I mean… I don’t get what they’re lamenting, lemmy.ml, even if created by comrades, is a pretty liberal instance, comrades like yoghots (shout out to him) get censored and banned unjustly all the time, they just can’t stand the fact that people have ideologies differing from the democratic party.
[accidentally tagged NSFW, please mods remove tag, I cant from app]
That’s pretty much it, so far as I can tell. I have a real life friend who likes to call himself socialist. We were talking about The Ukraine War one day though, and he just got really upset that I could dare defend those baby killing Russians. Even today, if the subject comes up, he just seethes at me and mutters something about me being brainwashed by Russian propaganda under his breath. It’s completely unthinkable to him that I wouldn’t be calling for the death of every Russian. To do otherwise is profoundly immoral.
I honestly don’t know what to do about this. He sees it as being a completely black and white situation without any sort of nuance. Anything contrary is just Russian propaganda, and everything in support of the black and white situation is true and just. History begins at 2020.
This seems to be exactly the mindset that Reddit is in.
EDIT: I think the most horrifying thing he said to me though was when I brought up Afghanistan. The US just spent an entire generation invading it. I asked where the sanctions were on the US, and why that was supposed to justify destroying Russia, but not the USA? The answer I got? “They had it coming, and they got what they wanted, so fuck them.”
Western propaganda is really well funded. Unfortunately lots of well meant left leaning folks are caught up in it and are never exposed to facts that don’t fit the narrative.
During the first gulf war where the US blew the shit out of retreating Iraqi forces, only 1 in 20 Americans opposed the war. I was against it and protested, did civil disobedience etc, and got a ton of hate from my fellow ‘patriotic’ Americans.
Same during gulf war two. I knew there were no WMDs because of independent media interviews with Hanz von Sponich (sp?) who was a weapons inspector there etc. Everyone called me a traitor and Saddam apologist for opposing that war. 20 years later are there any mea culpas? Anybody apologize to the antiwar left?
It’s the same thing with Ukraine. And China. And the war machine rolls on…
I was too young for the first Iraq war. In the second one, my country wasn’t heavily involved, so I just tried to ignore the whole thing. I didn’t become politically aware until midway through the Afghanistan war. My friend should be old enough to remember ALL of this though, and is an American. I asked him about WMDs once after our talk, and he just shut me down with the usual disdain. I just really don’t understand how the propaganda works so well, regardless of funding. It was revealed to great fanfare afterward that the whole Iraq War 2 was bullshit. Why didn’t anyone listen?
Because it’s part of an entire worldview, an entrenched information system (I.e. framework for narrative, how the story is being told), with fully intertwined rationale and philosophies of justification. In there are woven many positive emotions as well, and rhetorics hitting the right emotionally resonating notes—patriotism, belief that the west is the light in the darkness, that you’re the good guys, doing the right things, etc. Behind it is also a foundational belief that US is powerful enough to crush anything it doesn’t like, so who really cares about nuance—sometimes, not even conscious.
To give up this worldview, one has to give up a lot of deeply held assumptions about one’s life, one’s self identification, one’s “tribe”, etc. It’s unlikely to happen just with some debate here or there, or reading some news stories from far away.
The ‘patriotic’ ones are just the worst. This 4th is my first as an ML and I’m gonna see everything differently. Never loved it before, but now I’m already over this shit and it hasn’t even started yet.