That’s what the Grayzone is. They try to minimise the badness of Putin and Assad to blame everything on the West. The West is not omnipotent; other countries have their share of the blame.
I think you would need to give examples to back up and clarify what you’re saying. Blame doesn’t operate on rules of universal fairness; it operates on who is provably doing what. The western empire may not be omnipotent, but it is the predominant force of military might across the world, which uses that might to undermine, destroy, and control. No one else comes close to the US’s hundreds of military bases and its decades of orchestrating coups, which it has far from stopped doing / attempting to do.
Using phrasing like “share of the blame” sounds off to me. It’s not a pie with which you have to recognize how big Putin or Assad’s piece is. It’s an extremely imbalanced dynamic of power and exploitation and within that dynamic, it’s important to recognize where someone like Putin lands in relation to his own people beyond the anti-imperialist struggle, but not to inflate what that means for the rest of the world while the western empire is still a dominant force that would squeeze out any self-determination for Russia and hollow it out for foreign capital if they could.
I think you would need to give examples to back up and clarify what you’re saying. Blame doesn’t operate on rules of universal fairness; it operates on who is provably doing what. The western empire may not be omnipotent, but it is the predominant force of military might across the world, which uses that might to undermine, destroy, and control. No one else comes close to the US’s hundreds of military bases and its decades of orchestrating coups, which it has far from stopped doing / attempting to do.
Using phrasing like “share of the blame” sounds off to me. It’s not a pie with which you have to recognize how big Putin or Assad’s piece is. It’s an extremely imbalanced dynamic of power and exploitation and within that dynamic, it’s important to recognize where someone like Putin lands in relation to his own people beyond the anti-imperialist struggle, but not to inflate what that means for the rest of the world while the western empire is still a dominant force that would squeeze out any self-determination for Russia and hollow it out for foreign capital if they could.