Basic premise most agree with in 2024: wars of aggression are bad.
I mean, yes, but also no. In most wars, you could make some argument for either side being the aggressor. For some of them you’d really have to work hard for it, but it’s generally possible to at least conjure some flimsy rhetoric around it. The Iraq War, for instance, was very obviously a war of aggression by the US against Iraq. …or was it? I mean, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and they have WMDs!!! Iraq is actually declaring a war of aggression against the concept of freedom and democracy! We’ve gotta respond to this attack!
So what’s actually going on here is “If your government can successfully persuade you that they aren’t the aggressor, and in fact they’re actually the victim, then you’ll probably support the war a lot more than if your government isn’t able to do so.”
For the Russia-Ukraine situation, portraying Russia as the aggressor is quite easy, because… well… they invaded Ukraine, and almost nobody knew anything about the Donbass. I only very vaguely knew about it before 2022, and the extent of my knowledge was “Oh, there’s some territorital disputes and fighting going on between Ukraine and Russia over something or other,” and I was fairly geopolitically-minded. So if you’re just the average guy on the street, you might not even have known anything about Ukraine, let alone the Donbass. But if you did know about the general sequence of events since the fall of the USSR; the US-sponsored coup in Ukraine, Russia taking Crimea in response, the West arming neo-Nazi groups, the diplomatic efforts taken by Russia to try and not go to war while Europe was arming Ukraine for the sole purpose of trying to weaken Russia (as Merkel explicitly admitted in an interview), the mass murders of the Donbass people, etc - then suddenly, NATO looks a lot like the aggressor in this war. The Russian people certainly know this sequence of events, which is why most of them support the war. It’s not that Putin has weaved a magic brainwashing spell on the Russian people, or that they’re all secretly too scared to say their opinion - they legitimately, and quite rightfully, believe themselves and their fellow Russians in the Donbass to be the victims of NATO and Ukrainian aggression. NATO has been on the offensive against Russia since 2014 - I mean, really, since NATO first expanded after the USSR fell. February 24th 2022 was merely the start of the Russian counteroffensive.
For Israel-Palestine, efforts to portray Palestine as the aggressor did kinda work initially because the October 7th attack was so effective. But in the months that followed, and as Israel further bombed and invaded Gaza, it became increasingly difficult to say that Israel somehow isn’t the aggressor here, and because most people are at least generally aware that the Israel-Palestine conflict exists and that the Palestinians have been suffering for decades, Westerners were primed to be able to experience sympathy for the Palestinians. The legacy of the Holocaust complicates the matter sufficiently that for a big chunk of people, the whole conflict just becomes this big complicated blob of “Well, both sides here have reasons to hate the other and fight, idk what to think really, I’m gonna go back to watching Love Island or whatever,” but generally speaking people believe that it was a war of aggression by Israel. The footage that has come out of Gaza helps in that regard, compared to Israel’s unwillingness to show their own pain and suffering publically because they want to maintain their image as God’s chosen superior ubermensch to the inferior, weak, untermensch Arabs.
I mean, yes, but also no. In most wars, you could make some argument for either side being the aggressor. For some of them you’d really have to work hard for it, but it’s generally possible to at least conjure some flimsy rhetoric around it. The Iraq War, for instance, was very obviously a war of aggression by the US against Iraq. …or was it? I mean, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and they have WMDs!!! Iraq is actually declaring a war of aggression against the concept of freedom and democracy! We’ve gotta respond to this attack!
So what’s actually going on here is “If your government can successfully persuade you that they aren’t the aggressor, and in fact they’re actually the victim, then you’ll probably support the war a lot more than if your government isn’t able to do so.”
For the Russia-Ukraine situation, portraying Russia as the aggressor is quite easy, because… well… they invaded Ukraine, and almost nobody knew anything about the Donbass. I only very vaguely knew about it before 2022, and the extent of my knowledge was “Oh, there’s some territorital disputes and fighting going on between Ukraine and Russia over something or other,” and I was fairly geopolitically-minded. So if you’re just the average guy on the street, you might not even have known anything about Ukraine, let alone the Donbass. But if you did know about the general sequence of events since the fall of the USSR; the US-sponsored coup in Ukraine, Russia taking Crimea in response, the West arming neo-Nazi groups, the diplomatic efforts taken by Russia to try and not go to war while Europe was arming Ukraine for the sole purpose of trying to weaken Russia (as Merkel explicitly admitted in an interview), the mass murders of the Donbass people, etc - then suddenly, NATO looks a lot like the aggressor in this war. The Russian people certainly know this sequence of events, which is why most of them support the war. It’s not that Putin has weaved a magic brainwashing spell on the Russian people, or that they’re all secretly too scared to say their opinion - they legitimately, and quite rightfully, believe themselves and their fellow Russians in the Donbass to be the victims of NATO and Ukrainian aggression. NATO has been on the offensive against Russia since 2014 - I mean, really, since NATO first expanded after the USSR fell. February 24th 2022 was merely the start of the Russian counteroffensive.
For Israel-Palestine, efforts to portray Palestine as the aggressor did kinda work initially because the October 7th attack was so effective. But in the months that followed, and as Israel further bombed and invaded Gaza, it became increasingly difficult to say that Israel somehow isn’t the aggressor here, and because most people are at least generally aware that the Israel-Palestine conflict exists and that the Palestinians have been suffering for decades, Westerners were primed to be able to experience sympathy for the Palestinians. The legacy of the Holocaust complicates the matter sufficiently that for a big chunk of people, the whole conflict just becomes this big complicated blob of “Well, both sides here have reasons to hate the other and fight, idk what to think really, I’m gonna go back to watching Love Island or whatever,” but generally speaking people believe that it was a war of aggression by Israel. The footage that has come out of Gaza helps in that regard, compared to Israel’s unwillingness to show their own pain and suffering publically because they want to maintain their image as God’s chosen superior ubermensch to the inferior, weak, untermensch Arabs.