August 15, 2022

Selective empathy in wars

Viet Thanh Nguyen reminds us (The Nation, 22 July) how often our sympathy – and care – for victims of war often comes with baggage of hypocrisy and racism. The deserved sympathy for those civilians suffering from the Russian invasion is rarely matched by our sympathy for civilians who have suffered by by Americans over the past decades. Nguyen talks of U.S. drone strikes in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia in the recent past, and the legacy of the U.S. military and massive suffering from Japan and Germany in WWII, to Korea, Vietnam, and the horrors of the cold war.  He also reminds us of how Martin Luther King, Jr. argued that poor Black men were sent with poor white men to kill Vietnamese people in a racist war, calling the U.S. as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”