Superpowers are hypocrites (follow-up)

The following comes from a self-indulgently expansive footnote in the preceding article Superpowers are hypocrites.

After publication, I read Socialists Fight for a Future Without War by Ronan Burtenshaw (Jacobin), which seems to hit many of the same points I made above, while being simultaneously more eloquent and informative.

“We hear very little today about Britain’s role in the NATO-led war in Libya in 2011, which demolished that state, left its people in the hands of warlords, and pushed thousands to flee and drown in the Mediterranean. Nor do we hear about Britain’s complicity in the ongoing war in Yemen, conducted by our ally Saudi Arabia with our weapons, £17.6 billion of which have been provided by BAE systems to the Saudis since 2015. The United Nations estimates that 377,000 Yemenis have died in that conflict.

“These lives are not any less or any more important than the lives of Ukrainians. We should fight to end all of these wars, and all of the wars yet to come.”

The U.S. and other NATO nations similarly choose to whom they wish to sell weapons and whom they choose to condemn for using them. People very cynically choose whom to care about and whom to ignore.

I’ve seen Swiss people castigating themselves publicly for not having supported Ukrainians sooner, but I’ve never seen anyone do so for Yemenis or Libyans (or any of myriad other beleaguered peoples).

People generally support the official good guys against the official bad guys. When the discomfort from peer pressure exceeds the discomfort of having to actual care about other people, they relieve that pressure by pretending to believe in a cause for a little while.

People get there a lot faster if someone can explain to them how it might affect them directly[1]. Attacking Ukraine is an attack on Europe, which is infinitely worse than killing brown people in the sand somewhere that no-one would ever want to visit on vacation.