“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.
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.
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.
Regardless of how you feel about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the fact that Congress quickly allocated $13.5 billion for military aid to a country which is not even an American ally while over half a million Americans are sleeping outside should make us reconsider our national priorities.
Defenders of American imperialism cleverly use the slur “whataboutism” in order to denigrate anyone who points out that the United States doesn’t have the moral standing to criticize other countries in matters of war and peace.
If you like your podcasts focused like a laser, this isn’t your episode. Cartoonists Ted Rall and Scott Stantis are as scattered as the world itself in their takes on foreign crises in Ukraine and the Taiwan Strait and the weird prospects for the 2024 presidential election.
Western nations including the United States have imposed brutal sanctions against Russia in an effort to derail its economy. However, the world is so interconnected and dependent on Russian energy that these countries are shooting themselves in the foot. Effectively, the sanctions are against ourselves.
