Jorgen Udvang
Subscriber Member
I can agree with you on one thing: "Putin is wrong - full stop."Again - This is not a soccer match where you root for one team or another. The is a life and death struggle going on right now by a one country invading another under the pretense of de- Nazification. One would think they could come up with a more original excuse instead or recycling a WWII campaign, their last moment of glory in the great Patriotic War. ALL countries in Europe and North and South America have Nazis - Russia included. I don't see the Netherlands invading Hungary.
I agree with you up until the second paragraph. These (some) people either have a hard time staying on subject or are deflecting for ulterior motives. You can like Ukraine, (or Georgia, Chechnya, Syria, or Crimea) or not. But what people are saying is the Ukraine brought this on them selves, That Putin is justified in invading, and of course crimes will be committed in any invasion. that cities will be leveled. That most are propaganda, Yes truth is the first casualty of war, but truth today, with communications what they are is much harder to hide. There is black and white when it comes to life, the being alive and being dead. Putin wants to subjugate Ukraine, eradicate their culture, control their foreign affairs much as Czarist Russia did. How do we know? Putin has questioned their right to exist.
Putin is wrong - full stop. Now Finland and possibly Sweden joining NATO. The Baltic States reinforcing their defenses. Possible unrest in the aforementioned Countries, encouraged by the success Ukrainians have had against the powerful Russian Military, to say nothing of unstable Belarus. Let Putin fix his own Country so the Russian people can have a fairer more meaningful and confrontable life. What he is doing in Ukraine is wrong. The Ukrainian people have tasted life free of Russian control and will not voluntarily submit to returning. That is why they are fighting and dying.
What-aboutism might have its place in a scholastic augment or op-ed page as click bait, but not in a situation when one country invades another to restore an Empire that is blessed by the National Church.
But your black and white vision is scary. Your inability to see proportions is scary. People have been dying from war in Ukraina for 8 years, and nobody seemed to mind. People are dying in enormous numbers in Yemen at the hand of a neighbouring country with western support, and nobody seems to mind. A third of Syria is occupied by a western country and civilians bombed on a regular basis and nobody seems to mind. When Afghanistan was occupied and bombed by western countries for 20 years with tens of thousands of victims, nobody seemed to mind. Even when civilians are targeted and killed by the Ukrainian army in Mariupol (there are sufficient interviews of the locals online to verify that), nobody seems to mind.
Because there is one evil, and one evil only, and that evil i Vladimir Putin. Everybody else dying or having their lives destroyed from wars are "Whataboutism", the sacred word that means "we don't give a shit about you because we support that war".