Ooh, nice! "Targeting industrial workers to target the war making capacity" sounds so much nicer than "indiscriminate mass killing of civilians".
Don't get me wrong, the Germans had it coming, but let's stop lying to ourselves, shall we?
Don't get me wrong, the Germans had it coming, but let's stop lying to ourselves, shall we?
But... is that really what they were doing?
> In the raid, major industrial areas in the suburbs, which stretched for miles, were not targeted.[10] According to historian Donald Miller, "the economic disruption would have been far greater had Bomber Command targeted the suburban areas where most of Dresden's manufacturing might was concentrated".[48]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_Wa...
See, now there you go, giving in to the same logic you're trying to make fun of in the first sentence. Saying all Germans is like saying all Ukrainians welcome being annexed by Russia. Some probably went along because it seemed at the time the easiest way from receiving bullets into parts of their anatomy even if they didn't actually like it.
I appreciate your comments.
This stuff has been researched deeply. Something like 96% of the population. Nice people. Not idiots. Will swallow absolutely anything that the leader feeds them.
It may be unfixable. Or maybe the only way to fix it is to destroy all forms of mass media.
Yes, absolutely. Deferring to authority is no excuse for morally abhorrent behaviour. Of course if you’re under threat that’s a different matter. But blind trust in leadership is a poor excuse. It’s not like the nazis had no detractors in Germany.
Does believing it make you a bad person? Of course not. You're only doing what's right and sensible.
Just go on reddit and you'll see several videos of Ukrainian drone dropping bombs on clearly wounded Russian soldiers and you'll see a whole comment section celebrating the war crime.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."
- William Casey, CIA Director 1981
I think the media issue can be resolved by media that is not affiliated with corporations, rich benefactors or government. E.g., MI5 used to vet BBC employees to ensure no one on the left would have any editorial influence (MI5 had veto power over hires). And, the CIA had/has journalists on their payroll at major US publications to ensure "proper" messaging. Advertisers can strongly influence what is reported e.g., an oil company threatens to cancel ad campaign if media outlet reports on their suppression of climate research. A single rich man can set the direction of a media organization-- including having their organizations spread known falsehoods in support of their personal ideologies e.g., Murdoch or Hearst.
A model that mostly[1] works is that of listener support (not the PBS model with government and corporate funding and also begging listeners for money, but rather the Pacifica model which accepts no funds from anyone but listeners.
Pacifica has a few programs that are usually quite good, like "Letters and Politics" (also available as podcasts linked from kpfa.org). They do have their share of dreck, though. And, being a bunch of lefties (the network was founded by pacifists who met while in US prison for protesting a war) they are equally critical of lefties like themselves, the mainly center-right to right "liberals"/Democrats and the far-right to extreme far-right Republicans (left right spectrum here is based on where the policies, of these groups, fit within the spectrum of world politics).
[1]Pacifica's New York station self destructed after the board was taken over by a group of listeners into all manner of woo, so Pacifica's model still has some issues.