I wasn't our gov't, I didn't personally invade Iraq without rational reason, I _dissented_. I didn't get angry at the rest of the world, I understood that sentiment. It wasn't fair to treat me with disgust over it, though I couldn't fault them.
We're just humans.
Of course all Russian citizens aren't "bad", but their gangster gov't is, and this is what happens.
I always thought the 'net would allow us to connect as normal people and get past the political rhetoric and just talk as fellow humans, establish some understanding and fellowship.
I was just tilting at windmills.
But sadly, short of WW3, only the people can replace them. And that would invoke memories of 1917.
On one hand, yes. And the other hand, we (here in France, but also in US, germany etc) are not better: our gov't are also gangsters.
(and don't even speak about china and various middle-east countries..)
But hundreds of thousands (millions?) of Russians have protested and opposed their leadership. That doesn't matter once nationalism is in the picture.
Which reminds me of the Americans who casually say the US should bomb the Three Gorges Dam & kill hundreds of millions of Chinese in the event of a war. Nationalism turns the average respectable human into something else.
Somewhere there's a line about how people who in normal times would have been discussing opera or the latest scientific discoveries found their conversation dominated by discussion of getting visas, to where, and how quickly.