> what evil looks like and who the bad guys actually are. Whataboutism aside, I really don't get what you're trying to imply with that "actually". Like, is th

> what evil looks like and who the bad guys actually are. Whataboutism aside, I really don't get what you're trying to imply with that "actually". Like, is there some country whose blemished record we pretend is terrible, but is "actually" okay when compared to Russia? Julian Assange was recently freed after spending 12 years either cooped in an embassy or in literal prisons because of the US's relentless campaign to punish him for exposing the US's war crimes. (And yes, there are many things to dislike about Assange and his support for Russia is a pretty big one, but the US would have hunted him regardless of these things.) Is the message that the US aren't actually the bad guys? That they're only the bad guys until you compare them to more violent and more openly criminal regimes? In that logic, isn't Russia not-actually-the-bad-guys because it has committed fewer war crimes than ISIS or the Nazis or the Myanmar junta? (Or maybe not. I don't know the numbers for any of those.) The lesson can't be that we're periodically reminded of evil when it's unambiguous and performed by polities opposed to US hegemony. All states do evil given the opportunity, and the only way to close off that opportunity and call them out whenever it happens, whether they are Russian, American, Israeli, Arab, French, Brazilian, Papuan or whatever else.