It’s getting quite cold in DC tonight but a large group of young black men gathered for a protest. I was curious what it was they were protesting in the cold on a Saturday night and approached. It turned out that the men were there to discuss the situation in Israel.
I think it’s deeply touching that in a city where it’s very obviously very difficult to be black these young men would care enough about what’s happening all the way across the world and would get together to discuss it. It’s not important whether you agree with them or not, I believe, to feel proud of these young men.
Clarissa's Blog 
Would you be proud of them if they were protesting against Ukrainian independence from Russia?
Most street protesters aren’t interested in “discussing” anything. They come into the streets with fixed extreme views favoring one side or the other on a controversial issue. They have strong feelings, but little accurate factual information about the topic of their rage — especially when their protest involves foreign countries that the protesters have little knowledge of, and no direct connection to at all.
In a free country, excitable crowds have the right to make noise, but the clamor is rarely helpful.
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Ukraine was never part of Russia and couldn’t get independence from it. But yes, I’d be super excited if I could hope they had heard of Ukraine’s existence. Mostly, even students of journalism are unaware. Which is a shame since it’s the largest country located entirely in Europe.
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But you won’t see any protests in America addressing either pro- or anti-Ukrainian views, unless the protesters are by ethnic Ukrainians. (The pro-Putin viewpoint is largely thankfully limited to lefty academics writing for obscure rags like “The Nation.” Those supposed intellectuals won’t get their shoes wet by actually going into the streets.)
In the U.S., the favorite foreign country singled out for street protests is Israel. The pro-Israeli protests are almost always by American Jews in locations like NYC, whereas the vast majority of pro-Palestinian street protests have few Jewish or Muslim protesters in the crowd — in other words, people with no direct knowledge of the Middle East situation at all. They’re simply angry about vague ideas of “Western imperialism” and “colonial oppression.” Many of those protests are organized by international groups like A.N.S.W.E.R, which are big fans of dictatorships like North Korea and Iran.
Lenin would have called them “useful idiots” — but their protests here in America about situations half the world away aren’t helpful, not in the least.
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Again this is not true. You are just not paying attention. There have been a number of pro-Ukrainian demonstrations in DC and even in NY in front of the UN attended by people of Baltic, Volga German, Crimean Tatar and other heritages in addition to people of Ukrainian descent.
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The problem is that nobody who’s not from the region is paying attention or has any interest whatsoever. The reason is that the war in Ukraine doesn’t lend itself to being interpreted in terms of American tribal allegiances. And most people are too limited to cate about anything but signaling these allegiances.
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I am pretty sure that American triabal allegiances and not from the region are not not mutally exclusive. Not from the region being defined as up four generations now in the US. A lot of US tribal alliegance is to tribes in the region like Lithuanians, Poles, Germans from Russia, and even Ukrainians. While such groups are not as strong as Jews or Armenians they have not exactly been missing from American politics either. Both of which are also from the region.
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The pro-Ukrainian protests that you mention don’t get attention on the national television news media in America, so very few Americans are aware of them. Protests involving Middle-East issues are much more widely televised.
There are usually around a dozen (rough guess) protests on various issues every single day in Washington, DC, and the vast majority if them get no mainstream press at all.
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This hasn’t been my experience at all. There have been longstanding weekly demonstrations in front of the Russian embassy in Tallinn for years now. All of the people I know involved in those demonstrations are extremely well informed.
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Well, Tallinn is a LOT closer to Russia than Washington, DC is to the Middle East, and I would expect anyone living in the Balkans under the direct threat of potential Russian aggression to be considerably more knowledgeable about the actual facts than is the case in many U.S. protests by college-age kids who are simply responding to campus cultural group-think to automatically oppose some evil ideas called “imperialism” and colonial oppression.”
Of course, you may find a few people in these protests who can back up their partisan views with selective facts that seem to support their position. But when pressed, most U.S. protesters are reduced to shouting poster slogans.
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