Lester Golden
2 min readMay 12, 2022

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This is ahistorical whataboutist nonsense because:

1. You'd be jailed in many non-western authoritarian states. Before 1992 you'd be in jail where I now live: Riga.

2. If there's no difference between the west and the rest, why did Filipinos ally with their American colonizers against Japan? Gandhi and Nehru with Britain against Japan? Palestine's Jews defend the Mandatory government of the British Empire against Germany and Italy? Indonesians flip from supporting Japan to resisting it? Vietnamese fight against Japan? Because they saw differences you refuse to.

3. Since the Greeks defeated the Persians at Salamis and Marathon there's been a discernible difference between the west and the rest: the value of the individual and the superiority of citizen over serf regimes and armies. You thinking for yourself, however wrongly, is proof that that difference is worth fighting for. Ukraine's citizen army and territorial defense forces thrashing the Russian firepower north of Kyiv proved the Ukrainians are the inheritors of this difference. That you see no moral difference between the two proves you're the inheritor of the "useful idiot" tradition in Anglo-American politics (Lincoln Steffens, the British Socialists Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Henry Wallace) whose slogan from August 23, 1939 to June 22, 1941 was "don't fight the imperialist war!"

In Ukraine you're at war with global authoritarian kleptocracy (Putin, Orban, Duterte/Marcos, Erdogan, Lukashenko, Xi Jin Ping). To win you can't be too choosy about your allies. From 1941-45 we allied with Stalin to beat Hitler. Every once in a while an enemy like Putin comes along to make even the nasty American empire look good by comparison. History's menu offers bad and worse. Absolute good is not on the menu. Choose.

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Lester Golden
Lester Golden

Written by Lester Golden

From Latvia & Porto I write to share learning from an academic&business life in 8 languages in 5 countries & seeing fascism die in Portugal&Spain in1974 & 1976.

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