I've long said that the radical progressives here in the US should have to spend 6 months in the DPRK and really see how life is like before they're allowed to flip the tables and continue to advocate for bringing more of that insanity back here. Certain elements of Occupy Wall street and many of the dirtball commies that had a blast hanging out and protesting in the streets here for their ideal version of socialist life would get thrown in the gulags over in DPRK and get minimal food while working 16 hour days in hell.
It's the same with all Russian supporters in the Ukrainian mess.
Most of them haven't been even once to Russia , don't speak russian but they think rusia is the greatest country just because it is against the US.
Two months in a communist country and every westerner will cry to get back in the "bankrupt" EU or US.
Our population accepts the enemy of enemy is friend doctrine unequivocally, and I'd guess this is the greatest factor in every part of our politics, too. Look at Obama, there's a picture of him with a hateful preacher. Look at Ron Paul, there's a picture of him with a racist leader. No time for nuanced views, which I'm tempted to think is valid. We read history books in school, then maybe fluffy news reports - Russia maybe has a paragraph about its acts in high school textbooks' chapter on WW2... Cold War still isn't really covered outside dates -- very sterilized. Nothing to form an opinion on anything related to Russia one way or the other, except our books make them out to be incompetent while Ronald Reagan may's well have been some kind of laser-shooting pterodactyl in space, backed by the wrath of our Almighty Lord. It's extremely difficult to intimately understand a place, people, or government without being fully involved with them, and that isn't even something we attempt to do, here, and maybe it's like this in many places or not - I wouldn't know. This makes being an adequately informed US citizen almost impossible. Our government becomes involved in acts of war with new groups of people faster than we could possibly understand what's in play, so soldiers go over completely lost except for what they're told to do, unless they learn too much, but the government's grown wise to this and insists on providing as many luxury distractions as possible. Idunno - it seems like playing Battlefield 9000 or whatever would trigger some moment where someone has a sudden realization... maybe you suddenly notice you feel a little more fire playing the NATO/EU/US team than when shooting Americans. Spec Ops: The Line was a fascinating and controversial game in the US... it would be interesting to send over in care packages, though maybe we could make even more succinct narratives - or maybe it's just taken as a game where you shoot people and avoid being shot.
Who am I shooting? Why am I shooting them? Why can't these people conduct commerce unmolested? Am I here to stop capitalism and democracy? Why do these people act like this? Don't they understand I'm trying to help - that they're backwards - repressed - and their lost relatives are a necessary evil for the greater good? Does the person who orders me understand the implications of what he's doing? You're to go over without adequate information, to do great things, but it takes a long time to decide whether you did a great good or great evil... but it's almost necessarily after the fact.
There's not much to do but rely on those in power, which is impossible for skeptics, but no single person could truly understand every person and group's motivations everywhere, so....
We can understand Canada and Mexico, maybe a few countries in Central or South America, and maybe an important country in the Caribbean - but it's irresponsible to have Americans doing anything anywhere else outside free commerce, certainly not acts of war and espionage. We don't *know* North Korea, ISIS, Russia, or other countries -- most of us only barely understand Cuba -- some type of weird, freedom-hating, backwards people on an island where they drive cars from the first half of the 20th century and make cigars (with rather strict unspoken rules on cigar-smoking, and I have made a habit of white-labeling all my cigars as soon as I get my hands on any) while refusing to come out of a lesser past. Funding all these different militias and providing weapons to governments few Americans could even pronounce and almost certainly haven't heard of is insane. -So then we get to this point where nobody's allowed to judge the people of a country, where a country can be at total war, with the head of state at high approval ratings, but we accept that actual individuals are generally ignorant and not responsible for what their government does, even if they voted for it... it's just all so disconnected, confusing, and impersonal. *shrug* I don't even know what I'm rambling about anymore, though.
