As an American wouldn’t you want to live in a country with a powerful military that can prevent any invasion and backs up your foreign policy with some some muscle? Wouldn’t you want to make sure that America remains a cohesive nation that shuts down any attempts at succession and asserts a firm military, governmental and cultural presence all over its own territory? As an American wouldn’t you feel that America has the right to try to get back regions that it controlled for generations filled with Americans cut off from the bulk of the US if need be? And finally wouldn’t you think that it is fine for the USA to resist economic, military and cultural pressure from an aggressive foreign power while developing itself?
Unless you are some sort of self-hating SJW zealot then all of the above should seem perfectly reasonable to you… because it is. It is reasonable not just for America but for any great human civilization on our planet. So the question is why is it that when Russians follow these same normal patterns of behavior they are labeled as “aggression” and somehow immediately become horrible and unacceptable.
The Russian aggression trope has come up again as CBS brutally shoehorned the expression into the title of one of their videos. In the piece Senator Joe Manchin comments on a few different topics but the main one was his tour of Arctic nations and the climate issues related to them. All he had to say about Russia is that they are really putting their chips down on the Artic and have invested massive amounts of money and resources into the region.
The topic of Russia came up after the presenter asked Mr. Manchin a bizarre conspiracy theory site style question related to Russians doing major nuclear tests in the Arctic for no clear reason other than Russians do bad things by default according to CBS’s editorial line. The presenter did not state where she got this nugget of fake news from, she just boldly asserted they are nuking snow and polar bears as Russians are known to do.
Thankfully Mr. Manchin bluntly said “no” ignoring this mad question to immediately go on to layout his opinion that the US could be really falling behind in terms of the Arctic due to the Russian surge in the great white north and that the US should be aware of this and try to catch up. He feels that America needs to catch up, overtake, or offset the Russians in the Arctic.
This is a totally reasonable respectable and patriotic stance to have, which is probably why CBS had to force “aggression” into the title of the video. If all American politicians had the same rational view of competition between nations that Mr. Manchin does, then the pointless tension between the US and Russia would probably be very nominal right now.
Perhaps it is part of human nature to create lots of double standards in favor of one’s own group. Every political movement and every nation seems to forgive the sins of its own guys when they do things “for the greater good” and demonizes anyone who tries to stop them. Our soldiers are heroes, their soldiers are monsters, our way of life is good for everyone, their way of life is a threat to the world etc. This aspect of tribal mentality is part of who we are and something we need to be much more mindful of in our 21st century nuclear standoff, because the worst that could happen from this type of rhetoric is not longer just some kind of pogrom but total nuclear annihilation.
If the Pro-Diversity machine in the media would wake up to the fact that the geopolitical chessboard, is, was and always will be “diverse” and that all players have similar goals with similar means that would really help the entire world move forward and keep us all very far away from the potential of a WWIII nuclear scenario. This “good guy vs. bad guy” racist narrative that Russia is on the bad end is propping up an ultimately artificial conflict with the US. It is time to acknowledge the reality that there are numerous cultures on Earth that want to be powerful and prosperous and just because they look different from us doesn’t make them any more or less capable of doing great evil.