You’re right, you do sound ghoulish

I was chatting with a Vietnamese guy on a flight today whose family was part of the southern government (I was reading PSL’s Socialist Reconstruction book and it triggered him). He ‘fled’ ~15 years after the war ended. He was ranting to me how upset he is that his daughters have become socialists. His family was closely watched due to suspicions that his father was a US spy after leaving reeducation, but most of his problems with the government were about bemoaning land reform. He read an enormous amount of communist literature in school as it was required. He kept telling me how he thinks it’s like a cult where people don’t question the government, and everyone is brainwashed. Unlike the US where everyone has economic freedom (lol).

Ultimately I think the diaspora genuinely has more knowledge about their homeland than the average person. The problem is they can’t see past their deeply ideological views of feeling personally harmed by their homeland and wishing violence against the government they think wronged them

They have family there and are deeply connected to them. It’s something western people often don’t understand because most were brought up as individuals and not as a part of a proud community. They feel the same anger and even more the guilt because they are not there to suffer with them.

they get to feel special and like they have exclusive rights to speak on an issue, they’re also generally uneducated westerners who have nothing to say but bloodlust and star wars plots

I can’t speak of all diaspora members everywhere, but some of them basically just have a blood feud with the country. They don’t want to go there, but the government hurt their ancestors so now it’s part of their life’s mission to see that government fall, and none of the civilians suffering are real to them because at least most of the country isn’t real to them (except, depending on the person and country, one or two places they may have visited at some point). It’s made all the better in the case of a country like Iran by the fact that the country they have a blood feud with is the country of “their” people (as opposed to like a Ukrainian’s blood feud with Russia), so they can just call you racist if you’re not the right ethnicity and tell them that what they’re saying is fucked up.

I’ve known a couple of people who don’t know staggeringly basic information about the country they purport to speak for – things that literally over 99.9% of the people on this board know – and have spent basically all their life in America and in some cases don’t even have a conversational level of “their people’s” language (not for lack of documentation or even American speakers!) who just fucking love to do this shit. It’s odious, but their fellow liberals eat it up.

a country they never had any plans of returning to anyways

Exactly, it’s like Redditors whose only relationship advice to other Redditors is “leave them.” It’s all the smug moral posturing with no consequences if the position they’re arguing for goes to shit.

I’m not trying to cause a stir here, but is this not a typical behavior even for many Americans or Westerners too where they do an ancestry test to find out omg I am 1% Estonian time to become the top poster on r/Estonia and talk about how amazing it is now that they got Freedom™ (even though they don’t live there)

I suppose it could also be an element of fear where someone feels like they have to be 200% racist towards their own people or their new home will never accept them.