Every war and conflict is complicated. The current situation in the middle east, depending on how thorough you’d like to be can be traced 20, 50, 80, 100, 150 or even a thousand years back. Or even two or three. (e.g. “The word Palestine derives from Philistia, the name given by Greek writers to the land of the Philistines, who in the 12th century bce occupied a small pocket of land on the southern coast”)
The situation in Ukraine similarly, depending on how thorough you’d like to be, can be traced 2, 5,10, 20, 70, 100, 200, 400 or 800 years ago. Or even 1200-1400 years ago when the Byzantines tried to do some “geopolical magic” in the area and succeeded (it is all recorded history. This is an interesting read).
This region of the world is not Yukon or Yakutsk where few people historically lived and few people historically fought over.
The Middle East/Asia minor, the Balkans, the regions around the Black sea and the whole of Europe and nothern Africa. Those are places with thousands of years of recorded histories and bloody feuds and differences. If you view even one of those “changing maps” videos of those regions just for fun, you will realise how rare this time of relative peace we currently enjoy is.
Proof? Here:
(e.g. notice where Bulgaria first appears, when the video begins from that timestamp - exactly where the war is happening now, even though we all know that Bulgaria hadn’t been there for a looooooooooooooong time. They soon get displaced and on the map there it says “Magyars” which are the Hungurians that later got displaced too from that region and so forth. Do note that the Bulgarians are still a bit angry about Basil the Second and if you click on the link you will see why. Yeah, it happened more than a thousand years ago, but that’s not enough time to completely “forget and forgive” around this part of the world)
Let’s not pretend that in these regions one war is “complicated” and the other is somehow simple.
Here in OGS things are simple. Ukraine and Russia has a lot of Go players, so that case is relevant with the thematic of the server, so the owner of the site decided that there was a need to have a position on it, as @Uberdude pointed out.
The middle east doesn’t have a lot of Go players, so as far as OGS is concerned, it is just another conflict of the many that happen globally.
That’s simple. True.
Outside OGS, both wars - and most wars - are complicated. If anyone would like to pick a side, that is their prerogative, for any conflict they like, but please let us not pretend via calling for simplicity that we really have a clue of what’s going on ten countries away or that we studied centuries of history and we were really in tune with the current ongoings in those regions, so now we can safely pick a side. Most of us do not know what on earth our local town council is voting each week, so let us show some respect to other people’s histories and at least say “I do not know, I reserve judgement” instead of oversimplifying things to justify trying to fulfill the need to “pick a side”.
As Sir Humphrey Appleby would have said “that would be most unusual”. E.g.
