General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Why is Russia's invasion all the Fault of the U.S.? [View all]The Magistrate
(95,244 posts)Some on the 'further left' start with certain assumptions, which not only go unquestioned by those who hold them, but which actually conceal some fairly poisonous attitudes.
The most important of them, and the foulest, is that only the United States, or the capitalist West, is possessed of moral agency. All else, all 'second' or 'third' world entities, simply react to the actions of the United States, and do so automatically, without any real choice in the matter. The United States does thing one, and in consequence Russia or China or whoever it is simply must in response do thing two, and therefore it is the United States that 'really' is responsible for thing two having been done by some other, lesser entity.
For that is the ugly root of this attitude, which will be vehemently denied by most anyone who hews to it. For an analysis of events based on this paradigm to be true, there must be some inherent superiority to the capitalist West, in terms of both maturity and morality. No one else is quite grown all the way up, in this view, and this relieves them of any moral agency, renders them less than wholly responsible for their own actions, like minor children faced by a sharpster with a contract, who by law aren't capable of informed consent, and so cannot be held to their signatures.