Americans have strong opinions about the war in Ukraine. It seems custom made for American worldview; innocent defender attacked by an overwhelmingly malevolent aggressor who we can also diss as incompetent, and best of all for us, the noble defenders are WASPs like Americans (pay no attention to the dark skinned folks intentionally stranded in inclement weather low on food, etc). And, while stuff like PayPal pulling support hurts ordinary Russians, we'll gladly cheer them protesting their evil government, right?

A little like how in Hong Kong, the noble protesters were oppressed by our vicious police. Or how Arab-Israeli conflict is decontextualized and simplified to evil colonial honkies oppressing the noble local brown people. The good guys prevail, the bad guys lose right? And meanwhile, here in *America*, land of invading or occasionally bombing the third world, police murder African Americans, ICE does horrific things to Latinos, protests are put down with a self righteously sadistic show of force.

I feel there's an element of straight up racism here - I mean the bad guys are what, they couldn't possibly be us, they're *Eastern* possibly commie Russians (how many Americans think Putin's government is still somehow communist?), scheming Jews who control everything, East Asians with no regard for individuality and human life, right? In contrast when was the last time you heard about Basque or Catalonian independence, maybe it's just that we aren't supposed to hate Spain the same way (and could that be due to who *won* the Spanish Civil War)?

But what's under that?

I don't think there's a functional difference between Putin, Netanyahu, Xi, Trump, Biden, or any of these other guys. Conservatives throughout the world are pretty much the same damn thing; and similarly, a policeman probably packs the same fuckton of munitions and lack of accountability regardless of his origin and language.

I think our media keeps hyping these terrible actions by other countries so that we don't question the USA, how we work, what we do to the rest of the world. Gotta keep to the narrative that only the wingnut far left is concerned about this stuff and *normal centrist moderates* clearly care about what's going on - for after all they're upset about whatever latest dickwaving episode in Ukraine, Gaza, Hong Kong?