People sometimes ask me, “why should the US participate in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine that started centuries ago and has nothing to do with the US? Why should America be obligated to participate in ancient blood feuds not of its making?”
My answer is always, “My dude, I’m so with you. Your question is true and the way you word it is perfect.” It’s totally an ancient blood feud that we have with the Russians. It started way before the grandparents of the people who built the Mayflower were even born. The US is definitely not to blame. I’ve been bashing my head against the wall here on the blog for a decade, explaining that it’s not about the NATO expansion, the non-existent CIA coups or “color revolutions.” It’s a civilizational struggle which, yes, is similar to the one between Jews and Arabs.
If America could remove itself completely from it, that would be great. But by completely, I mean just that, completely. Not disarming one side under false promises. Not trying to manage the war from afar. Just completely. But if you can’t do that, then pick a side already and stick with it.
What I do not like and actually despise is when people ask, “But why am I supposed to care about Ukraine?” It’s whiny and infantile. Nobody can make you care or feel anything at all. Your emotions are completely under your control. Stop asking for permission to feel or not feel. Stop trying to involve others in your emotional self-regulation. I have no knowledge or feelings about Taiwan, for example. Am I running around the people who do, moaning at them about why I “should care”? Obviously, not.
Stop being a snowflake already. It’s unbecoming.
I said all this after my most recent talk but in a kinder way. I didn’t want the snowflakes to start weeping right there.
Clarissa's Blog 
“Why am I supposed to care” in American English is similar to the phrase “How are you?” The answer is “I’m fine, how are you?”
In this case it means “why should I face social ostracism, and/or loss of employment for jail for not acting and speaking as if I care?”
“Silence is violence” remember that lovely bit of Stalinism?
It’s stupid, and it’s the society we have in large swathes of America.
I like to believe parts of my country are still free, and American. Maybe it’s even true.
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Yes, people are totally facing social ostracism and loss of employment for not acting as if they cared about Ukraine. That’s definitely a thing.
Seriously?
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Thank you. You weren’t talking about the general social phenomenon “why should I care about X”, you were wondering why people applied it to Ukraine? My mistake.
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I think I said what I was talking about very clearly in the post.
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The main justification for why the US got involved in Europe in the first place was the holocaust. Hitler and the nazis were simply evil who Americans should care about defeating on moral grounds. After the nazis were gone, they were replaced by the commies as a threat worth defending against.
With the nazis and commies long gone, the question of why Americans should continue to care about European conflicts is worth considering.
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Because if the US is not the world hegemon, somebody else will be. And we’ll probably not like whoever it is.
Also, because Europe is our mother civilization. When it ails, so do we.
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\ The main justification for why the US got involved in Europe in the first place was the holocaust.
Surely it was not the main justification during WW2, if mentioned at all …
“The United States joined the Allies’ fight against the Axis powers (led by Germany, Italy, and Japan) to defend democracy, not to rescue Jewish victims of the Nazi regime.”
At least, that’s the impression I got after reading a bit on the topic. The Jewish topic was hardly publicly mentioned by people in power in US.
I think, your explanation is taking the current knowledge of and (still) mainstream current attitude to Holocaust in US culture and applying it in retrospect.
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I believe most historians agree that Pearl Harbor was the definitive event for the US to send troops.
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Yeah, there was almost no awareness at all of the concentration camps and mistreatment of Jews in Germany, in the US press, until Kristallnacht. And even after that it was downplayed pretty shockingly. I’ve read pretty much all the newspaper articles from both NYT and some local papers, on the subject, during that whole span from 1933-1941. The only regular people in the US who had any notion what was going on were the ones getting letters from relatives in europe. None of that was public intel. The news largely ignored it.
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“almost no awareness at all of the concentration camps”
General knowledge of the camps came about only after the war was over.
Probably the US had some idea of what was happening but was short on specifics.
There was a great story on This American Life about an American (immigrant from Central Europe iirc) who was one of the first to talk to those who survived the camp. They barely knew how to describe what had happened to them. It’s really amazing stuff
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/197/before-it-had-a-name/act-one-7
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Yeah, some of the camps are mentioned by name in the papers, Dachau in particular I remember, but there was no conception at all about what was actually going on in there. The impression seemed to be that they were temporary internment camps– much like the US did with its domestic Japanese population– or perhaps wartime labor operations for prisoners… which would not have shocked anyone, as prison labor and prison farms were common in the US at the time (those were their own scandal). No real public info until after the war, as you say. Even the more anodyne mentions are confined to, like, page 6. Or there’s a headline, but then the article chops and all the real info jumps to a back page. Anybody who wasn’t looking for information about how bad things were in Europe, was in no danger of stumbling across the information by accident.
What was available, to anyone looking, was at least the outlines of very bad things happening to jewish populations. But it wasn’t totally clear that it was a government op, and not spontaneous mob violence. For any normal person, it would’ve been a terrific, conspiracy-theory-level leap to guess even a fraction of reality.
The only people who had some idea were those getting personal letters from Europe. I understand quite a lot of them tried to get the papers to talk about it, but failed because a letter from your second-cousin in Poland isn’t a real news source.
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Yes, I was referring to the current attitudes, not whatever people may have believed at the time.
Obviously, the US entry into the war was due to Pearl Harbour, and Asia has only become more important since then.
These days, China has replaced Japan as the main threat, in particular to Taiwan, where the most advanced chips are produced, such as the ones in the new iPad.
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By produced do you mean manufactured or invented?
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Taiwan’s tech us very impressive.
https://www.wired.com/story/i-saw-the-face-of-god-in-a-tsmc-factory/
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Yes, saying that WWII was a war to save the Jews while WWII was still ongoing might have somewhat undermined public support for WWII in the West (with white nationalists asking why exactly their sons should die for the sake of the Jews?), so the West didn’t really frame it that way until after WWII was already over. Fighting for the sake of Christian European peoples such as Poles, Czechs, Eastern Slavs, French, Dutch, Belgians, et cetera was much more appealing to Westerners, most likely.
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I wish it still were appealing.
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It is for Western leftists, though less for ethnonationalistic reasons and more because they believe in the idea of a Pan-Europe. Having Ukraine inside of the European Union would help complete the European Union, after all. Would also make it easier for the European Union to become a friendly peer competitor to the US since it would have more high-quality human capital with Ukraine.
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https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/40036-when-i-was-coming-up-it-was-a-dangerous-world
“When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they’re there.”
-George W. Bush
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