I have written and spoken about it a lot but it’s time to phrase it more directly:
When an empire – the U.S. to be more specific – takes up a role of a moral compass, the liberator, the “benign superpower”, we know too much at this point to trust and follow it blindly.
That mistrust doesn’t come from any tendencies of paranoia, contempt for the West, or uncalled cynicism.
It comes from knowing how it has behaved in various regions, what world leaders it has been working with, what paramilitary groups training, what weapons using against what population, what regimes selling weapons so, what refugees rejecting, and so much more.
As the war in Ukraine has started, we have seen some absolutely hypocritical statements made by U.S. officials.
But they’re only hypocritical if we know a bit of the context here.
And when we do, we are much better equipped to construct our own moral compasses, without any help from the U.S.
In other words, we can condemn Russian crimes ourselves; we don’t need to stand by any hypocritical statements that only add insult to injury to the tragedy in Ukraine.
This is what I illustrate and explain much better in my episode.
Resources:
- Convention on Cluster Munitions
- Cluster Munition Coalition
- Q&A: The International Criminal Court and the United States
- Why the war in Iraq was fought for Big Oil
- Everyone Is Denouncing the Syrian Rebels Now Slaughtering Kurds. But Didn’t the U.S. Once Support Some of Them?
- U.S. forces are using white phosphorus munitions in Iraq but it’s unclear exactly how
- US fired depleted uranium at civilian areas in 2003 Iraq war, report finds
- The US Poured So Many Toxic Weapons On Fallujah In 2004 That Residents Still Pay The Price
- The US spent $2 trillion in Afghanistan – and for what?
- The US’s hypocritical criticism of Russia for deploying ‘exceptional lethal weaponry’
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