“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” That statement is often misattributed to Edmund Burke. After Russia invaded Ukraine, many Americans who didn’t have anything to say about the invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq, much less torture at Guantánamo and elsewhere, or Yemen, or Palestine, suddenly started wearing blue and yellow flags. They weren’t good before, so how can these self-serving souls think they are suddenly being good now?
The Russian invasion of Ukraine prompted the usual American response of imposing economic sanctions on Russia and Russian nationals. You only have to look at Cuba and Iran to see how consistently ineffective sanctions are. To the contrary, they tend to increase the popularity of the targeted government as a a siege mentality sets in.
The two-party system has infused American politics with a sick binary obsession. From environmentalism to food choices to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we are constantly being told that we have to pick a side. In reality, of course, it’s totally OK to sit out these things.
Nothing that Russia is doing in Ukraine is something that the United States has done many times elsewhere over the years. But there’s a big difference in the way that these events get covered. When the US does something horrible, it is dismissed as an incongruous departure from standard American values or simply not covered at all.
Much of the opposition to student loan forgiveness boils down to bitterness. Why should people who suffered under a stupid system subsidize young people so they don’t have to suffer as well?
White people are socially prohibited from using the N-word, while Black Americans are not. Some white people complain about being excluded from this “right.” Although one has to wonder, why do they care?
The United States has a habit of arming and funding sides in civil conflicts that later become enemies. Here we go in Ukraine, supporting a questionable government of a country Americans couldn’t find on a map two months ago.
From gas prices to inflation, President Joe Biden is determined to blame Russia for everything that’s going wrong — even stuff that happened before Russia invaded Ukraine.
After a gunman opened fire and set off smoke bombs in a Brooklyn subway, the NYPD investigation was hampered by the fact that none of the cameras in the station were working. According to officials, many of the surveillance cameras in the subway system are out of order at any given time.
It’s impossible to know whether any of this is true or even if US intelligence agencies really believe it, but part of the propaganda war against Russia is spreading the message that president Vladimir Putin is out of touch, doesn’t really know what’s going on and is losing his mind after two years of COVID-19 related lockdowns. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the Russians believe the same things about American president Joe Biden.
