Comment by jrochkind1

I could make a list, and we could argue about it, but also, is "invading a democracy" the only horrific crime that a state can undertake, that it's citizens are responsible for preventing?

The post I was replying to actually said "waging unprovoked war on another nation," it didn't say anything about democracies, you've changed the language already, we can keep restricting the language legalistically until we are confident it applies only to what we accuse our enemies of and never to anything we can ever admit our own country has done and continues to do.

It shocks me that people don't realize how full of war and misery the world is every day, and how much the US government is responsible for. That the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a shameful travesty of violence only makes it more shameful that people turn it into some jingoistic "our population is more moral than their population" thing, that instead of using it as an avenue to empathy with refugees and victims of violence everywhere, we use it as a cudgel to paint some other population of day to day people as especially evil, when we aren't any better at figuring out how to deal with our complicity, in fact this projection is a way of avoiding it. We have nothing to be held responsible for on behalf of our government while living comfortable lives as our government commits crimes that we don't know how to stop, it's only them, who deserve punishment for not being willing to sacrifice everything to do something about their government.

The real relevance of "democracy" is probably on the state committing the crimes. If the USA is more of a democracy than, say, Russia, than the USA's residents hypothetically have more power over it's governments actions, and should be held more responsible for them. (Although I can say I don't feel much power).