LogFAQs > #978750947

Southernfatman posted...

Some people just have this mindset of rooting for the "underdog" who fights the big bad imperialist west/America. They get into this mindset where if the USA is bad, then anyone fighting them is automatically good. It's mostly tankies, but some other lefty types can get caught up in it too.

Yeah, I've explained it the following way in several other topics where this comes up.

When you spend too much time studying the horrific shit the US has gotten up to in it's existence, especially the last 70 years or so, you can start to get a skewed view of things if you aren't careful. I mean we've gotten up to some truly horrible shit. Assassination, coups, training and propping up dictators, proxy wars, you name it. Usually for the benefit of some corporation or another, so they could seize land, or prevent an elected government from doing land reforms.

So you tend to find yourself thinking "well if the US is pretty much always the bad guy, does that mean that the people we oppose are always the good guy?" and if you don't have a full on grasp of nuance and real politik shit you can end up an apologist for some pretty fucking awful people. People want black and white, right and wrong, good and evil, and the world just doesn't work that way.

The entire situation with the Houthis, Yemen, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the US is a giant fucking mess, and yes the Houthis did a decent thing in trying to force a ceasefire in Gaza. They also do awful shit like this because they a regressive religious fundamentalist organization. You can say "It's good the houthis are trying to force a ceasefire" and it doesn't mean "I support the Houthis general platform". But because people are so ensconced in whatever position they have they can't see it that way.