he's trying to stand up to the US instead of getting fucked around by them or else making corrupt deals like everyone else. They weren't stupid or naive about what a war like that meant, who was paying the horrifying price, or how much or how little it was doing to solve American imperialism anywhere else in the world. And so they were shocked and horrified, watching the scale of the suffering. They didn't want to try to do little backflips to connect it to some kind of noble cause somewhere else that it was supposedly in service of.
Any other reaction, honestly to me, means you are at best some kind of sheltered and elitist person, some kind of person who feels like making excuses for innocent people dying because you want to cling to some pet theory. As the person in Hasan's chat very succinctly alluded to, I would never make that kind of excuse on behalf of the US, or for Israel or any other horrifying state-power entity that's doing awful things and spreading around propaganda about it. So why is Hasan doing it? That's fuckin' weird, don't do that.