It was a bad situation. Two hundred people were murdered, among them innocent non-combatants, either bystanders or lawful protestors.

OOP is making the argument that yanks should clean up their own house first. The person you’re replying to is making the argument that the mentions of this event by westerners is cognitive dissonance, side-lining, essentially forgiving, comparable bad situations resulting from actions perpetrated in their name while disingenuously condemning their government-ordained enemies without knowledge or investment in the situation.

As a leftist, you sometimes make the argument that evidence of the western institutional dishonesty can be found in seeing what events are mythologised and exaggerated. Take a scenario where something bad happened, but the western myth is something worse. Or perhaps something sad and regrettable happened, but the western myth omits context and details such that it seems malicious. You might then challenge someone to contemplate why the myths exist in the forms they do. Wouldn’t you benefit from an accurate understanding? It’s tiring to hear that answered with only “both sides”, since it’s obvious the person you’re talking to didn’t actually contemplate the contradiction, and instead defaulted to their programming. Western programming allows allies infinite culpability to an infinite number of crimes because they are all ultimately forgiven with flimsy and inevitable excuses.

Brits insist they’re a democracy, don’t they? They’re included in the “Democratic west vs authoritarian east” rhetoric. Weird how the goalpost shifts when your side is transparently coming out worse.

The dictators that the USA supports are people who don’t have popular support or a pre-existing legal framework they derive their power from. They are governors working as proxies for the USA, deriving their authority from the USAs guns. It doesn’t just mean people you don’t like. Russia’s “democracy” is as legitimate as most European liberal democracies. The DPRK has never propped up a dictator, they don’t have the power to.