Thoughts on Ukraine
Jun. 29th, 2022 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unspeakablehorrorRussia going to war with Ukraine this year seems more like something that they've been building up to than some random, out of the blue action. After all, they already did this before, back in 2014 when they annexed Crimea. And Putin's government has expended a lot of effort in recent years to try to control narratives about itself with both right and left wing Americans via propaganda through different outlets. In retrospect, perhaps this invasion has always been a major reason for investing so much energy in that over the last few years?
I think if someone's anti-war, which I am, they have to oppose all wars, not just some of them. And I think to be anti-war you have to specifically oppose the aggressors in war. Which in this case is Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine, not the other way around, and this is part of an act of aggression which began many years ago.
The US, of course, has been the aggressor in many other conflicts-Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the list goes on. And in those cases, one should not have looked at the invaded country and said 'look at all the flaws this country has--the US needs to come bring democracy to it!' And so I certainly don't think that any similar argument implying that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is in any way humanitarian to Ukrainians holds any water at all. I don't think I should only care about people in other countries when they're being harmed by the US. That's just another type of American exceptionalism--instead of people only mattering when they're being harmed by an enemy of the US, it just reverses that and says we only care about people in other countries if they're being harmed by the US. But either way, it's still a logic of American exceptionalism that only grants others conditional humanity.
I think if someone's anti-war, which I am, they have to oppose all wars, not just some of them. And I think to be anti-war you have to specifically oppose the aggressors in war. Which in this case is Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine, not the other way around, and this is part of an act of aggression which began many years ago.
The US, of course, has been the aggressor in many other conflicts-Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the list goes on. And in those cases, one should not have looked at the invaded country and said 'look at all the flaws this country has--the US needs to come bring democracy to it!' And so I certainly don't think that any similar argument implying that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is in any way humanitarian to Ukrainians holds any water at all. I don't think I should only care about people in other countries when they're being harmed by the US. That's just another type of American exceptionalism--instead of people only mattering when they're being harmed by an enemy of the US, it just reverses that and says we only care about people in other countries if they're being harmed by the US. But either way, it's still a logic of American exceptionalism that only grants others conditional humanity.