I hope more will realize this.

And we should always call them out on it, too.

@bear_delune A lot of countries have done that, and it's always been a crime.

Propaganda is pretty effective no matter where you are in the world. It's why many soldiers can do horrible shit to civilians in occupied territory and only later realize that they did something terrible. Here's hoping we start hearing about Russian mutinies from more soldiers with similar realizations.

It's easy to be skeptical of propaganda from the outside looking in, but once your immersed in it then it can be difficult to parse out reality from fiction.

Case in point look at shockingly large percentage of americans, many even from the north, who will argue the civil war was a matter of states rights. Hell the US went to war against Iraq and it initially had strong support because we were still reeling from 9/11.

It's important to always keep in mind that NOBODY is immune to propoganda or group think, nobody is above the narrative, and the people who think they are tend to be particularly vulnerable.

History has been teaching us painfully often how quick people give up their individual believes for the sake of a centralised propaganda machine. It'd be very dangerous to think we are immune to it imho.

I legit started studying social psychology to understand this and similar phenomena. It's going slow but I hope to have a working understanding in a few years.

I mean, propaganda doesn't need to be 100% effective to be damaging.

Look at the world's oldest propaganda medium, religion.

Ok, I agree, and I know it’s all Putin’s fault. However:

• He’s backed up by a broad elite and government and many in the populace naively hung ho
• It’s soldierswho pull the trigger daily on missile strikes targeting civilian targets. It doesn’t matter the propaganda for the war to know it’s wrong
• It’s soldiers committing the war crimes, many of them, of rape, torture, threat of killing and more. This was confirmed this past week by a UN report describing it as systemic, broadly consistent and widespread. Soldiers, humans, can and should know better.

I was a soldier in the military long ago. I made a mental note of who around me who would do whatever they were told, no matter how bad it would be (and I asked them directly, not just my guessing) and those like me who would have a limit and decide to say no at some point. It was about 50/50.

Soldiers aren’t robots, even if commanders wish they were. They are humans and should try to be humane and thoughtful. If the war you’re sent to fight doesn’t make any sense, ask questions and demand good answers. If it’s all shit, don’t do it.

I can remember a couple decades ago I was talking to my grandmother and she said that for the most part people trusted the gov't. Until my dad's friends started coming back from Vietnam and spitting truth. I hope enough Russians go back and spread the word, but I worry that not enough will be alive to even go back.