Walk a mile in their shoes, in other words, if you're American, because they're still on the Imperial system (which is probably appropriate, given their determination to expand Pax Americana).

Here, and in much of the rest of the world, thanks to the French inventors of the metric system, we have to walk a kilometre in the other person's footwear.

Except, of course, if we go beyond disputes, to be resolved by diplomacy, and head into war, when the first rule of engagement is to declare everything on your side to be the gospel truth - and nothing but the truth - and everything on their side to be a pack of lies.

IN OTHER NEWS:

Or, to borrow from the 45^th President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump, you dismiss it, as loudly and as often as possible, as "fake news".

Fake News With Capitals even.

I've been mulling over this for quite a while now.

It didn't bother me too much when it was just about Trump, and just Over There. But then The Pandemic came along, and anything at odds with the dominant Official Narrative about COVID - anything that questioned the origins of the virus, the efficacy of the experimental vaccines or the authoritarian nature of a lockdown mentality that swept the planet as quickly as the virus itself - was slapped down as Fake News.

In an instant, it seemed, the same strident partisanship that we Australians generally decried about the over-the-top divisions in US politics, was infecting us here.

Now, with the pandemic less of a global handbrake than it was, we have another planet-shaking problem to deal with, the confrontation between East and West that has exploded into war in the form of Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

Now, I cannot condone Putin's actions for one millisecond.

And I hope what I'm about to say doesn't cost me the friendship of a mate with Ukrainian heritage, but doesn't anyone else think it's a bit rich for the US - which has led so many invasions and covert regime changes that we don't even notice them any more - to call "Shock! Horror!" when Russia finally retaliates to what it sees as US/NATO provocations on its doorstep?

I don't know a great deal about Ukrainian politics but, like a lot of us, I'm in the middle of a crash course.

This century, Russia and Ukraine have been in conflict since the Western-backed "colour revolution" (the "Maidan revolution") that began in late 2013, spawning Azov - a paramilitary battalion now part of Ukraine's National Guard, and an object of Putin's "Nazification" allegations.

More broadly, the Russian view is that the West has repeatedly reneged on promises given at the time of the Soviet Union collapse in 1991 that NATO would advance "not an inch eastwards".

By my count 14 nations - all but Macedonia formerly in the Soviet sphere - have since been added. As someone who likes his personal freedoms I am not surprised by the rush.

But not everyone thinks like us. And the view from countries that find themselves on the wrong end of American hospitality - Iran after the Revolution, Iraq when it was no longer any use to the United States in countering Iran, and so on - is not so much the Leader Of The Free World, but a schoolyard bully with a moral compass with all points facing to Washington.

One aspect of the Ukraine war that I picked up on some time ago by reading Fake News websites, was the presence of various biological research labs inside Ukraine that were allegedly either run by or backed by the US.

As bio-warfare is prohibited, all these labs are for "research" purposes. It took a while for the issue to percolate into the mainstream media, and then only to run US denials and descriptions of such allegations as "fake news".

A quick Google check will confirm.

Yet on March 8, in a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing, Republican Senator Marco Rubio asked the Biden administration's Under Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland: "Let me ask you, does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?"

Nuland responded: "Ukraine has biological research facilities, which, in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of.

"So we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces, should they approach."

As I said, US mainstream media have all but ignored it. And others are still denying it, as mentioned here.

Others, including Glenn Greenwald, the award-winning independent US journalist who brought Edward Snowden to the world's attention, have dug deeply into it, and the picture he paints is not a pretty one.

Information-wise, we live in amazing times.

The internet empowers us all.

Governments of every persuasion seem to want to restrict what their citizens can read or see. Us and them.

It's not about "protection".

It's to enable dishonesty.