MoA

In current western culture, the ‘good’ will always win. But life is not about ‘good’ versus ‘bad’:

Notes on Stormtrooper Syndrome – Ecosophia:

Popular entertainment in Western industrial nations today is as thickly larded with moral posturing as anything Victorian parents inflicted on their children. In most popular genres, the Good People always win, and the Bad People always lose. Oh, there’s often a Good Person who dies heroically so the other Good People can emote on camera, and there’s often a Bad Person who turns out to have a heart of gold, but the basic principle remains: Good People win because they’re good, Bad People lose because they’re baaaaad.
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There’s no shortage of examples of Stormtrooper Syndrome these days, but I’m going to focus on the most important of the lot, the one that bids fair to transform the world’s political and economic landscape in the years immediately ahead. Yes, we need to talk about Ukraine.That emphatically does not mean we need to talk about who gets to claim the roles of Good People and Bad People in the Russo-Ukrainian war. May I whisper an unwelcome truth in your ear, dear reader? The outcome of this war does not depend on which side is morally better than the other. In the real world, in terms of military victory and defeat, who’s right and who’s wrong don’t matter two weak farts in a Cat-5 hurricane once the cannon start to roar.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/08/so-much-winning-.html

Reader comment:

Stormtrooper Syndrome – The mental picture that many Americans have formed of the conflict in Ukraine seems to come out of Marvel comics and the movies that it spawned. The US and NATO are some sort of Justice League of Superheroes, while Russia gets to play the evil villain that will destroy the world unless it is stopped. The war is a simplistic morality play – the US is presented as an innocent bystander that, seeing a gross injustice being committed by evil Russia’s invasion of a plucky, nascent democracy that just yearns to be free and determine its own destiny, rushes to the aid of its little friend. Because that is what good people in good countries do.

Anyone that is even slightly informed about US interventions around the world knows that the US is never an innocent bystander and it doesn’t give one flying fig about the welfare or freedoms of another nation’s peoples. The US always has a hidden agenda behind any of its foreign actions. Always. And yet, much of the US public is in high dudgeon over Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, and they want you to know how grievously outraged they are, especially the Democrats, who proclaim themselves the standard bearers of the good. Nevermind their country’s own sorry legacy of invasions, regime change operations, and sanctions that kill. The important thing for these people is that they FEEL virtuous, and a simplistic morality tale does that. Too much information makes for a more complex story, one where the US is far from virtuous, more like evil, and such information is labeled Russian propaganda. We live in an idiocracy, cultivated and fed propaganda by a political class that depends on people not knowing, or caring.

Posted by: Mike R | Aug 25 2023 13:34 utc | 47