My Take | Demands for peace to stop people dying are far from outrageous
- The West may be shocked that the rest of the world does not share its anger over Ukraine, but there are conflicts in which it acts differently
We are all selective in our outrage. We are all at heart hypocritical creatures with our own double standards. OK there may be real saints out there who are models of moral purity, but in all my life I have never met one. Fortunately, some of us at least have the decency not to be outraged when other people don’t share our outrage. I think that used to be called tolerance, an old-fashioned word that isn’t much tolerated nowadays. Virtue-signalling is now the modus operandi.
The West has been outraged by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The rest of the world has not. The West was and still is, to some extent, surprised and outraged that the rest of us don’t share their outrage.
It must mean we are more ignorant and/or morally defective. The simple reason may be that we are all selective in our outrage; a lot of it has to do with geography, that is, where we grow up and live.
Perhaps the West – read much of Europe and North America, sans Mexico – is just morally superior to the rest of us. Admittedly, that is a possibility.
Of course, not joining the West’s proxy war doesn’t mean we condone Vladimir Putin’s war, and feel no sympathy for ordinary Ukrainians. But there are plenty of conflicts that the rest of the world are outraged about, and yet, the West pretty much ignores, plays down, or even helps perpetuate.
When we point fingers and appeal to their conscience, we are often ignored, or worse.