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…
Selective empathy in wars
