3 ms·
There are always people who go through mental contortions to justify to themselves that their own side is spotless. However, in this case there is a common and
by 4bpp 4y ago
There are always people who go through mental contortions to justify to themselves that their own side is spotless. However, in this case there is a common and much more valid objection that the framing is hypocritical, or at least based on a different and much less appealing set of standards than the implied "attacking civilian infrastructure is a war crime and humanity must unite to punish whoever engages in it".
Consider for example Mosul after the US-led campaign to recapture it in 2016 (https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2018/4/29/mosul-post-isil-a-city-struggling-to-rebuild https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2018/4/29/mosul-post-isil-...), which looks as devastated as any fought-over city in Ukraine; NATO's bombing of Serbia in 1999 (https://balkaninsight.com/2012/06/11/nato-99-bombing-in-pictures/ https://balkaninsight.com/2012/06/11/nato-99-bombing-in-pict...), which seems to be well on par with Russia's bombing of Ukraine's backline cities in this war; and indeed Ukraine's own bombing of Donetsk since 2014 (referred to in words at https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-ukraine-crisis-idUKKBN0GK12020140820 https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-ukraine-crisis-idUKKBN0GK..., and captured on video in a documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JovKkDvAU9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JovKkDvAU9Y) that mostly seemed to be criticised only based on the author's politics).
In all of these cases, the criticism of the invasion itself was already much more ambivalent in Western society - I went to a protest against the Iraq war in 2003 as a schoolkid in Germany, and was accused of "childish anti-Americanism" for it by a teacher - and the attendant destruction was nearly universally shrugged off as somewhere between "sad, but that's just how war is" and "to save this city we had to destroy it". Suggestions that the US government or its allies should face repercussions or even a war crimes trial were widely dismissed as far-left ravings (and one should not forget that when this was actually tried, they sanctioned the ICC (https://www.dw.com/en/afghanistan-why-has-the-icc-excluded-the-us-from-war-crimes-probe/a-59367096 https://www.dw.com/en/afghanistan-why-has-the-icc-excluded-t...)). Considering that the remedy for this particular case of violence implicitly suggested by the authors of OP's website seems to be to militarily empower the US and its allies further, I think the moral case being made looks rather less clear-cut.