I find it troublesome to listen to the person who claims that Russia is fighting in Ukraine in a more humane way than the US in their wars
[https://civilek.info/en/2023/04/30/noam-chomsky-russia-fight...]
[https://civilek.info/en/2023/04/30/noam-chomsky-russia-fight...]
"America bad" people are also "Russia not so bad" people. These are highly valuable people for Russia propaganda, of course. They're literal useful idiots.
Not really relevant to this tho, it’s a question of philosophy. His naïveté in foreign policy isn’t really relevant
Oh you’re talking about the First Gulf War started by Iraq invading and conquering Kuwait and the bombing campaign freed Kuwait as an independent country, destroyed Iraq’s civilian massacring Scud missiles, and left Iraq intact?
The implications here are clear what he meant. Everything else in that headline is spin. This feels exaggerated IMO
Moral relativism with geopolitics is cheap pseudo-intellectual play. America may not be perfect but we are definitely the good guys compared to Russia or China
Or just a top 5:
- Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- Battle of Okinawa (and just the habit of American soldiers on Okinawa to rape and kill the locals in general)
- No Gun Ri massacre, Korea
- The use of Agent Orange in Vietnam
- My Lai massacre, Vietnam (really, most of the Vietnam War and Korea. Americans really do like killing Asians in the most violent and horrible ways it seems.)
- Haditha, Iraq (and arguably the entire Iraq war, which was waged under false pretenses to redirect American bloodlust after 9/11 towards the neocons' existing goals to "democratize" the Middle East and distract the public from Saudi involvement in the attacks.)
- Abu Ghraib as a runner up just because stacking pyramids of naked, tortured prisoners of war is just kind of banal compared to everything else.
Now does any of this mean other countries also don't commit war crimes? No. But the US has arguably committed more war crimes than any other country, going back to the continent-wide genocide against the natives. Is this because the US is more evil than all other countries? Subjectively, yes, but I would argue that the US as a nuclear superpower simply has no external limit on its capacity to commit war crimes and therefore commits the most simply because it can get away with it. If other countries were in America's shoes, they would probably be committing war crimes just as often.
Outside of strictly defined "war crimes", we have a very long history of interventionism, imperialism, support of coups, installation and support of dictators, overthrow of governments, military actions with foreign nations to install our own form of government / economy / morality. We've destabilized whole regions and nations, birthed massive terrorist organizations, overthrown countries, annexed territories and sovereign nations, and we continue to invade any nation that doesn't have nukes with our special forces (or to support foreign special forces) to attack targets of value.
Stalin was a mass-murdering fuckhead, for sure. But the USSR's actions look a whole lot like the New Imperialism every other major nation has been practicing since the 19th century. Putin is a new Stalin, for sure. But in the time between Stalin and now, we, the USA, have pulled wayyyyy more heinous shit on the world than Russia has.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_imperialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_United_States_for... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_state-sponso... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_killing#Use_by_the_Un... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_U... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...
Here we have a person denying eyewitness testimony of Genocide. Surely we all have to learn from such a great individual
He is garbage!
I think you may be ignorant to the extent and type of crimes that Russia is committing in Ukraine.
>> “There are examples of cases where relatives were forced to witness the crimes," he added. "In the cases we have investigated, the age of victims of sexual and gendered-based violence ranged from 4 to 82 years."
A life of no evil cannot be perpetuated from will alone. It can be lived, and possibly perpetuated in extremely narrow likelihoods, but not through force of will. If you would like to complain that this suggests it is unfair if you are to survive in this world, yes. Though I wouldn't call it unfair. Consider this, if it's a function of luck, it is truly the most fair thing of all. Far more than if it were simply left up to will, which gives a discriminatory advantage to those with better skills of utilizing and applying their will.
I like to think of it like a system of feedback loops. A naive pursuit of lofty moral heights naturally creates a vacuum in its wake, where whorls of moral lows collect and aggregate. The reverse also holds true. Should we accept evil being done because it will spawn a great good to balance things out? Paying the cost up front. I find the idea no more absurd than the supposedly logical inverse. Perhaps the ultimate good was not to fight a war, but to recognize its increase in likelihood and defend against evil's manifestation in the first place in a less reactionary way. Failing to do this, we are left with a moral debt to pay. Playing games of gods and devils so to speak, it's like a finger trap puzzle. The more you struggle, the tighter you become bound.