Whenever I talk to any Democrat supporters, they by-default cheer their Presidents and then I’ve to remind them of their leader’s illegal wars and war crimes. They condemn those acts and they go back to their cheerleading role - Why do they keep forgetting atrocities committed by their leaders? Why do they accept war criminals as their leader?
Gonna disagree with some of the crowd here and say I think those people typically aren’t bloodthirsty/supportive of war. They’ve never believed many examples of inhumanity have been direct consequences of democratic leadership, and some (I have the Gaza genocide in mind here) they’ve never believed existed at all. They’ll see an “expert” voice an opinion that they’re already inclined to believe at present. The “expert” authoritatively cites evidence that they’re not familiar with, so seems legit enough. They’re not going to trust you to have knowledge the “expert” doesn’t, but they’re not interested in holding the discussion with you because they don’t carry the mythical knowledge that would win them the argument. They concede the point ahead of time to avoid conceding after a debate that didn’t convince them. It’s not forgetting, it’s pretending that they agree with your assessment.
A huge factor is how detached we are from atrocities that don’t touch us. I really believe that if one of these people had a friend or family that were affected by this, they would think a lot more deeply on culpability. I lived in Dearborn during the last election and I didn’t get the sense that muslims there were more likely to abstain from voting (or vote third-party) than non-muslims. I know this is partially a function of who I was talking with (mostly academia), but I’m convinced that a big factor was that all of us knew someone in our personal lives that had been emotionally injured by losing family.
There’s a good argument that ignoring atrocities is a moral failure, but I think most of us can relate. There are so many evils in the world today that if I actually spent time to think on even a fraction of them I think I’d be in a mental institution. That recent exposé on the dogs that were trained to rape prisoners, I can acknowledge it’s almost certainly real and that saying otherwise would be an injustice to the victims, but in my heart I don’t actually believe it happened because I don’t feel capable of managing the emotions that would come with accepting it. If you’re already overwhelmed by other aspects of the hellscape you live in, at some point reacting to horrifying headlines by throwing up your hands and booting up a video game becomes a survival strategy.
There is ignoring atrocities you can do nothing about and then there’s ignoring atrocities because your side is the one committing/contributing to it.
If you’re on the side of contributing to genocide and still ignoring it, where do you think it will lead to? Someone’s going to figure out how to use the apathy and profit off of it. And It’s only going to get worse until it knocks at your door.
And that’s how US got trump. Every war criminal president before him was more or less celebrated and are still admired by the public. They’ll still call themselves good Christians. That level of cognitive dissonance is going to push the level of moral failure to its limits until it’s going to start affecting themselves. But, then, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle anymore.
I see that there’s no apprehension of “Prevention is better than cure”. You cannot wave away problems because they’re only going to return worse than before.
There’s also demeaning people who see the atrocities for what they are and want to create awareness so they can minimize it. But are shamed for it.
I just mean that I can understand where it comes from when someone is already close to their breaking point, and I think most people are about there. They’re not consciously deciding to bury their heads, because making a decision requires too much inspection to actually ignore it. Often when I was beaten down it’s like my mind selectively blocked out information as a means of protecting me, but I remained in denial about that until I started really getting out of the hole. I’m not sure I’d equate them to Trump supporters in a broader scope, but I do think the lack of inquiry here is not too different from Trump supporters.
I also think that with more animosity towards regular citizens, the more the conversation shifts from the powerful to the powerless. The impact of one citizen changing their mind is wholely insignificant compared to what a politician changing course would do.
I’m not smart enough to piece together what you’re saying here. Prevention or cure for what? What does prevention look like? Why should we be apprehensive, it sounds like a reasonable statement?
I do feel this point and I’ll admit I’ve had many infuriating interactions. Now I try to just ignore until I cool down, because once I do it’s like this asshole isn’t worth that much thought. I have a limited amount of time to be angry, that’s better spent on the people who actually could make a meaningful difference by taking a stand.