the problem isn’t necessarily pointing out the problems with any particular country, that can be done as a legitimate discussion, what gets really fucking annoying is when people only talk about the problems with a certain country and then when questioned, are like “Oh, no! We also hate it when America does this thing! We’re just talking about X country right now!” when that’s clearly false. like, you say “Fuck China for having mass surveillance” on reddit and you get 100k upvotes, 20 platinum awards and some dude’s firstborn son, whereas if you say “Fuck America for having mass surveillance” you’ll get “Hm, well, you see, this is a complicated topic, because on the one hand…” or even just “Yeah, but it’s nothing compared to China though!”
the problem is also when what you’re talking about is necessarily a comparison because no action exists in a vacuum free of context. if I say “The US is an awful, imperialist country that has invaded all these nations, and NATO has also invaded and destroyed nations, and we should not support them even if Russia is doing a bad thing because Russia’s death toll is so much lower than the West’s” then all I would get on most lib platforms is “That history doesn’t matter! What matters is the here and now, when Russia is doing a bad thing and NATO currently, at this precise moment in time, is not! Bad things are bad things! You can’t wave them away through context!”
but the question isn’t “Is Russia doing a bad thing”, I don’t think anybody would deny except the most fervent Russian nationalist that Russia has done at least some bad things in Ukraine, the question is “Who should we support in this war” and so the fact that NATO and the US has killed tens of millions of people within the lifetime of the current president and doomed hundreds of millions more to backbreaking labor in mines and plantations and sweatshops, and Russia, well, hasn’t, is a perfectly pertinent point to make when asking who to support. This is also why liberals are so utterly gobsmacked when third-world countries don’t come out against Russia, because they have been on the receiving end of this campaign of carnage that the US has wrought around the world and so, logically, think Russia is the lesser of two evils. can’t they see that Russia is evil! can’t they see that Putler is the devil doing a genocide!? they must be brainwashed by Russian disinformation propaganda! we must up our efforts to spread Correct Information!
literally the consent “isn’t there somebody you forgot to ask?” meme but with America
but this is also a very funny way of imagining how self-determination and independence movements work a lot of the time. Imagine a world where a newfound country breaks free from an existing one and then that newfound country sees that 90% of the UN, including the country they just broke free from, doesn’t recognize them for doing that and they’re just like “Well, shucks. I guess we’re going back and re-joining the country again, because these people aren’t ready to accept us yet!”