Hacker News Reader

Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

If Iraq happened today I think more people would be upset and protest.

In 2001 I don't even think I had a cellphone, we didnt have social media like we do now, the only source of news was the News Paper and TV.

If it happened now we would be blastered on twitter with videos / photos of it happening in real time like we are know. Much more aware of war crimes happening.

We can't change what happened in the past but I would like to think we can change the future, and Iraq doesn't happen again.

(I was living in NZ at the time still at school when 9 11 happened)

View on HN

I remember getting completely shut down by my American friends when I told them about atrocities committed by US soldiers and that Saddam had no nuclear weapons. It was like talking to a wall at the time. You don't understand - we are fighting this war for the world's safety, blah-blah.

Maybe the next US war will be different ? I doubt it. US propaganda makes Russian propaganda look like amateur hour. Stuff that doesn't fit the mainstream narrative will be shutdown hard, while stuff that fits it will be amplified continuously.

Yep, and EU is no better... they even banned RT... imagine banning CNN when USA attacked afghanistan.

But this is the start of the war, and there is A LOT of propaganda everywhere... everyone in the west is trying to show russia as losing everywhere, while they're conquering basically everything, on the other hand, they say that russians have destroyed whole cities, and only two short clips of the same building are showed, and now fearmongering like this reuters article.

I live in the balkans, and (obviously) I'm against any kind of war... but what putin is doing is no different than americans choosing a random middle eastern country (or even yugoslavia in 1999), and destroying the fuck out of it... but somehow it's different when americans do it.

Eg.Yugoslavia's issues were internal.

Ps. A lot of people left RT because of it's propaganda and it's idiocracies even before the ban.

Yugoslavias issues were internal, until nato/usa started the bombings in 1999.

It doesn't matter that they left, the problem is the lack of free speech, because RT was the only medium that reported some things that most european newshouses avioided.

Obviously RT is displaying propaganda now, but so is everyone else, sadly.

Mail.ru is still an accessible propaganda site fyi.

At the time of the Iraq War I thought US mainstream media were nothing more than bloodthirsty warmongers, liars, and dogs of the state [1]. I still hold a grudge against them TWO DECADES later for the lies and war propaganda they spread during this time.

I mean I'm ultimately against banning media, I linked to RT a few days ago to make a point about the propaganda they spread, back at the time of the Iraq War I was a huge Jon Stewart fan and watched him every night just crap on that bad ol' media using clips from the media and you can't really do that effectively while banning that same media. However, I've got to say, I don't think banning American Media in the early Bush era would have been a preposterous idea. I mean at the end of the day the US media succeeded in selling that war to the "coalition of the willing". US war propaganda is probably more dangerous than Russian war propaganda because it's more sophisticated in the way it manufactures consent and has this veneer of journalistic freedom.

[1] A wiki article that summarizes popular criticisms of US media from this time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Iraq_War

> Maybe the next US war will be different?

Depends on if there's another incident akin to 9/11. Right now, if you tried to run the Iraq playbook again it would fail. But if something major happens which makes the US populace feel insecure, that could change.

I do think that there's a lesson in how difficult it would be to actually change the minds of Putin supporters in how slow the US reassessment of Iraq has been.

> US propaganda makes Russian propaganda look like amateur hour.

That's because US government narratives get continually sharpened and refined against the grindstone of challenges from the free press. This is different from countries where the government shuts down the press, such as Russia where the ridiculous canard that Ukraine needs to be "denazified" actually flies.

This. Dissidents would be cast as pro-Evil and purged from social media for misinformation.

Then we shouldn't accuse the average Russian citizen of not overthrowing their own government because while they do have cellphones today they live in a country with an extremely tight grip of media. If your argument holds for 2001 america, it's the same now for Russians.

How can we let more average Russian citizens have access to real facts? It's now a crime in Russia to publish 'lies" about the Russian army. It's hard. And it's even harder because any information you manage to smuggle through is always tainted by coming from the corrupt west.

Just thinking aloud: what if the information reaching Russians does not come from the west but from other countries, all other countries, the global south, the far east? They can't be all corrupted by the west, can they?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com