I wonder why you single out the usual boogie men that US propaganda uses.
Have fun in that rabbit hole.
> The campaigns exploit existing political fault lines like race and regionalism to increase polarization and disaffection with the political system. The complete lack of a coherent message across these campaigns is jarring until one realizes that the goal of the campaigns is not necessarily to convince anyone of anything, but rather to generate noise.
In other words, they simply don't care about the message as long as it's divisive. They will loudly support BLM or alt right or whoever as long as it sparks negative emotions and increases conflicts between Americans. And this strategy works incredibly well just because instead of inventing non-existent conflicts it rekindles the existing ones.
[0] https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2020/october/elections-russia-d...
It can be framed as 'yes let's go fight this!' or it can be framed as a dismaying, looming threat rumbling ever closer. Doesn't matter. I identify that behavior as an attempt to produce race and/or civil war, even from nothing. And the more persistent the calls, the more well-funded but ill-sourced the outlet (ask yourself how the person's getting paid to do that full-time with such a busy workday), the more likely I'm going to think they are part of what I've come to think of as WWIII: the attempt to destroy rival nation-states purely with the old CIA techniques, which themselves probably date from the middle ages or Machiavelli or something.
Nothing is new. It's all humans continuing to bumble along as a cooperative but rabidly competitive species. These dichotomies produce this behavior and it's about whether stuff's got out of balance. I think Russia waging WWIII predominantly informationally, is out of balance and having some serious negative externalities beyond their wish for power.
I often play with the tought that I may well be just as brainwashed as e.g. Russians or Chinese are portrayed to be. I don't think there's really a way of knowing for certain. For most this is probably unthinkable. Or maybe I've been brainwashed by constructivist cultural marxism or whathaveyou?
Getting back to your question: of course we are all brainwashed (or "culturally conditioned"), this way or another. But there is an abyss of difference between living in one of these regimes that criminalize everything that is not official vs living in a Western country with all its particularities and inconveniences.
You have no idea how much that means to you until you properly lose it. Then suddenly there are very few things in life worth more.
That's how it can be a target for fascist uprisings: people want to pretend they're open to all things and have all freedoms as long as there are no consequences. In reality, there's one cost to restriction and another cost to multiculturalism and diversity.
If you look at it in a-life terms you see the autocracies as plateaus. Stuff gets locked down, and there's no progress. But progress hurts. Liberal democracies and their tolerance of diversity are about coping with all the unaligned interests of starkly different people, knowing that combining those people is what gets you startling progress. It can almost be reduced to simple mechanical terms, like recombination in a genetic soup.
It's always possible to crush inconvenient genes and have everyone the same (to a point, and if you're determined enough). And then, you don't have those genes anymore, and your future's narrowed.
Russian disinformation warfare is very much real, no matter if it is a Lithuanian workman or the head of the CIA talking about it.
The head of the CIA might have ulterior motives but it is silly to dismiss the facts though.
They may be local but in society like afghan one that can have various meaning too since there are many distinct clans who often openly fight each other. Ie British previously loved in their colonies to give power to some minority to focus hatred within locals and keep eyes from their exploitation business. Quite a few of that caused some recent conflicts in Africa.
https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/press/releases/2023/November/...
You know when the opium production numbers started to rise, in earlier times (according to the same statistics)? 2004. Correlates with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...
That said, the ones doing it the most are those with most resources. So, the US and us vassals working for our "partners" across the Atlantic.
The thing is that your comment felt to me a bit like a somewhat common dismissal of real and corrosive problems facing democracy these days.
Like for instance now you say that “everyone is doing it” but what is “it” there? Because not everyone is actually spreading disinformation about everything. People, corporations and governments have agendas of course but how they go about things really matters.
There is a clear difference between the ways and behaviour of western democracies on the one hand and Russia and China on the other hand. I know in which places I do and don’t want to live for instance.
False advertising is a very serious offence in my book. Wouldn't move to Russia unless they change course.