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Americans’ views on the war reveal a striking generational divide (economist.com)
143 points by ptr on April 14, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 532 comments



I appreciate the other threads here on this. My viewpoint may be a minority, but I fought in a war and live with the aftermath so I think my perspective might be of some value. I'm going to try to be careful with my wording but please realize this is a bit emotional even a decade later.

I fought in Afghanistan. Real authoritarians with a very real tyrannical streak that's comparable to cartels, with tactics to boot. I watched the Obama administration lie about how well the war was going. We were getting reports of Marines being shot in the back by their counterparts continually. We were finding posts abandoned. Our bases were getting attacked while understaffed, our patrols were minimized, and our ROE was changed such that we had to be shot at directly to return fire. I watched national rhetoric coalesce on "they signed up for these injuries" when veterans needed help the most, culminating in people comitting suicide outside of hospitals.

I will never for those reasons support sending another soul down range.


Don't compare your experiences with Ukraine. They fight a very different war, on their own territory (often their own cities). They literally defending their families, no less.


> Don't compare your experiences with Ukraine.

Why would you tell someone not to compare two things just because those things are different? What would be the point of making comparisons at all if everything was the same? You would already know the result.


Good point. I meant "those are different, so your (their) experiences don't apply there".


The circumstances are not that different. The people of Afghanistan (by the time I arrived) were trying to defend their homes and communities from Taliban incursion that the US had partially reinvigorated by overthrowing their government (in that it made them worse, not that we created them which is common misinterpretation). The history of Afghanistan puts this kind of stuff pretty plain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Enduring_Freedom#The...

I do understand there is a wide knowledge gap that HN visitors have about Afghanistan, but please try to understand better.


> They literally defending their families, no less.

So the Taliban were not defending their families?


No, he's saying Americans should not be committed to fight for Ukraine.


But there's one quirk to the story: US has signed up for it on December 5, 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...

Too bad that document was very high-level, without specific procedures, timelines and liabilities listed in case of a breach. But nevertheless, it's a very real and legal grounding for fighting for Ukraine.


> I will never for those reasons support sending another soul down range.

Even if Poland or a NATO ally gets attacked?

I don't think anyone major is proposing sending troops to Ukraine, so this discussion is sorta irrelevant for the current conflict, but it seems like this line of reasoning would necessitate pulling out of NATO as well.


That's the trouble with relying on a democracy to be the big muscle in your defense pact.


This is quite sad that your reasons for lack of support of the wars are that you (an invader) had a bad time there, not that you were part of the force destabilising and destroying another country


People sign up for the military often with good intentions, yet they don't often get to choose what the military then does with them. You're seemingly assigning responsibility for an entire invasion to a foot soldier.


I didn't intend to put a blame of invasion on a single soldier. But I do put blame on a soldier, that he came to another country to kill people there for no good reason. There is a choice


This is a crucial and under-represented perspective. I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion, but it is hard to ignore the inherent callousness of arguing over a conflict that will have no direct impact on me or my family.


Thank you for your service.


The difference is, Afghanistan was of negligible importance in comparison. Stakes here are different. Just listen to Putin and take his words literally, because he means them.

Either way, Ukraine needs weapons and bullets. They don’t need more soldiers.


This comment is weird. Who cares about the stakes? Dead people are dead people. Unless you want to get into a "realist realpolitiks" analysis, which coincidentally can also be used to justify the russian war of aggression. I've seen this take pretty often and to me it boils down to "ukraine is in europe and ukrainians are europeans so it's different and it makes this war so much worse" which to me sounds extremely... problematic?

Like the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan still make those wars and the Civil wars they caused much much more destructive than what's happening in ukraine. It's not a competition, for sure, but it's important to keep that in mind before dismissing or downplaying the consequences of American policy and the enthusiastic support for those wars of the American public .


> ukraine is in europe and ukrainians are europeans so it's different and it makes this war so much worse" which to me sounds extremely... problematic?

It sounds more practical than problematic to me. Afghanistan is 10 times farther away from Western Europe than Ukraine is. If Europe didn't feel a lot more threatened by Russia, they would be insane.


I agree, from a national policy perspective. But on an individual level, which I think was the scope of the discussion, I still don't think that it's okay to value ukrainian lives more than middle eastern/Muslim lives.


I don’t think it’s been a matter of lives dying or who lives are dying. Not for anyone who isn’t Ukrainian (after all then Palestinian, Yemenis, Ethiopian, and other states in conflict would matter as well). It’s about what it would mean if Russia is not only successful but met un challenged. The last time Europe as a continent allowed appeasement the whole world eventually got pulled into the second greatest conflict less in the span of 50 years. Another one would be devastating since a good some of the actors have world ending weapons to use against one another.


A generous interpretation of your parent comment is that, "because of the stakes, the government will take it far more seriously" and, e.g., stand with our soldiers.


> Dead people are dead people.

Reality does not work like that, unfortunately western lives have more value than non western lives.


I can't tell if this comment is satire, I sincerely hope it is.


I’m not from the US. I’m from Eastern Europe. Our grandparents survived the Red Army liberation from Nazi Germany. The Russians were much worse. This is an existential war for not only Ukraine, but whole eastern NATO flank. Putin more or less denies agency of all our countries.


I feel like you are ignoring a major issue with Ukraine. Its a corrupt country. After Russia it is consistently ranked as the most corrupt country in Europe. https://www.google.com/search?q=most+corrupt+countries+in+eu...

How do we even know any of our aid is being used successfully? I have no problem giving aid that is used to fight a proxy war with Russia. I have a huge issue giving aid to a country whose politicians are trying to make money for themselves. Kolomoisky, who is one of Zelensky's main backers, was indicted in the US for bank fraud. He is also in the panama papers. The politicians in Ukraine are corrupt, not as corrupt as old putin imo, but still corrupt.

Now they are saying they need 7 billion dollar a month? I would be okay with this if everything was tracked and open for all to see. Buts it not. For all we know they are going to take 6 billion for themselves.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-14/ukraine-u...


I think, regardless of the value of the point you're trying to make, saying this in this context is callous at best. The comment you're responding to was careful and vulnerable, and if you read between the lines even a tiny bit there is pain there.

We all know what happened in afghanistan right?. Anyone who spent significant time there witnessed horrific suffering. Watched friends come back completely different or not at all.

"Negligible importance" to who? Not to the people who died there, or killed and have to carry that with them forever, or who didn't when they think they should have and have to carry that. Have a little compassion come on.


However one can't simply say everything is Afghanistan. I never supported the war there. We had to many other ways to hit Bin Laden. However I completely support the war in Europe. This war of aggression is just the start if we just roll over for Putin. He won't stop at Ukraine, it will just be a pit stop to Poland and the Baltic states and who knows what after that. Ukraine doesn't stand a chance if we don't send them weapons, food, material, and intelligence reports. I also don't think my opinion is invalid just because I didn't serve on a battlefront. I pay taxes and vote so I get a voice too.


>He won't stop at Ukraine, it will just be a pit stop to Poland and the Baltic states and who knows what after that.

I find it hard to believe this narrative when the US and Ukraine has refused to negotiate on the terms that Russia offered to prevent, and then later stop the war. The rationale given is that Russia was not sincere, but I think we should have tried. From my perspective in the US, a NATO demilitarized Ukraine would have been a win-win for both countries.


Sorry we, as a society, failed our soldiers so badly. It's trite to say but thanks for serving. You'll carry those scars to the grave.

That said, what does this have to do with the article, which is talking about generational sympathies with either Russia or Ukraine? Is there a serious push to get US troops involved, a move which would surely spark WWIII? We're not talking about sending souls down range. Putin already did that. He is sending Russian souls down range and forcing Ukrainian souls down range.


>That said, what does this have to do with the article, which is talking about generational sympathies with either Russia or Ukraine.

The relevance is as an example of the broken trust people that grew up during Iraq and Afghanistan have in the narrative that we are the good guys in foreign policy. After being repeatedly sold a bag of Lies, many look for how we could be tricked into thinking we are the the good guys yet again.

This skepticism and openness to alternative narratives is at the center of the generational divide

The skeptics are primed to ask in what ways the US is complicit in brining about this war, and it what ways it stands to benefit. The dangerous part is that a long track record of lies and self interested foreign wars adds a lot of weight to otherwise less credible narratives regarding Ukraine.


Wow I'm an old man.

With the youth I'd say this generation is more affected by any other by the sheer noise of modern media. It's also one of the first where there was less emphasis on indoctrinating people towards the government's view on the cold war, the first to grow up with a government that lied to them about a significant non-cold war war (Iraq), and the first that actually has the means to cheaply find other views on things.

So maybe it's not so strange that young people think this way.

I mostly blame the Iraq war. Yes, the west has done a lot of bad things in the past. But in recent memory Iraq stands out as where we blew any pretense of moral superiority. (It does happen now and again, but the Cold War is a really good excuse for a LOT of bad things). People would have seen this and seen that whatever our governments say, you gotta take it with a grain of salt.


Adding to this, young Americans have never seen anything gained from war. The war in Afghanistan lasted 2 decades and cost trillions of dollars, yet we have next to nothing to show for it.


It made stock prices go up so a bunch of retirees could live comfortably and also made several presidents look presidential while they heartfelt condolences over flag-draped caskets.


Add Libyan intervention (2011) as well - that put the country into 9 years of civil war (is it still peaceful there? IDK). Though this one is combined mess of NATO.


When is the last time America has seen benefit from going to war? The 50s with a stalemate in Korea?


Arguably the first Gulf War. The US successfully protected it's economic interest and expanded its military establishment in the region.


And liberated the Kuwaiti people from scud missiles, invasion, and occupation from a brutal Saddam regime? That's a pretty important benefit to miss, but maybe you're just limiting it to benefits for a US citizen. (of which selfless ones would consider it a benefit)


That is indeed the perspective I was looking at if from. But you are right.


People who don't go to war always gained from war. Lots of jobs. The post-WWII afterglow is when we defined our middle-class mythologies. The good old days.

The US had 419K deaths from WWII. That's like half as much as covid thus far. Americans like to go to war because they sacrifice nothing. It's a game.


One problem with all these reviews is that we can’t see the counter factual. That said I agree Iraq war was likely a very bad thing for our country and certainly is responsible for much of our internal strife right now.


>I mostly blame the Iraq war.

The Iraq war is mostly to blame in the recent past, but only because our attacks on Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere haven't received the media coverage they warranted. We utterly destroyed Libya, which was the most prosperous country in Africa, in 2014. Today Libyans are being sold there in open-air slave markets. How many Americans know this? Our troops are occupying Syria illegally, right now. Where is the outrage?


According to Gallup, the proportion of Americans who trust mass media a "great deal" or a "fair amount" dropped 10 percentage points during the Iraq war, and then never fully recovered.

Of course, broken down by political party shows Democrats have restored their trust in mass media just fine, especially since Trump...

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/355526/americans-trust-media-di...


Yes there is a solid 30% of america that is Trump america (and probably was before Trump even came on the scene and made them bolder). They don't trust the government (but gladly accept donations from the government), don't trust mainstream media, largely support alt-right news like Fox and OAN, tend towards white supremacy, fear "the other" and base most decisions around that fear, and will always vote Republican.


> and will always vote Republican

I'm not sure I would go that far. I can easily imagine a situation where the Republican party pulls out all the stops and ensures Trump doesn't win the nomination, only for Trump to run on the MAGA party ticket. I would expect him to easily get 10% of the vote.

We didn't get any democrats who really dared test this on the left in 2020, as even Bernie (the strongest cult of personality on the left, for comparison) fell in line behind Biden.

That is to say, strong personalities, more than institutions, seem to carry the most power. Perhaps this has always been true? How much of mass media's historical confidence was due solely to Walter Kronkite?


Obviously I don't actually know whats going on over there, but I find it hard to believe that the Russian military as a whole is "deliberately targeting civilians".

From the first estimate I found searching the web:

On April 10:

> Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recorded 4,232 civilian casualties in the country: 1,793 killed and 2,439 injured.

<2000 civilian deaths in a full-scale invasion of a country with ~44 million citizens seems FAR too low to declare that targeting civilians is a goal. Mariupol is currently fighting to the bitter end, despite being surrounded for weeks and even bisected by Russian forces. This is a city that had a population of >400k at the start of the war.

If the goal was really to kill everybody in sight, the Russians would've just carpet bombed their targets day 1 and killed hundreds of thousands. It seems like everyone has forgotten what war is. There's no "humanitarian" way to commit war. It's always awful and always creates unintended death.

Again, not an expert here nor do I believe any statistics to be 100% accurate.


"deliberately targeting civilians" is not the same as "going out to murder everyone". Obviously, Russia could just nuke Ukraine. They haven't done that. However, they have verifiably used cluster munitions in cities; abducted, raped and murdered civilians in areas they control; bombed hospitals; shot and shelled civilians trying to flee; and so forth.

All of this is very much what they have form for in Syria. Is it not getting reported in the US? It is in Europe.


> OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration. This concerns, for example, Mariupol and Volnovakha (Donetsk region), Izium (Kharkiv region), Popasna (Luhansk region), and Borodianka (Kyiv region), where there are allegations of numerous civilian casualties. These figures are being further corroborated and are not included in the above statistics.


Give a 20 year-old Russian conscript a gun and drop him in a warzone. Anyone not wearing a Russian flag is now a potential threat because he's in hostile territory. Then, at some point, the young man gets tired of all the potential threats and just starts eliminating them. At that point, Russian military as a whole is quite culpable.


But if you're going to make up a story, why not make up a different one? A nicer one where this person who doesn't exist isn't guilty of doing the thing that didn't happen, and the entire country of Russia wasn't to blame.


The OSCE published a report yesterday: https://www.osce.org/odihr/515868

Some quotes:

“The Mission is not able to conclude whether the Russian attack on Ukraine per se may qualify as a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population. It however holds that some patterns of violent acts violating IHRL, which have been repeatedly documented in the course of the conflict, such as targeted killing, enforced disappearance or abductions of civilians, including journalists and local officials, are likely to meet this qualification. Any single violent act of this type, committed as part of such an attack and with the knowledge of it, would then constitute a crime against humanity.”

“It is not conceivable that so many civilians would have been killed and injured and so many civilian objects, including houses, hospitals, cultural property, schools, multi-story residential buildings, administrative buildings, penitentiary institutions, police stations, water stations and electricity systems would have been damaged or destroyed if Russia had respected its IHL obligations in terms of distinction, proportionality and precautions in conducting hostilities in Ukraine.”


Why do you find that hard to believe? Targeting civilians doesn't mean wiping out the population. And if there wasn't such a large body of prior evidence I might be tempted to agree that some of what we are seeing is isolated, or simple incompetence. But it now seems undeniable that Russia is intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure. And although that may have been effective in Syria, I have no idea what they hope to accomplish with it in Ukraine.


how can you read what they did in Bucha (raping, torturing, execution style murders in the street) and say you don't think they're targetting civilians. That was a warning from Putin to Ukrainians about what happens if you fight back and don't surrender 100%


You deliberately omitted the part saying "OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher".

Most of the civilian deaths are still under rubles or in mass graves like Bucha. Many of them are also in areas still controlled by Russia.


The graphic is important I think. It's not a binary. While the younger generation showed more support for Russia, most of the difference between the generations was due to the younger generation giving an "unsure" answer.


Excellent point. If the younger generation were not more often "unsure" about a foreign policy question, that would mean either:

1) they have spent a lot of time studying foreign policy questions (unlikely with any generation when young), or

2) they just accept whatever their elders tell them

56% of young people supporting Ukraine, is a result we would consider a crushing victory for either party in modern presidential elections, and that's when there's a lot fewer "unsure". There is a generational difference, sure, but it's a lot less dramatic than most of the posts here are suggesting.


18-29 is 1993 or younger.

They we born during the Bosnian and Kosovo wars. They were 7 years old or younger when they briefly experienced no war in 2000 and GWBush and 9/11 in 2001 they saw the Afghanistan war start and not end until only months ago. 20 years of war and a loss!

They only know war. Can you imagine their war exhaustion? Can you imagine how much they don't care about a war happening on the otherside of the world that the usa aren't officially involved in?

The USA is still officially involved in somali, yemen, and syria.

These young americans are probably more concerned with those 3 and you didn't even ask them? You don't need to ask. You know they'll universally say to stop being in all these wars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_America:_World_Police


Sidenote as someone who's a member of Gen Z -- I... didn't grow up knowing nearly anything about the USA's wars of aggression other than that we were fighting someone in the middle east. I knew there was fighting, but I didn't (and honestly still don't) understand what for. It was never explained to me and I never thought about it enough to go looking.

Not trying to disprove your point, just sharing my own anecdotal experience.


>Sidenote as someone who's a member of Gen Z -- I... didn't grow up knowing nearly anything about the USA's wars of aggression other than that we were fighting someone in the middle east. I knew there was fighting, but I didn't (and honestly still don't) understand what for. It was never explained to me and I never thought about it enough to go looking.

I know many Chinese Nationals and even people from Hong Kong and none of them know about Tiananmen Square. I bet you heard of Tiananmen Square massacre. I bet you didn't know that the Chinese military killed all those people at Tiananmen over capitalism.


Brief history: Terrorists attacked New York City and destroyed the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. This was huge and it completely shocked the whole country. It really felt like a sucker punch.

A bunch of laws were implemented in the US to take away people's freedoms in exchange for security. For example this is when the TSA was created and you have to pose for a nude selfie to get into an airport, and if God forbid you have change in your pocket, you're wearing a metal belt buckle, or there's just a random scanner blip, a government employee will give you a search that would get any private business sued out of existence for sexual harassment. Also banks were required to ask a lot more intrusive questions to their customers, responses to potential terrorism and criminal penalties for terrorism related stuff were increased, all kinds of electronic government spying was increased -- sometimes illegally (including the stuff Snowden eventually revealed).

Soon after the attacks, the Al Qaeda terrorist group based in Afghanistan was determined to be responsible. The President told the government of Afghanistan to hand over Osama bin Laden, the leader of the terrorist group. The government of Afghanistan, called the Taliban, refused. The Taliban are religious fundamentalists; besides being responsible for the September 11 attacks, they're mainly famous for destroying irreplaceable historical temples over 1000 year old. So the US invaded and got rid of the Taliban government. After the invasion, the US briefly set up an occupation government, but then set up free and fair elections. Unfortunately the Afghans elected a corrupt and ineffective government, who ended up stealing most of the money the US put into rebuilding the country.

It took the US a really long time to capture Osama bin Laden. Even after bin Laden was captured, the Afghan government still didn't get its feet, it was constantly unstable, corrupt, untrusted by the people and reliant on US military backing. So the US military decided to stay until they could be sure Afgahnistan was stable collapse as soon as it left. Unfortunately Afghanistan never got that stable.

The Taliban fought with tactics like roadside bombs, car bombs, and child suicide bombers. Which led to a lot of psychological wear and tear on the US soldiers; a number of returning soldiers had mental issues or committed suicide. For example if a car looks like it's not going to stop for a checkpoint, or a child is running up to a group of soldiers, the soldiers have to assume it's a bomb and shoot to protect themselves, but 9 times out of 10 it was just an innocent civilian.

Eventually Trump decided to rip the band-aid by negotiating an exit date with the Taliban, to actually occur during Biden's first term, so Biden could be blamed if it went poorly. Which it did; the Taliban, being terrorists, ignored the peace agreement and attacked. The Afghan army quickly collapsed and the elected Afghan president disgracefully fled the country in the middle of dinner.

Now the Taliban are in charge. The Taliban won't quit with religious extremism like shooting women and girls if they don't want to wear a burka, or try to get an education beyond fourth grade.

The people of Afghanistan are starving because the Afghan economy completely collapsed because foreign companies don't want to work or invest in Afghanistan due to the violence and religious fundamentalism of the Taliban regime. We tried our best to help during our years in Afghanistan. The Afghan people responded by electing a corrupt government, stealing the money that was supposed to help them, running away instead of fighting, and supporting the Taliban despite their barbarity and terrorism. The Afghan people are starving, which is sad, but it's not our problem any more. The Taliban wanted to be in charge; now they're in charge, and this is their problem now.

Calling the US war in Afghanistan a war of aggression is absurd. Afghanistan sent in terrorists to hijack planes in a suicide attack that successfully destroyed two skyscrapers and killed thousands of random civilians. Another hijacked plane flew into the Pentagon, which was also severely damaged. September 11, 2001 was an act of war, pure and simple.

A bunch of really weird stuff came out of the war. For example, Osama bin Laden's been dead for a decade, we're out of Afghanistan, and nobody's launched a successful major terrorist attack on the US since 2001. But for some reason, no politician of either party is willing to even bring up the possibility of disbanding the TSA, rolling back the 2001 era regulations, and giving us our freedom back. This is kind of a sore subject with me.

There's also the story of Guantanamo Bay. For some weird reason, even though the US and Cuba hate each other, the US owns a tiny part of Cuba and has a military base there. Since it's owned by the US government and not on US soil, some terrorists were sent there. The US court system ruled that they're somehow outside the reach of US law and the Constitution there, and the US government is legally allowed to use torture and detain people indefinitely without charges there. A lot of people (in my view, correctly) claim the government shouldn't legally be allowed to do that, and even if it's somehow legal, it's still morally wrong and unethical to do it. And even if the government did it anyway in the past, in the present/future they should stop, close the prison, and either charge or release the prisoners. US intelligence claims the detainees are bad, bad people who would launch September 11 style attacks, but due to the exigencies of war they can't get enough evidence to convict them with normal legal procedure. Obama promised to close Guantanamo Bay but he didn't, and AFAIK there are still prisoners there to this day.

Iraq is a different story, but this post is already long and ranty enough.


Important to mention that not only have we been at war their entire lives, but that they've been absolutely pointless wars of aggression that ended in a whimper for the US, and absolute devastation for the countries invaded. And as you said, we lost all of them.

Not only that, but we've been too ashamed to declare them. No one wants to take responsibility, just reap the profits. Young people are cynical about war because it wasn't inculcated into them as a religion like it was for Boomers. Young people are cynical about war because they look at it, see its products, and see its profiteers. They lack the poetry to breathlessly admire the beauty of our weapons.


Another possible explanation is that younger people tend to rely more on far right or far left media, which tends to be much more pro-Russia than mainstream media (sometimes organically, sometimes through paid sponsorship like https://twitter.com/bamnecessary/status/1499162014895296516).

Hasan Piker for example, the #1 politics streamer on Twitch, is quite far left and is much more pro-Russia than say CNN.


>>far right or far left media, which tends to be much more pro-Russia than mainstream media

I wouldn't say pro Russian but anti-war. This kind of framing reminds me of GW Bush's "you're either with us or with the terrorists" accusation against people who opposed invading Iraq.

Also "far right or far left media" would be more accurately characterized as non-corporate non-MSM journalism. For reasons that aren't entirely clear, the MSM literally promotes every US war and foreign intervention no matter the cost or predictable disastrous consequences. It's as if they have become engulfed in the military industrial complex.


I'm not so sure that's true. The logic of both left and right people I've talked to is something like: Western elites are terrible, Ukraine colluded with those elites/is their puppet (wanted to join Nato/EU/etc), Russia is opposed to Western elites, and is therefore a positive force. I've talked to many people of both political persuasions and they try to minimize Russian wrongdoing and emphasize Western provocation (poking the bear).

Of course, they have different reasons for disliking western elites, but their arguments end up remarkably similar.


Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was spurred by America oil embargo on Japan, and 9/11 was spurred by American meddling in the middle east. None of those statements should be necessarily seen as minimizing or justifying those subsequent acts. There is nuance in the world, nothing happens in a vacuum.


> Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was spurred by America oil embargo on Japan

...and the embargo on Japan was due to it's continuing invasion of China...


Correct.

Without American oil imports, Japan was forced to seize Dutch oil production in Indonesia to keep their economy running. That would drag the USA into the war, therefore it was a logical conclusion to strike the USA first.

It's not hard to see Russia's action as a logical action to protect their interests. That however is not the same as condoning Russia's invasion of Ukraine.


Sure, which the US didn't oppose as a matter of principle but as a matter of empire.


The US and the EU repeatedly told Japan to stop it's invasion. Japan did have some cassus belli initially but after several atrocities happened the response grew much louder - specifically after a pastor was killed by a stray bomb and the photograph made it's way back to western audiences with an accounting from his daughter.


As I said: "they try to minimize Russian/Japanese/Islamist wrongdoing and emphasize Western provocation"


>>Russia is opposed to Western elites, and is therefore a positive force

Ukraine is corrupt and the USA doesn't care about civilians and is acting to turn Ukraine into Russia's next Afghanistan.

It is a jump to go from there to saying Russia is good.


Or rather that they don't have facts that you can be condemned as a traitor for mentioning.


I don't think the far right or far left media is more "anti-war" than the mainstream media.

After all, the NYT is also publishing opeds about how the US shouldn't institute a no-fly zone: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/opinion/no-fly-zone-ukrai...

Anti-war is the mainstream opinion in the US from pretty much top to bottom.

When I talk about something being pro-Russia or not I am referring to stuff like Hasan saying that Russia's annexation of Crimea was ethical, Nick Fuente's literal cheering for Putin, etc.


Anti-war might not even be entirely the right word, but it's possible that a more "anti-imperialist" sentiment is growing. Sort of along the lines of the old "world police" critique. A lot of these people are probably both sympathetic to Ukraine, but also not in favor of some countries extending their military and financial influence far beyond their borders.

I think Hillary Clinton said in an interview, something along the lines that Russia should be prepared for the West to turn Ukraine into another Afghanistan. Seems like a pretty harsh way to view the people that are supposed to be supported.


That isn't "anti-imperialism", that's just good old fashioned isolationism.

True "anti-imperialism" seems like it would imply some duty to stop imperialism done by non US actors.


That's where you get into a muddy mess of where to draw the line between "imperialism," and something else. There are different takes on what constitutes imperialism, and whether one State trying to push back on what it perceives as creeping imperialism is legitimate.

The argument a lot of people are making, not just Russia or Russians, is that overextension of NATO influence was a major cause for the conflict. This might be something like if the Soviet Union had refused to deescalate military support to Cuba during the missile crisis and the US went ahead with military action there.

That's not to say that I personally would agree with US intervention in Cuba, or Russia in Ukraine, just trying to understand the logic that's being played by here.


The “nukes in Cuba” in this situation are democracy, free speech, LGBT rights and other Western principles. Yes, they are a threat to Putin and his system.


None of which are selling points for the Ukrainian government


Hillary Clinton, like other neocons, thinks it would be great if Ukraine turned into another Afghanistan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLANOdsNhPg


There are people out there who are weirdly pro-russia. Oliver Stone was gassing Putin up for years, defending his actions such as his anti-gay legislation. The Putin documentary he created was nothing short of a hagiography.

The ostensible reasons would be he wants to stick it to America or that he likes the attention his contrarian opinions give him (which is much less in our transgressive age). Maybe some people naturally gravitate to authoritarians. One interesting fact though is that his son worked at RT.

It’s all deeply weird to me. I try to grapple with it intellectually but it’s beyond my comprehension. If you are someone who truly believes America is irredeemable, why wouldn’t you esteem more peace loving nations over countries with overt expansionist intentions?


Oliver Stone has blood on his hands with that documentary.

People cite it as a source of ultimate truth, yet it's lost on them that Putin is far too clever to appear in something he doesn't fully control.


> For reasons that aren't entirely clear, the MSM literally promotes every US war and foreign intervention no matter the cost or predictable disastrous consequences.

It's almost like the CIA and NSA might use their unregulated surveillance to get leverage over the media.


I wouldn't go so far as saying it's blackmail, but when you read in the paper "official familiar with the matter say", it really should read "CIA/NSA asked us to tell you". It's hard to bite the hand that feeds you.


I agree. The younger respondents tend to consume media that's not only more politically diverse, but often a little more nuanced than many of the mainstream outlets. Less black-and-white thinking is bound to lead to opinions that aren't so easily reflected in a "Yes, No, Unsure" poll.


> Hasan Piker for example, the #1 politics streamer on Twitch, is quite far left and is much more pro-Russia than say CNN.

I don't think Hasan is even remotely pro-Russia. What makes you say that?


Hasan talks on his show about how he thinks Russia was right to annex Crimea: https://clips.twitch.tv/ElegantTemperedApplePicoMause-VCY99f...


I don't think this particular clip shows a strong support for the Russian Federation in general. He seems to be saying that a majority of the people of Crimea want to be a part of Russia, having been more tied to Russia proper historically than any independent Ukraine, and they were able to make that switch without much violence.


It completely ignores the context (which you would see in more mainstream sources) for why most people see that annexation as unethical.

In particular, the lack of a "status quo" option for Crimea (the referendum only had two options, go independent or join Russia) and the lack of international observers (OSCE observers currently in the Crimea were asked to leave by the Russian authorities in the area) made the whole thing iffy from the get go.

And that's not even getting into the fraud allegations ...


That's definitely true. However, it's not really arguable that a majority or close to a majority of Crimea was moreso favourable to joining Russia than staying in an anti-Russia version of Ukraine. Independent polls confirm this : https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/03/20/one-year-a...

There was no status-quo option because at the time, according to the dominant legal opinion (as in, backed by force), Crimea had already seceded from Ukraine. To consider the status quo that Crimea was part of Ukraine would undermine the legal basis for a referendum without assent from Kyiv, which is why it was not included. It's for sure bullshit to the moral level, but it couldn't have been done differently while still being a referendum on joining Russia. They could have done a referendum on returning to Ukraine, I guess.


To be fair, it is a tiny clip of an off-hand response; hard to compare to focused articles and segments on the topic. I can see the criticism of piecing together an opinion from a bunch of off-hand comments vs fully expressed arguments. It might be better to compare a full discussion on the specific topic from the criticized party to the lauded one.

One problem with many mainstream outlets is that they are often give free passes to organizations like OSCE. For example, the OAS, an organization that serves a similar watchdog position in the Americas, completely bungled their duties in recent Bolivian elections. So much so, that they helped legitimize a violent far-right coup in 2019.


He glosses over the fact that native Ukrainians in those regions were displaced in the 1930s during the Holodomor and replaced with Russian settlers. That might explain why Russian sentiment in those regions is high.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor#Aftermath_and_immedi...


The problem with that argument is that Crimea had been considered a part of Russia as far back as about the founding of the United States, and prior to that had nothing to do with a Ukrainian National project. Crimea isn't even mentioned by name once in the Wikipedia article you linked. Why would they be targeted as Ukrainians at that time?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_transfer_of_Crimea


He does not say "Russia was right", he said the annexation was justifiable and clearly not justifiable as in "right" but as in "defensible".

Saying he is "pro-Russia" is a big claim, because you're saying their position on Russia's action are overwhelmingly one of agreement. In that clip he appears to call Russia's actions defensible (which is not the same as agreement) on the Crimea issue, while being unclear but likely opposed on the Donbas issue.

Also given that many people are capable of more nuance than blindly supporting or opposing a country on every issue, you might as well be calling them a simpleton.


But he also used his stream to raise $200k for Ukranian relief efforts.


I mean his is the quintessential “both-sides” take that pushes (younger) people to be “unsure” about who they support, no?

Russia is bad, but so is Ukraine and NATO, too. Russia is bad but Ukraine does have a Nazi problem. People like him are probably the greatest contributors to the large amount of Gen Z who are unsure as to who they support.


Yes, in real life the truth is often that all participants in a conflict have morally ambiguous motivations and do bad things when they think they can get away with it. It's OK to acknowledge that while also acknowledging that in a certain narrowly focused issue one side is less wrong and one side is more wrong.

If you're arguing that young people should accept that Russia (which is already a complicated concept) is universally Bad and the western friendly powers (another nearly uselessly complicated concept) are universally Good then you're arguing for a false view of reality. Give the public a little credit, they can tolerate a little bit of moral ambiguity and still make a reasonable decision of right and wrong.


To middle-class retirees in the US, this is literally sedition and you are a Russian asset.


> younger people tend to rely more on far right or far left media

Anecdotally, this is the opposite of my experience


IIUC, the poll's questions used the term "Russia", which implicitly lumps together the following groups:

- the Russian government

- the Russian military leadership

- Russian career soldiers

- Russian conscripts

- regular Russian citizens

If I were taking the survey, my answer to all 3 questions would depend on those distinctions.


Yep. I am observing this interesting gap in political correctness for a long time now. When Russians are concerned nobody (in my perception) is using a politically correct formulas (formulae?) like "a Putin-paid disinformation campaign", usually it's "a Russian disinformation campaign". Since all gaps in political correctness are (in my humble perception) deliberate, I've always wondered why it exists.


Saying that anything bad that Russia is doing is Putin's fault is very reductive.


Anything? Ok, let’s look at a couple of examples.

1. Stealing and publishing DNC correspondence. A team of security experts, doing a magnificently fast work named exactly two culprits: a) Russian military intelligence, b) Russian political intelligence. Both these entities are directly under Putin’s control. Still it was “Russian interference in elections”, not “Putin’s interference in elections”. The latter is both correct and politically correct, and in no way reductive. Why not use it?

2. Placing Facebook ads during the election campaign. The official indictment named Prigozhin’s media company (forgot its name) as a culprit. Prigozhin is the closest buddy of Putin. So blaming Putin was not reductive in this case. Still, “Russian meddling” was used, not “Putin’s”. Any idea why?


It also makes people pretend like understanding the conflict is just a matter of doing amateur psychology with the image they get of Putin through the television as a James Bond-style bad guy.

Every time some plain old person tells me what Putin thinks or what Putin wants or what Putin can't stand, I have to leave or change the subject. The way they talk about the Ukraine conflict has no actual physical references. It's like they're telling fairy stories about an evil wizard.


A lot has changed in the three weeks since they took their poll, I'd be very surprised if some of these numbers hold true today (for instance, this claims only 47% under 30 believe Russia has intentionally targeted civilians)


I think there's no point for Russian forces intentionally target civilians.


There's "no point" in organized war atrocities, and yet they happen anyway.

Which is to say there actually is a point: terror, demotivation, channeling the anger and frustration of your troops into a "soft" target, etc.


I am a pro Ukraine millennial. I also came of age during our middle east forever war and saw all the lies that went into supporting that boondoggle. The irony is not lost on me one bit. Goat herders yesterday, babuskas today. The great powers play their games and we pay.


I'm in the same age group and mindset as you. In fact, none of [the] poll results tracks anything I've encountered since the war started. I do not know a single person who sympathizes with the Russian aggression.

If the polling numbers are representative of larger groups outside of my social circles, then it is every disconcerting.

> barely half of those under 30 said they care who wins...

Yikes.


Young person here: aren't you the dolts who lied to us about Afghanistan and Iraq, then just got chased out with your tails between your legs?

Why should we believe a single thing you have to say about going to war?


Generally my mentality. This is a European war in Europe's back yard. CNN and Fox (with the exception of Carlson) are in lockstep, Google's demonetizing content that's dismissive of, or opposed to Ukraine.

Ukraine is the victim here, not the aggressor. I hope they win, I doubt they will.

But domestically, the rhetoric around the war has infuriated me.

A redneck shows up to a domestic political rally with his tacky Confederate flag, and everyone involved is a bigot, a fascist, or a potential domestic terrorist.

A country constitutionally bans same sex relationships, turns trans refugees fleeing the conflict away at the border because they're 'actually' men, supports the efforts of a pseudo-autonomous militia whose ~10k soldiers walk around wearing sonnenrads, and its only a tiny minority that we should overlook. Facebook even made an exception for their policy on supporting them.

I'm fine with nuance. It's important. But why is it only a thing when it means we might get to spill American blood in a police action for someone else's benefit?

I'm still disgusted that the US tolerated afghan allies who indulged in bacha bazi. Now people on my facebook feed and in the news who spent the last six years hyperventilating about neonazis and demanding restrictions on speech to stop them are telling me that supporting ethnonationalist militias is the price of democracy in Europe.

The EU is rich. This is their neighborhood. I've heard plenty of lectures from EU nationals that the US needs to stop enforcing its will on the rest of the world. If they want US arms in Ukraine, buy them from us.

I don't want American boots on the ground, and I'm leery of providing military aid with tax money that could be better used serving the people who paid it for a war that likely won't end in a win.


Some questions:

1) Who do you think started this violence? Did Ukraine invade Russia or did Russia invade Ukraine?

2) Who do you pull for when one person attacks another? The bully or the victim?

To me, these two questions and their answers determine my sympathies. You were lied to about Iraq and you are right to mistrust the US government, but the world media is not the US government. If you see reports from multiple news sources about mass graves and such, you should believe them.


>Who do you think started this violence? Did Ukraine invade Russia or did Russia invade Ukraine?

Who cares? Not our fight.

>Who do you pull for when one person attacks another? The bully or the victim?

Such infantile moralizing displays a profound case of arrested development in the moral faculties. Geopolitics is not a marvel movie.


Not our fight? Have you heard of Chamberlain?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeasement


The fact that Ukraine now defends itself means that we are in a very different situation. None of the countries Hitler annexed during the appeasement actually defended themselves, he got them for free through diplomacy. If they did defend themselves instead of joining the German side then Germany wouldn't have been threat, and there would be no need for an alliance against them and Germany wouldn't have been the biggest threat in WW2. That is the situation we see today, Ukraine is defending itself, there is no way Russia can continue invading like that, they can't afford it, so the WW2 scenario has already been averted.


yeah the problem is that these are obviously the wrong questions. You behave like a doctor treating the symptoms rather than the root cause. Why not ask "_why_ did Russia invade Ukraine?" The answer is that nobody wants to deal with the inconvenient truth that the US contributed heavily to the inflamed tensions.

You present a false dichotomy. I can have sympathies for Ukraine and distrust the US at the same time. Not viewing Russia as a cartoon villain is far more realistic than what the Western media is pushing.


PDF of cited poll: https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/l8ynsbxwgl/econTabReport.pdf

Cited figures from Table-14, on (PDF/printed)-page-55.

Looks like they polled 4 age-groups: 18-29; 30-44; 45-64; and 65+. The results for 30-44 were pretty close to those for 18-29, and the results for 45-64 were pretty close to those for 65+. In fact, if we combine the two younger groups and two older groups, such that it's 18-44 vs. 45+, then the reported-results really don't change much.

Tangentially, it's really weird for news-articles to not link their sources.


This should be pinned.


I think one of the big reasons is that this generation came of age during the Iraq War.

They saw how the whole media and US military and intelligence community could push a story that was designed to inflame people and push for war.

And we saw the huge cost of that.

Fool me once…


Yea but it would also be a mistake to just assume that this is the case yet again, especially given that the United States has adamantly refused to put troops in Ukraine and has sought diplomatic solutions from the start. The US government has really pushed against inflaming the US population toward war. If recognizing atrocities, however, pushes people toward war than there isn't much you can do about that besides continue to do what the US has done which is not get into the war.

I went to Iraq. The war was probably misguided (although there is still a democratically elected government in Iraq... so... idk) - Ukraine is quite unlike Iraq and if this generation (which I think includes me?) is drawing comparisons than it's because of a lack of thought and education around world events.


Fool me once... shame on... shame on you. You fool me you can't get fooled again!


Precisely. We don't trust the government or the media at all anymore, and we aren't willing to go fight the elite's war for them.


This is sort of the Chomsky syndrome: Assuming that government A is always lying, and that therefore the opposite claim by government B has to be right.


Younger people are so far removed from actual war that they have the luxury of being ambivalent about it. It's become easy to believe that war is simply a thing of the past and Americans won't ever experience it again. Ukraine is just pictures on a screen, nobody is going to drive tanks into America or fire missiles at our hospitals.


Anecdotal counterexample (I'm Gen Z) -- Ukraine is pictures on a screen, and that's what brought my attention to it! I want Ukraine to win the war and I think what Russia is doing is extremely wrong and heinous, and I also wouldn't have become nearly as invested in the conflict were it not for the fact that this is the first major war to be broadcast on social media. I've seen video clips that made me angry, sad, and horrified, and have catalyzed me to make a firm stance on the issue instead of being ambivalent.

Also anecdotally, every other person I know in my age group is also very pro-Ukraine and not ambivalent, perhaps as suggested by one of the other comments the poll is outdated?


Gen Z kid here; my friend group largely doesn't care in the slightest about the war in Ukraine. We think what's happening is wrong, but we don't see the point in doing anything ourselves. The Middle East was bombed for decades while no one had the spine to really do anything about it. We didn't even have the virtue signalers that you see online today. Why should we care when it happens to Europe?

This is all without mentioning the fact that the war exposed a lot of the biases we knew were present in the media- how many reporters just straight up admitted that they care more because the people dying are white this time?

As someone else on this post said, Europe is a rich peninsula with enough money and manpower to handle Russia by itself. If they want American help, they can buy American weapons. America has committed enough war crimes over the past few decades. We don't need to expand that list and further risk the future of this country, which is already looking bleak.


Which war did you fight in?


Desert Storm. You?


I didn’t. But I had to check that you weren’t talking out of your rear. It was a damn condescending comment. “Young people don’t agree with the established foreign policy position, it must mean they’re weak,” kinda thing.

I mean the greatest generation didn’t support ww2. Hell, the Americans of the early 1900’s didn’t support ww1. Both times presidents were elected on the promise of keeping America out of war. Could you attribute that to being “detached from war”? They fought when they were called to do so. And until congress votes for war, I’m going to keep on saying that supporting Ukraine is a poor decision and outside the interests of America. I’m a zillenial for context.


Spoke with a young person who had an interesting take: He says he sympathizes with Russians because he feels like they're also getting dragged into pointless wars by their government. (memories of Iraq and Afghanistan)


I agree! I'm Gen Z and I sympathize with the "good Russians" because I know a few. I've talked to people living in Russia right now who are furious with Putin for the awful evil things he's doing. I want Ukraine to win the war, but I don't think the Russian people are evil, I think Putin is evil. I'd wager that many pro-war Russians are victims of propaganda and lies and would change their minds if they had access to verifiable sources of truth, but they don't.

Putin is horrible though and I want him and his cronies to be punished to the fullest extent of international law for their crimes against humanity.


I wonder whether 18-29 year olds have more pressing problems to care about and are therefore more apathetic?


College debt and housing costs are killing the 30+ crowd.


I'm vouching for this comment, because it's an entirely reasonable thought that crippling debt and housing costs lead to apathy (graphs 3 "Do you care who wins?"). I do not believe it leads to supporting Russia, though.


Yeah, I wish these polls would also ask "null-hypothesis"-questions (for a lack of a better word). Like "Do you care about the war in Ukraine?" and then get more specific.


Just as Russia is complex, so is Ukraine. The blame-throwing game can go on for quite some time by cherry-picking memes.

I hope the war ends soon.


Young people are the Cheng Xin of this world. In the past, we did not know the lies that the mainstream media was attempting to broadcast as part of large scale population unification and pacification. Without control of that process, lots of these lies are now visible and faith has deteriorated in public sources of information.

It's like how everyone knows the NIAID is useless today. Unfortunately, another casualty of all this is truth. This is the problem with lying for what you think is the greater good. At some point, the fact that you lied ruins the future entirely and poisons the info well. If even the guys we chose to help us are going to bullshit us, we must live in a world of perpetual information mistrust.

This, plus, it's worth remembering that 16% of people have an IQ less than 85.


TBH I don't really know how to take this.

I am 31 so my age group is not represented at all by this graph. I am curious why they left out 30 to 64.

At least within my friend group (which I don't think any are younger than 29... not that I really talk about age often) we are universally against the invasion of Ukraine and want them to survive.

I don't feel like even at my age that I have experience or other events that are impacting my opinion. I also don't get most of my news from major news organizations.

So I am very curious why this is the case.


I picked up this comment from a HN user in another thread but it got no traction, seeing Germany drag it's feet on sending arms and Zelensky's recent comments about blood money I think it's especially relevant... "seeing as we're heading into spring, seeing Germany has quite a wealthy economy and QOL, that many if not most workers get 5 weeks of holiday, the chip shortage is leading to slowdowns in the automotive industry etc... why doesn't the government just go cold turkey, give people a month or 2 free holidays while drastically reducing public lighting, telling businesses to stop heating their premises at night etc etc... I mean we had a dress rehearsal 2 years ago with the onset of Covid, this would be better ,for a good cause, probably give a boost to domestic spending and send a f...U to the rest of the world saying we too can think outside of the box :-)"

I know it may seem naive, but how so?


"If we just...."

Young Americans, in general, do not understand or internalize national security or great power competition; and instead project high ideals and generosity to countries whose _leadership_ does not share the same view of their nation or the world. With Russia, using OP example, there was & probably remains the very serious risk of food & energy dominance by Russia at the expense of democratic nations - none of whom can make the transition to so-called green tech in-time to avoid that outcome. There remains the risk of a Sino-Russian alliance that would result in a very different world from today's somewhat free & open societies. I could go on at length, but will sum it up by saying the world doesn't work the way we wish it would, and we have to face reality head-on and not wish it away.


This is a very condescending view of Young Americans. I think any analysis that does not start with an economic analysis of Americans today vs Americans 40 years ago is bound to end up on these soft attributes of "ideals and generosity".

It's abundantly clear for any Young American, that there is no upside to war. If American maintains her dominance, then they are still suffering under a gerontocracy and growing wealth inequality. What person would risk nuclear war for the privilege to struggle to pay rent every month? Likewise, the risk of a Sino-Russian alliance only effects those who stand to extract rent from "democratic" countries (in the form of foreign ownership). If capital is increasingly owned by a small few, why should Young Americans care if their oligarchs are American or Chinese?

I think most Young Americans don't have the luxury of wondering about power competition especially since so many of them don't have a stake in the game. It's hard to convince people the effects of what Russian oil dominance will have where they deal with much more pressing survival issues that are a lot closer to them.


> If capital is increasingly owned by a small few, why should Young Americans care if their oligarchs are American or Chinese?

Here's why:

- Rule of law, including health, safety & environment.

- Minority rights.

- Free-ish speech.

- Mostly equal application of law.

Could say more, but you get the point.


>rule of law

We don't have that NOW.

>minority rights

I'm sorry, but the BLM riots in 2015 have made me immediately suspicious of anyone towing this line. I just don't trust you.

>Free-ish speech

We just banned Russia Today (not to mention all the issues with alt-platforms getting dehosted)... oh yeah and the Babylon Bee.

> Mostly equal application of law.

See pt. 1


this response IMO cherry-picks a single line, which is easily setup with an "appeal to USA flag-waving nationalism" rebuttal. Clearly capped off with a "love it or leave it" literally.. not intellectually honest in addressing the real point here, which is perhaps "young people have serious daily life and future adult life" problems which have nothing to do with Great-Powers, Great-Games manipulation. Similar discussions could have been had for three millenia of nationalistic warfare, and I side firmly with the parent post myself, empathy towards the young adults in the USA, not flag-waving "you people need to honor the flag that gave you all of THIS" type stuff


Those are all also things that the oligarchs of the enemy can promise to do better on (and perhaps even actually deliver) to buy off Americans away from loyalty to their hometown billionaires.


I really don't understand this response. Are you seriously implying that today most young Americans have an healthy environment? At least China is pretending to roll out some sort of universal health coverage. Minority rights? Let's ignore our own highly politicized conversations on minority rights and look to our allies, like Israel. I'm not sure I see too much a difference of the genocide of the Uighurs in China and the genocide of the Palestinians. So no, I don't get the point. The bullet points you have posted are shaky at best and don't convince me that anyone should risk nuclear war for "ideas" like "free-ish speech".

I'm not implying China is perfect; or that America is wholly evil. It's that you must consider the day-to-day implications for _most_ Americans (who are probably unlike you and don't make six figures working in tech or own any capital), and that the system doesn't provide any material returns to them; and therefore any "change in leadership" is likely immaterial. Risking nuclear war, and billions of tax dollars for such a war does not make sense, especially when it makes life harder at home.


People think they're being "enlightened" for holding such views, being able to hold up the magnifying glass to their own society...but it's far more likely that they just live in a bubble. It appears as something of an irony that these very same free societies they criticize not only permit but actually _encourage_ this kind of self reflection through their traditions and institutions.

I think that to truly appreciate life in a western democracy you need to have some real exposure to the alternative/absence.

As I've travelled more, gained life experience, I've become less and less impressed with the ACT of expressing such criticism (particularly the knee-jerk reflexive "whataboutism" sort so frequently launched in response to any criticism of authoritatian regimes) and more appreciative of the fact that it's freely allowed and part of the culture of the free world.


>I think that to truly appreciate life in a western democracy you need to have some real exposure to the alternative/absence.

Fine. Let's ignore the implication that I live in a bubble and let's focus on this right here.

Most Americans have never left the state they live in. Most Americans don't have the luxury to travel. Most Americans have been left with rising housing costs, food costs, and gas costs. Most Americans have increasingly taken an isolationist view point as the quagmire in the middle east spent trillions abroad with nothing to show at home. By your own yardstick, why is it surprising that many young americans aren't enthusiastic to jump into yet another foreign war?


Meh, it is what it is. Surprising? Maybe not, just unimpressive. Most people are a product of their environment and that's never going to change no matter what. I don't think there's much to gain here except perspective and appreciation at an individual level...and in my personal experience a great deal more happiness as a result.


If you live in America and this is what you believe you really need to live elsewhere for awhile. I recommend living in Fushun, China and getting to know universal healthcare there. It's close to the North Korean border where you can explore China's close ally. When you get there let me know how many Uighurs serve in the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party as compared to how many non-Jews serve in the Israeli Knesset. For extra credit rank for world genocide and let's see where Palestinian so-called 'genocide' falls.


I think in general, western democracies do a lot better on elite freedoms than China, or indeed eastern democracies. When it comes to the actual freedom enjoyed by normal people, it's more patchy. Living in contemporary America, or indeed any fast-paced, high-bill liberal democracy, is essentially a lot of work for most people: usually the vast majority of their waking time is spent at one or more jobs. This usually delivers no real security, they usually have no real control over what they do, to a very fine level (acceptable emotions to display, and so on) during this time.

China is like that too, but the only people that would really experience a night-and-day difference are the elite, who coincidentally write all the academic papers, news articles, etc.


So now we have gone from "rule of law" to "we don't do as much genocide as the other guys".


Does China have those things? Because America certainly doesnt


> I think most Young Americans don't have the luxury of wondering about power competition

Precisely the opposite. Americans have the luxury of not worrying about great power competition. Eastern Europeans, for example, do not have this luxury. You think that great power competition does not affect you, but you are very wrong about that. You just think so because you are a citizen of the most powerful great power.


>It's abundantly clear for any Young American, that there is no upside to war.

I would argue there is plenty of upside to war, otherwise countries wouldn't wage it. Compare the US economy in 1939 vs 1949 for a clear example.


That had far more to do with Europe being destroyed and creating a dependence on American resources. It's not as clear cut for America pre and post the Vietnam war, or the Gulf war or War in Afghanistan.


This is very true. I think for young people it's very difficult to appreciate that we live on the knife's edge of peace. Peace is not the natural human condition, and vast numbers of people are ready and willing to commit incredible violence and atrocities in the name of their tribe. Absolutely nothing about human nature has changed since the uncountable wars we have fought since our very first moments as a species. Peace exists only in the liminal space between great violence and terrible powers.


Disagree. I'm in the 'young' bracket here but researching geopolitics/military is something of a hobby for me.

I'm not arguing that the young are all like me, but rather that I applaud my generation for being skeptical, at least from an intervention POV. I still side strongly with Ukraine but this is a complex issue and rolling the tanks against a country with less GDP than NY does not make the world inherently safer. The older generations, on the other hand, were raised in the context of Russia being a world power while at this time they've revealed themselves to be objectively not.

However, a Sino-Russian alliance would be an absolute nightmare scenario and direct military involvement would give China a possible excuse to back Russia. As long as they remain neutral-ish then it's safe to let this play out, particularly given how things are going so far.

Now, the area that concerns me is how many are openly supporting Russia. Skepticism is great but I don't think there's any reason to voice support for Russia at this time.


> I applaud my generation for being skeptical, at least from an intervention POV.

As I read it, the poll was not about the wisdom of intervention. I think even the older generation is extremely wary of direct military action by the West againt Russia. Rather, the poll is about the relative moral position of the two combatants. And I think the sympathy for Russia among the young reflected in the poll probably stems from comparative indifference and skepticism about world politics (leading to a tendency to simply ignore the subject), and different media consumption habits. Young people don't watch nearly as much television news, they tend to absorb their news through social media (which of course is filtered through their friends, who also tend to share the same indifference to global politics). It becomes a case of the blind leading the blind.


What about this issue is particularly complex? Other than nuclear weapons? Russia has spent the last 20 years acting with total impunity, relying on a western reluctance to intervene. Russia is a world power if they are allowed to throw their weight around without consequence. The only reason not directly aid Ukraine in securing their borders is the threat of nuclear war. China is not going to got war with Russia against the US because of military intervention inside Ukraine's borders. That is an insane claim.


>only...nuclear war

Uhhhh 0_o

That seems like a good reason in its own right... Right? That said, they're suffering a lot of consequence at the moment so it's worth letting that pan out. The west drastically overestimated their capability, by that standard NK is a world power. I get it, I don't think your position there is wrong but...semantics.

>China is not going to [go to] war with Russia against the US

Never claimed that. The game for China is if they don't provide material aid, they get to maintain better relations with the west. I think the west broadly misunderstands their goals for international standing. They want to be recognized but if push comes to shove they'll just buddy up with Russia. Best to not provoke that. If the US decides to world police some more, along with three EU, that makes world policing the standard for world power and China will happily rise to that. They're very much watching what we do here.


China's government, like Russia's uses the west as a tool to consolidate power. The western world, and specifically NATO (which is really just another world for America in this context) serve as a looming enemy. We have now clearly seen that the actual actions of the West do not matter. China and Russia suffer from intense corruption, low overall standards of living, and the massive income and power gaps that arise from these types of governments. Western democracy ain't perfect, but there is a good chance that given the ability to accurately compare their options the Chinese and Russian populace would start to push back against the power structures. You can see this in the case of Hong Kong, and in Ukraine's westward trajectory.

Thus the people in power need to control information and unify the population in order to stay in power. If the west doesn't directly provide ammunition for this information war, they will just make it up. And they already do this. I have come to realize over the last 5 years or so that China and Russia have ZERO information in maintaining a truly friendly relationship with western (there needs to be a word for this that doesn't ignore Japan and Korea) democracies. They will continue to act in whatever fashion preserves the power structure, and that will include simply inventing threats. Such as Ukraines doomed bid to join NATO.


You're a few steps behind the ball my friend. The overtures of Sino backing of Russia have been pretty loudly resonating over the last few years. The neutrality now likely being a consequence of trying to gauge whether the U.S. is actually willing to flex in response to an invasion by another nuclear power. They've had their eyes on Taiwan, and if their leadership thinks they can get away with it, they'll likely give it the old Hong Kong treatment.

Especially since Ukraine, being the leading source of neon, is also a sizable link in the U.S. semiconductor supply chain. Not quite as big ticket as TSMC, but big enough to serve as a useful gauge for strategists and planners.

Gen Z has little or no exposure to outright saber rattling. Just proxy wars, which globalization somewhat optimized for until realpolitik came back around to start biting once folks started understanding the soft power play of post cold war economics.

3 generation rule at play. We've got the direct witnesses of heavy geopolitical action on the way out.

The boomers->X->Millenial know the aftershocks, and at least know what didn't work for the "The Greatest Generation". Z and forward are a refreshing breath of fresh air in de-bullshitting, and have access the way more information than any previous generation had all at one time, but that's a vulnerability at the same time without strong bullshit filters, and a collective sense of both unity and the real. The Real* is not entirely a "here's your canned reality" from the media, but a collective and relatable ground truth experience that crosscuts the population. I'm afraid one thing we've really dropped the ball on is as teachers, and institutional raisers and propagaters of strong bullshit filters. Especially given the information augmented battlefield of today.

Definitely keep doing what you're doing though. Ain't no way to get the head for it but to do it.


Interesting points but I'm struggling to find the thesis here, at least with respect to military intervention.

Russia and China have a weird relationship. They were, in a way, born together into their current statuses, but Russia isn't Soviet anymore and they don't necessarily represent the image China is going for. Meanwhile Russia wants China for it's economic might and China probably has an interest in resources and land north of Beijing, but at the moment any agreement wouldn't net much for China and represents a great deal of risk in the long term.


China's aspirations go far beyond Russia. They will not be content with vast reaches of methane burping tundra as their international policy showpiece. They want true superpower status and to set the tone for the world order. They will wait decades more if they have to.


Do we have any reason to believe this "common knowledge," or are we just projecting from Western imperialist tendencies? China has a _long_ tradition of being insular.


One belt one road. Much ink has been spilled on China's recent international ambitions that will make infrastructure investments in 70 countries between now and 2050. The reason this is common knowledge is that their superpower ambitions are blindingly obvious.


why is the perspective that they are making these investments to secure their economic future against foreign interference less valid than "they are trying to control world affairs"? China has never been interested in pushing its ideology unlike certain actors today. And regardless of how Westerners feel about it, HK is indisputably a domestic issue, and Taiwan arguably so. There's never been any indication of China wanting to project military force abroad. Their stated aims of being a regional force in a multipolar world make much more sense.

I take great issue with Western portrayal of China as an antagonistic threat when it's the West that has done the lion share of provocation, the West that continues to believe it deserves a say in East Asian affairs.


>I still side strongly with Ukraine but this is a complex issue and rolling the tanks against a country with less GDP than NY does not make the world inherently safer.

Putin takes Luhansk and Donestsk, consolidates the southern coast, and links to Transnistria. Ukraine is now a landlocked welfare case for Europe, with millions of refugees streaming out and a government in collapse. Just like that, Russia has a salient into Western europe, and the world order of national sovereignty comes to an end. There is no complexity to the issue. This is the clearest, most mortal threat to Western civilization since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Do not fall for "let's hear both sides" whataboutism.

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes in life there is simply right and wrong.


That's why I left the "at this time" caveat in there. Yeah, if the Russian military actually gets its shit together and manages an offensive that achieves that we need to reevaluate but...I don't think they have any chance of pulling that off. Their troops have spent weeks retreating from a meat grinder with nonexistent morale and will be asked to do it all again, "but it'll work this time".

Further, would you take landlocked Ukraine and possible welfare state over a Sino-Russian axis? I think I would.

This isn't "let's hear both sides" it's "this will get really nasty if we pull the old so-i-started-blasting strategy."


>This isn't "let's hear both sides" it's "this will get really nasty if we pull the old so-i-started-blasting strategy."

It already is really nasty. Ask the people of Bucha. I think my overall point here is that the war has already begun, and we in the West are sticking our heads in the sand and praying for it to go away. History shows that evil men will stop at nothing short of a forced hand. And any talk of negotiation with Russia at this point sounds painfully like "peace in our time". There is no "choice" to avoid this conflict anymore. I wish to god that there was. But that choice was made 20 years ago when Ukraine was alienated from NATO. Our only option now is to accept the reality of our state of war with Russia, or to sit by and watch them win.


>we in the West are sticking our heads in the sand and praying for it to go away.

So you want boots on the ground? Whose? Yours? Your children's? Do you think that will lead to less bloodshed? Negotiation is the way out.


> Negotiation is the way out.

Okay. How do you get the two sides to come to an agreement? Right now, one side wants the other side to not exist [1], the other side appears to be willing to concede status quo ante bellum.

[1] To be more precise, they have given several conflicting answers as to what they actually want. I personally find this answer to be the most likely to be true, especially given that the other side is willing to agree to the demands implied by several of the other answers, and yet this side is unwilling to accept such agreement.


> Negotiation is the way out.

Negotiation isn't a way out against an aggressor who isn't convinced that you can and will use force otherwise.

What you have then is at best surrender to their current demands and hope they don't decide to see what they can take you for next after that. This isn’t novel territory.


>So you want boots on the ground? Whose? Yours? Your children's?

Boots are already on the ground. Ukrainians childrens boots. They are already fighting the largest land battle in european history since World War II at this very moment. Russia has already taken greater losses than Germany did with the invasion of Poland.

Ukraine's fate is our own. And the longer we pretend this is just another foreign conflict, the more danger we will be in.


> Negotiation is the way out.

How? Putin isn’t going to leave if you ask nicely, and hasn’t left with increased sanctions or when bloodied.

What is the negotiation? Give him half Ukraine?


I wouldn't because I don't believe that's the choice I have. You can sacrifice Ukranians, accept landlocked Ukraine, hope it will stop there and you are still unlikely to prevent Sino-Russian axis that has been building for years now and clearly has a more matching world view than other current combinations.

This was started in 2014 and thinking it will go away if only Putin gets a big enough chunk of Ukraine is, I think, wishful thinking.


> This was started in 2014 and thinking it will go away if only Putin gets a big enough chunk of Ukraine is, I think, wishful thinking.

I mean, it worked with Hitler and Czechoslovakia, right? “Peace for our time” and all that...


> Further, would you take landlocked Ukraine and possible welfare state over a Sino-Russian axis?

Those are not alternatives, they are a package deal; if you accept the first, the second comes along free for the ride. The Sino-Russian axis exists now, the only way to disrupt it is defeating one of the poles in a way which results in a realignment (and, more likely, that weakens rather than fully disrupts it.) Permitting it victory just makes it stronger.


Sino-Russian axis is here, so get used to it. It wasn't started by this war, and it won't be stopped by stopping it. Russia and China have larger aligning geopolitical interests and that is the driver.


The world order of national sovereignty ends because Ukraine loses eastern territory?

There have been much greater refugee crisis' (Syria, for example) that has not resulted in the entire fall of civilization.

Having a prolonged conflict over Ukraine would be great for Northrup Grumman and Delloit. Finding a peaceful, quick diplomatic resolution will be better for the rest of the world.


> There have been much greater refugee crisis' (Syria, for example) that has not resulted in the entire fall of civilization.

Ukraine has, as of now, produced 4.7 million refugees, with another ~7 million internally-displaced people. That is over the course of 6 weeks.

The Syrian Civil War took 4 years to reach that refugee population, and currently stands at about 6-7 million refugees with roughly an equivalent number of IDP.

If the Ukrainian war persists for several months (which sadly seems likely), then the Ukrainian refugee count will eclipse the decade-long Syrian refugee count by the end of the year. Syria's refugee crisis--itself the biggest since WW2--isn't exactly "much greater" than Ukrainian's refugee crisis; if anything, it's the other way around.


Transnistria is the interesting one. If Russia eventually goes into Moldova to 'liberate the Russians there' then we know the narrative around Ukraine was total bullshit (it's absolutely true that Ukraine treated those in separatist areas poorly for years).


> (it's absolutely true that Ukraine treated those in separatist areas poorly for years).

The “separatist areas” are a product of the first wave of the current Russian invasion; they weren't pure homegrown movements, Russian troops, both regulars and the Wagner “private” military company that is Russian and appears to work exclusively for Russian state interests were involved in the fighting which established them, around the same time as the Russia also seized Crimea.

We’ve know the justifications of the wave of Russian invasions starting with Georgia in 2008 has been bullshit since the beginning, and people who haven't figured it out in the last 14 years aren't particularly like to click over with a new round in Moldova.


Given how Russia treats its own citizen and how the Russian state views human rights, I’m surprised anyone believe Russia’s claim that it’s defending its people.


Russia has to take Odessa to do what you have described, and at the moment it looks like it can't.


>Russia has to take Odessa to do what you have described, and at the moment it looks like it can't.

It seems like people have forgotten that wars last longer than a month. This will be a years long proccess of attrition if it isn't stopped.


This 'national sovereignty' and 'world order' degrade didn't start with this war. Russians are now just using our double standards. They don't recognise our sui generis. You can call it whataboutism or however you like. World order is a thing for powers to sort and national sovereignty is just an illusion for smaller and weaker countries.

Call me a cynic...


I would argue a greater threat is the attack upon democracy in the United States. One of the major political parties now rejects election results they do not win. A fall of the United States to a fascism that is allied to Putin would very likely be worse for Europe and "Western" society.


>Do not fall for "let's hear both sides" whataboutism.

Your comment is spot on, but this is strange. It is complex; there are two sides. The ideals of "Western civilization" aren't held by the globe, so it's important to understand why things work the way they do. It isn't "good" versus "evil".


Nah. There is one side. Two collectives competing over influence and sovereignty. The West, advocating for everyone has their lines and we're good, and Russia now going imperialist/expansionist.

NAP. Don't start nothing, won't be nothing.

Russia started something. There is now something. Failure to respond and restore the equilibrium is tacit acceptance of Russia setting terms, which sets a precedent.

It's pretty clear.


Though to be fair, the West 's position is everyone has their lines but plays by our rules. The western governments put huge pressure on the rest of the world to conform their laws and norms to be beneficial to the globalized world order they themselves invented. This world order includes good things like human rights and rule of law, but also questionable things like the deck being heavily stacked in favor of the incumbents and winner takes all hypercapitalism.


Watching the actions of the Russian and Chinese governments over the past few months I think the issue has gotten much more black and white than these things usually are. Not necessarily good vs evil, as that is too subjective, but definitely somewhat of an ideological standoff between truth and...not truth.


I am absolutely on the side of the Ukraine and the West, but that is too simple. We are also post-truth. I think we are much closer to the real truth than Russia state media, but the president calling Ukraine a genocide is inventing a new definition for the term.


>The president calling Ukraine a genocide is inventing a new definition for the term.

How many more bodies do the mass graves need to qualify as genocide?


Genocide: Noun. The deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group "a campaign of genocide"

By that definition I would say quite a few more mass graves, along with a coordinated effort to stamp out Ukrainian language, customs, intelligentsia, and identity. I understand that Russian state media calls Ukraine "one people" with Russians, but it's a far way to go between a talking point and indiscriminately killing civilians as part of a brutal war and genocide. It's pretty obvious that word is being said for political reasons, not because the current situation obviously meets the definition.

I am absolutely horrified by Russia's war, but I reserve the right to be vastly more horrified if they begin an organized campaign to exterminate the Ukrainian people.


[flagged]


What a lazy comment.


It's not. Contrarian takes on the internet are 90% trolling and 9% clueless/bad faith arguments being presented as if they had the same weight of evidence behind them as the (usually) established view.

The 1% of actually contrarian arguments are usually well received, even if they differ significantly from the status quo or say something outside the Overton window.


>We live on the knife's edge of peace

Peace for who? America just formally ended a 20 year long war, with very little to show for it. Someone who is 18 today, has only known America in a time of war. How can you call this peace? (I know how, it's because you only talk about peace as peace for western nations.) Anyone would immediately be skeptical to the thought that we should immediately enter another war several thousand miles away.

It's only when majority white western christians are being blown up that we are at the "knife's edge of peace". What is it called when it's muslims in the middle east or northern africa being blown up? I'm not convinced America needs to be proactive in an engagement with Russia to hold up what you consider "the knife's edge of peace".


Afghanistan and Iraq were and remained local conflicts. Twice in the last century and once in the century before (Napoleon), a local conflict in Europe escalated into a world war in which millions died in the span of a few years.

That doesn't make the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq right or just (I don't believe they were), but Europe has long been an extremely dangerous powder keg. We have had relative peace in the last 70 years because European great powers have successfully avoided actively shooting at each other. This move by Russia is a major threat to that stability and is categorically different than the invasions in the Middle East not because of race but because of the likelihood of escalation.


> Afghanistan and Iraq were and remained local conflicts.

Sort of, but Pakistan might not agree.

The disastrous Iraq invasion had huge consequences for neighbouring countries and people argue over its contribution to significant knock on effects like the Arab spring.


> How can you call this peace?

I think you already know the answer to that. When the 20 year old war is mostly all about sending some soldiers over to the middle east to bomb it, then it doesn't really feel like a war. For people in the US who choose to ignore it, they absolutely live in peace every day.


Peace for me. And I want my government to prioritize that over peace for other countries at every opportunity. It ain't pretty, but it's how the world works.

And nobody gives a damn about "white western Christians." We set whole cities of white western christians on fire in WWII, and bombed white western Christians in the 90's on behalf of a Muslim population (Serbia / Kosovo).


You, too, may experience a difference if war comes not for a faraway people whom you like to feel indignant about, but to your own country, landing on your doorstep and destroying your neighbourhood. Perhaps it's very wrong that you will feel differently. But you will. That is what the knife edge means. Using the miseries of far-off people to encourage cowardice or putting your head in the sand is wrong, and foolish.


The conflict statistics bear out that we are in a lengthy era of peace. I am not being eurocentric, it's true for a vast stretch of the world since WW2. If you think we have not been in a time of peace, just wait till you find out what a time of war looks like. It will go from 3 ongoing conflicts to 100.


Peace is the natural human condition in small groups. As the groups increase in size so does competition, insecurity and conflicts of interest. Its this dynamic that gives rise to conflating our own peaceful orbits with tribal or state rivalry; and conversely its often an abused imbalance of our interpersonal relationships that gives rise to individual leaders with power compulsivity.


> Peace is the natural human condition in small groups.

I don’t think this is true. I read Sapiens by Harari and he presents lots of info on how early man, living in small groups was very violent. With gravesites from the time showing violent deaths at young ages.

I romantically would like to think this but believe the reality is that humans are violent and it’s large civilizations with complicated rule of law and interdependency is the reason for peace. Sort of the Leviathan argument that humans are evil and it’s a struggle to overcome and improve on that nature.

Although I hope that one day this changes and we eventually evolve to be more peaceful.

Evolutionarily speaking I think violence was too much of a shortcut to survival so mammals evolved against peace.


Yes, peace is a technology for sure.


Oh is it now? I'm so happy for you and your harmonious family.


> knife's edge of peace

This phrasing reminded me of a comment I favorited a while ago, so I went through my favorited comments and found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847789

"It took thousands of years of human civilisation before we got relatively benign governments. Power structures are not inherently benign; they must constantly be pressured to prevent malignant people using them to leverage their actions. A non-authoritarian government is an historical anomaly. It's a ball balanced on top of a hill, pushed there by the deaths of millions, and kept there by the vigilance of those who care.

Please start caring."


Indeed. Or like the ISS in low earth orbit. It took enormous energy to put it into that decaying orbit and constant infusions of energy to keep it there. We will come crashing down to earth quite quickly if we can't keep up the balance.


Edge of peace. I like that phrase. I may end up borrowing it.

I think overall I agree with your post. We truly do suck as a species. The past few decades were a massive aberration in our history ( and even that relatively peaceful -- for a westerner -- period saw some horrifying conflicts that just did not make the front pages ).

I do not wish for another major conflict. No sane person does. We should do what we can to prevent it.

Still, I personally see one on the horizon. Best I can do is talk to my social circle, but even that seems futile. The actual decisions about matters like these happen way outside those.


The people who came of age after the internet but before it was censored into something safe enough to sell ads on are far more aware of how nasty things can be than the people before and since.

If anyone is gonna set out on a path of "real violence" it's likely going to be a subgroup of millennials.

Edit: the above only applies to the US


> I think for young people it's very difficult to appreciate that we live on the knife's edge of peace.

That doesn't seem like thought that supports the position of the old, as characterized here, who are encouraging the escalation of a war against a nuclear power with a ruined economy.

I blame the generational gap on that particular US generation who has lived through major wars but never had to worry about war on their own territory, who have gone through wars where only an extreme minority have had to participate (and that being privileged enough to be in college or to have an important job was enough to get you out of participation), and who have been hammered by propaganda their entire lives that the final battle would be the commies vs the bootstrappers.

Half of them are praying that this will be the end of the world, like God said it would be.

They supported every war except Vietnam, because Vietnam was the only war they were in danger of participating in. Those wars didn't affect them badly at all, in fact the wars helped the economy because everybody got jobs creating expensive things that would be burned (in the occupied homes of Iraqi families.)

I would call them a reflection of Russian nationalist aggression, but they're really not, because Russians have known suffering from war. Russians have pretty good excuses not to want NATO weapons, missile defense systems, and troops stationed on their border. Americans are afraid of their vital fluids being corrupted by the demonic Russians and their sole goal of creating discord by spreading propaganda that the issues that everybody who isn't an old wealthy retired homeowner is concerned about aren't something that should be completely ignored.

Young people generally see them as insane chickenhawks that are useless domestically and hyperaggressive internationally, and rightfully so.


Maybe when life’s good it’s easy to ignore what one’s government is misspending on the military.

But when job security’s low, education costs a fortune and the social safety net barely exists, asking why one’s government is sending billions in help to a country at the other end of the world is not at all a crazy question.

Now that’s the US, but I’m in the EU and I’m still deeply disappointed at how much money the EU is spending on helping everyone except EU citizens. It’s unacceptable to spend money at such scale when we have areas which are dirt-poor in Europe and many children are severely materially and socially deprived.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...


Rather than a "fault" of young Americans I would just point out that they have never experienced a significant militaristic national security threat nor witnessed a great power competition, and old-fashioned tanks-and-bombs conquest has been rare from the first & second world countries for their entire lives.


This is a "fault" of almost everyone living in Europe and USA at the moment. Europe for a while neglected military spending because the great evil Soviet Union was gone. In the USA we got to the mode where Russia isn't exactly our friend but they are contained to their vast land and nobody cares. Our focus too was on the Middle East.

But now, I am not really old enough to know what it was like living under the threat from Russia, but I am old enough to know from 1 generation of separation family and friends what it was like. And 2 generations was WWII. So Russian aggression has me worried.

Now Gen Z is another generation forward. I have found that Gen Z as a whole seems to be more empathetic, and very anti violence. The thought of someone coming in and flattening your neighborhood is the last thing they would think of. The things they more empathize with at the moment are the issues in the USA with social justice. And seeing Russian minorities in Ukraine persecuted from Russian sources resonates with them more than the narrative from the USA that Russia is an imperialistic country. They are also deeply skeptical of that narrative from our government as reflections on the USA's own history in the middle east, and central/South America


The last 70 years of (relative) peace are the exception, not the norm. Remaining ambivalent when a great power makes it clear they are intent on upsetting the balance on which peace hangs is clearly a "fault". It doesn't matter if that fault is the result of ignorance of history, it's still a problem.


This is an example of the quip 'Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.'

The younger generations have grown up in a bubble. The Soviet empire was no more. They were probably too young to remember or not even alive for 9/11. The modern wars the US was involved in could mostly be ignored. The economy was, for the most part, booming and full of distracting consumer goods and excess capacity leading to a full table of innovative goods and services.

I'm a late gen X. My wife is a late millennial. I try to relate to her how the world used to be when I was young(less wealth, less choices, more uncertainty) but until you've lived it you can't understand it.


The current generation is just barely eaking out of a nearly three year long 'once in a century' pandemic with broad impacts on education, employment, and housing costs... and yet, they apparently haven't suffered through enough 'hard times.'

OK.

Notwithstanding the constant ongoing war in the Middle East and that anyone born before 99' definitely remembers 9/11. I know people who still haven't adequately processed the trauma of the Great Recession -- and they weren't old enough to make the massive gains from the economy, either.


I think this is an extremely ungenerous take. I think more objectively young Americans simply have different ideological preferences than older Americans.

The cold war mentality, talk of "free and open" societies is in itself deeply ideological, not "facing reality head on". It's the wish to remake or maintain the world in America's image. If anything I think young Americans are the less ideological group here. They see America's domestic issues, international overreach, they have less of a preference for liberalism in the broad sense of the term, and they demand a foreign policy that is more focused on America's domestic interests in the face of a changing, more multipolar world.

the general opinion of younger Americans seems much more aligned with realist schools of foreign policy than with the moralistic, idealistic mentality of older generations.


There are levels of grey to open (e.g. free speech, expression, democracy) vs closed (e.g. prison for political speech, totalitarianism), but the US and EU are a world apart from Russia or China. I recommend speaking to someone (who isn't state sponsored as many Tiktok & Youtube influencers are) from that country to understand. Do not think that you will not be shot by a conscripted soldier who wants your stuff to take back to his impoverished family or that if you are it will make the world a better more "equal" place. Many Russians are afraid of the return of soldiers from this war (special operation?), because each time before it has led to more violence.

Having your pronoun misused by a teacher in school isn't right, but it is fundamentally different type of oppression from working in a prison camp in Siberia or Xinjiang.


My understanding is that--according to Western sources--Chinese people report high satisfaction with their government, much higher than US citizens. I feel that this metric should also be considered when evaluating the quality of life in a society.

As for the point on Xinjiang, I think the oppression of people there is real, but oppression of religious minorities isn't just a non-Western phenomenon; look at France, for example.

Consider the source of your information about other societies. The elites of Western society, who have a great interest in preserving Western societies as they are and who hold a lot of control of the media, want to align the populous against the enemies of the Western elites. The flaws of enemy countries will therefore tend to be exaggerated, sometimes highly so. Western societies will tend to be portrayed as the best anyone can hope for.


I've traveled to China for two decades. There is both great prosperity and astounding poverty there ($300=2000Yuan/year is defined as poverty). Whatever you may see on TV there is plenty of homelessness even in Shanghai/Beijing/Shenzhen (for many who lack an appropriate identity card) and also much greater destitution in the outlying regions. There is no free medical care. Of course "people report" high satisfaction with a government that can and does throw them in jail for disagreeing. That visibly happens even in independent Hong Kong. Be careful what "Western sources" are actually propaganda outlets. It is amazing what large monetary donations to journalism and research universities can buy in the US, EU, and Australia, but there is plenty of other documentation.

That you compare "religious suppression" (reeducation prison camps with forced labor and sterilization) in Xinjiang to not wearing a hijab in France is quite frankly shocking.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22311356/china-uyghur-bir...

https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-international-news-we...


You shouldn't just evaluate governments based on reported approval, but approval does mean something. I don't think you have provided sufficient evidence to be able to dismiss the data.

I don't think my comparison to France is as shocking as you claim, but perhaps a better comparison would be Canada's treatment of indigenous people. I thought this video on the topic of Xinjiang was pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz9ICFDk8Js

Edit: About France, here's an article on the topic I was referring to: <https://theintercept.com/2019/02/23/france-islamophobia-isla...>. A quote: "[France] has become a 'laboratory' for discriminatory laws targeting minorities, particularly Muslims."


You haven't even done basic research. Random sources you pulled from cursory web searches, with origins in _actual_ propaganda funded by the US government, are legitimate to you? You literally cite Adrian Zenz. But Harvard polls on government approval are "propaganda outlets" because they contradict your beliefs. Shocking indeed.


Realist as determined by some social media bubble, some of which are engineered by foreign intelligence agencies, sure.


Which intelligence agencies do you think have the most control of the Twitter discourse?


This is a matter of ideology? You're saying the principles of young people in the US say it's OK to invade another country that did not attack first? Or because they found some news sources saying Putin is justified?

I guess I just don't see any sense in that argument. Do kids today not think for themselves? Have they no principles of their own?

Wow. Today is definitely the right time to reinstate the US military draft.

If nothing else, the prospect of yourself dying in the mud of a distant foreign land should motivate US kids to finally give a damn about power-crazed politicians killing multitudes of human beings for... whatever platitude manages to get a million retweets.


An important aspect to understand is that "democratic nations" fighting together for their ideals is fiction created for the purpose of propaganda and of manufacturung consent. Countries fight for their interests, not for ideals.


> none of whom can make the transition to so-called green tech in-time to avoid that outcome

The Germans brought it upon themselves with their anti-nuclear views.


Those seem an odd selection of questions, which made me immediately suspect they asked many other questions then skipped over them to generate a story.

Similar to how pharma companies have to pre-register research questions, do these polls have to publish their full methodology somewhere?


I was anti-military and anti-gun ownership, until I happened to be in Ukraine at the time of attack, and until I happened to be in Belarus at a time of dictatorship.

PS: although I think organization and coordination is thousands times more important than weapons.


Eh... without a breakout of their numbers it is hard to trust this poll.

That said, I think its fair to say half of 18-29 year olds have no interest in geopolitics and 65+ people have been around long enough to have some opinion on it.


The difference isn't that many more are supporting Russia. The difference is that many more don't have clear-cut sympathy for any side.

I personally are much more sympathetic to Ukraine on different principles than most, but I definitely understand why many are not willing to trust the main media line on this. We went from hearing about how Ukraine was a deeply corrupt country, barely a democracy, to immediately hearing about how they are only being attacked because of how democratic and amazing it is and that Putin is scared Russians will want to live like Ukrainians. Media started glossing over Nazi imagery on the very pictures of soldiers they spread, not even mentioning it. There were many more narrative flips that I won't get into as a matter of time.

Because of this, people that are less informed or that have a more traditional understanding of the morality of conflict will naturally get skeptical and decide that they don't want to sympathize with anyone.


> We went from hearing about how Ukraine was a deeply corrupt country, barely a democracy, to immediately hearing about how they are only being attacked because of how democratic and amazing it is and that Putin is scared Russians will want to live like Ukrainians.

Can't forget the regime change—excuse me, anti-corruption protests—in 2014 directly after the old regime chose economic partnership with Putin over closer integration with the EU. Much of the civil conflict within Ukraine, which Putin ostensibly invaded to pacify (remember, lying to justify a war isn't a US-only skill), is due to their residents/leadership not recognizing the results of the 2014 governmental changes.


>Media started glossing over Nazi imagery on the very pictures of soldiers they spread, not even mentioning it.

I think they genuinely didn't know what it was. Even on r/ukraine, they were promoting those picture at the beginning. It doesn't look like any of the more common nazi symbols and and it doesn't have any text on it that you can google.

It was quite interesting to see journalists using those pictures in their articles talking about how there was no nazi problem in Ukraine.


The title is backwards. There is a striking generational divide, and it extends into views of war.


Insightful episode of South Park on this recently...


pay walled



never loads, for me



Turning off Javascript on the Economist website also shows the full article. I'm using uBlock for this. Besides the paywalls, I find that turning off JS improves the user experience on the vast majority of news sites.


A lot of sites will just break without JS. I just tried with my ublock origin and cnn.com with javascript disabled, and only the site map on the footer loads.


It's strangely appropriate that someone would need to tear down that wall to let everyone read about this particular generational divide.

The first time I've appreciated a paywall.


I visit some fringe political forums once in a blue moon just to take a pulse. I was surprised to see a sizable pro-Putin sentiment which is basically a result of the whole “Russia Russia Russia” thing.

Boy who cried wolf is a real thing.


I check out some of these forums too occasionally, out of morbid curiosity.

Within the last decade or so, many of various unrelated political fringes have sort of loosely joined forces together and organized, but instead of being organized in service of a goal, it’s just in service of vague contrariness for the sake of contrariness.

These various groups, no matter how far apart ideologically they are, have sort of all coalesced on “If the ‘Mainstream’ is for it, we are against it, even if we can’t articulate why!”


>“If the ‘Mainstream’ is for it, we are against it, even if we can’t articulate why!”

This argument has worked out just fine. The mainstream is generally against me.


> a result of the whole “Russia Russia Russia” thing.

Can you explain who the "boy" was and how they "cried wolf"? Did you read the Senate Intelligence report? PBS: Senate panel finds Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election [1].

"The nearly 1,000-page report, the fifth and final one from the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee on the Russia investigation, details how Russia launched an aggressive effort to interfere in the election on Trump’s behalf. It says the Trump campaign chairman had regular contact with a Russian intelligence officer and says other Trump associates were eager to exploit the Kremlin’s aid, particularly by maximizing the impact of the disclosure of Democratic emails hacked by Russian intelligence officers."

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senate-panel-finds-rus...


That second quote you gave is just really slanted. The right framing here is Trump is not a smart man. Sure, his folks talked to Russian operatives. That's for two reasons:

1. They're stupid and easy to manipulate.

2. They urgently wanted negative stories to publish about Hillary.

Yes, Russia was trying to influence our election. But, no, Trump isn't some clever Manchurian Candidate taking over our country on behalf of another country.

The right framing here is that famous SNL sketch about Reagan from the 80s, where Reagan acts like a bumbler but then when the doors close suddenly becomes some kind of genius mob figure. That skit was funny, because the "mob boss" version of Reagan was obviously just not true. Same thing for Trump.

Turning to American media. Sure, they can dig up stuff about Trump's behavior with Russia. Along the same lines, there are tons of stories across decades painting the Clintons as pretty terrible people.

The difference here, and this is important, is that outlets like CNN do have a massive bias in favor of Democratic candidates. That's where the "Russia Russia Russia" narrative by Trump supporters is actually right. Mainstream media's treatment of events like the Russia story, Jan 6, BLM protests, etc. is absolutely biased. That's where the suspicion comes from.

The solution is for mainstream journalists to reduce their bias. Easy places to start:

* Tell the truth about the relative propensity of a white versus black suspect to be shot by police.

* Investigate political candidates in an evenhanded way, and be as honest as possible about errors on stories like Hunter Biden's laptop.


> But, no, Trump isn't some clever Manchurian Candidate taking over our country on behalf of another country.

A claim neither I nor the article made. The Trump Campaign, however, had many ties to Russia (Manafort, Rick Gates) and clearly served Russian interests (changing the party platform on Ukraine, ghost written op-eds). Some of them even went to prison for it and you are still trying to claim it never happened. Did we ever figure out why his campaign manager gave campaign polling data to a Russian oligarch?

> Sure, they can dig up stuff about Trump's behavior with Russia. Along the same lines, there are tons of stories across decades painting the Clintons as pretty terrible people.

Whatabout-ism in plain sight.

> The difference here, and this is important, is that outlets like CNN do have a massive bias in favor of Democratic candidates.

It was a PBS article, so this is not relevant comment. Even so, the article was referencing a release from the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee. Why would they repeat Democratic talking points?


It wasn't whataboutism. I was pointing out that much of the media's objective is just to create controversy, not to clarify issues. They do it in both directions. Yes, the article didn't explicitly say he was a Manchurian Candidate, but that's the implication, and it's a bad read.

Someone can commit a crime without being a Russian agent. Same goes for Hunter Biden and his stupid laptop and weird deal with that company in Ukraine. I don't think he was a spy. I just think he's an idiot and greedy. He and Trump are the same.

The core issue here is thinking there's some real moral difference between left and right. There isn't. Think of the political spectrum in absolute value terms. People in the middle are the best people. People on both wings are the bad people.

Edit: Also, you know full well no one is going to read all 1,000 pages of this report. PBS is well known to have a large liberal bias. I downloaded the report and went through a bit of it. One thing I noticed is there's a big partisan split in the report itself about what the report means. Democrats say it essentially means Trump is a Russian spy. Republicans say it shows there was no collusion. Note which story PBS published.


> Yes, the article didn't explicitly say he was a Manchurian Candidate, but that's the implication, and it's a bad read.

The article is inconsequential, the report it is describing (and the evidence within that report) is the thing you keep dancing around. The report lays out in great detail all of the activities and connections.

> Someone can commit a crime without being a Russian agent.

Another thing nobody claimed. You have failed to engage in any of the substance. It's just deflection after deflection.

> The core issue here is thinking there's some real moral difference between left and right. There isn't. Think of the political spectrum in absolute value terms. People in the middle are the best people. People on both wings are the bad people.

Sounds like you've figured it all out. No need to continue.


The boy was the media and left wing politicians for about 1-2 years straight. The supposed wolf was something like a puppy was seen in one of Trumps cars once and it looked Russian, according to XYZ political enemies of Trump.


The Senate Intelligence Report was released by a Republican-led committee and clearly outlined the many connections between the campaign and Russia. That committee and it's findings had nothing to do with "the media", "left wing politicians", or "XYZ political enemies of Trump".

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...


I guess you've decided not to count the letters in the report from Republican senators specifically saying there was no collusion as part of the report. Also, the word is "its" not "it's".


I didn't decide not to count anything nor have I used the term collusion. Are there particular excerpts in the letters that prove the campaign didn't work closely with Russians? Because the report provides plenty of evidence that they did.

Did we ever find out why Manafort gave Konstantin Kilimnik polling data from the campaign? Did we ever learn why he worked for "free" on the campaign? just to come full circle, he went to prison, in part, for his fraudulent actions helping the Russian government (attempt to) destabilize Ukraine.

> Also, the word is "its" not "it's".

Thanks for that, hope it wasn't too confusing. FYI, the period should be inside the quotes for "it's."


I purposely leave the period outside the quotes in situations like that, as I think it's more confusing for the reader if it's inside.


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