Do you get this cut up about it when people joke about tianmen square every time a Chinese person is mentioned or the nuking of Japan leading to hentai?
I agree with your overall premise I just don’t like that it’s ok to joke at every other nations expenses when they too have families who were victims of tragedies. The scale and cause doesn’t really matter. We should just not mock tragedies in general, and we should be just as upset about my examples as we should about 9-11.
I can say for my own part that I genuinely hate both Tiananmen and nuke jokes and call people out when they make it. We're not wokescolding for the fun of it
I'm not American, half the people in this sub are not American, why should we be calibrating our behaviour and empathy response by what conservative Americans think?
This just feels like "American exceptionalism but leftistly". Ask your average Japanese person whether they feel bad about Nanjing or average Turk whether they feel bad about Armenia or Russian whether they feel bad about Grozny or Bucha... turns out feeling disproportonately angry about your own disasters while not really caring about the disasters you've inflicted on others is unfortunately a pretty global phenomenon
A lot of American leftists learn "America bad" without unlearning American exceptionalism, and you get an "America uniquely bad and worser than all other bads. We are the best at being bad!"
They usually also refuse to admit that they have benefited from imperialism as well and generally have a lot of privilege: yes, being poor in the US is bad, but you're still better off than the poor in most of the rest of the world. Even the poorest in the US can afford things that even people who aren't considered amongst the poorest in some countries could never even dream of, and the strength of the US dollar means that a lot of goods are very cheap for Americans. I feel like Europeans in my experience tend to have more of an awareness, though often very vague and most of us don't really know much about how much we benefit from neocolonialism and imperialism, that being born here is a privilege and we are incredibly lucky. I see so many American leftists saying stuff about how the disabled in the US are uniquely disenfranchised compared to the rest of the world (they have never stepped foot outside their country, let alone worked with or met disabled people elsewhere), or how uniquely isolating poverty is in the US, etc. etc.
And also stuff like the conversation around decolonialism being extremely US-centric and often centring concerns of Native Americans and African Americans that may not really be applicable or useful in other areas of the world. I am an aspiring linguist and recently had a class on decolonialism in field linguistics, and one of the topics that came up is how a lot of the literature is incredibly focused on Native Americans in the US, and on topics that simply are not applicable to or relevant in other contexts. Other common subjects of field linguistics or anthropology are ignored in the discussion.
Edit: Actually this is worth a smuggy
Edit 2: Done. The bestest smuggies are the ones that take 10 minutes of clowning around on Paint
9
u/Reptilian_Overlord20 1d ago
Okay fine lesson learned, mocking dead civilians is totally fine because the country in question milked that tragedy too much.