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Comment by gwervc | Hacker News Reader

The matrix is indeed really strong in the West. At least in an autocracy you'd assume most "information" is somehow propaganda but here people believe whatever the press and government feed them. And when given information that contradict their beliefs (entirely constructed from hearsay) they become angry and violent. And I'm speaking of supposedly educated people, about information that are available in primary sources.

Ignorance is also carefully cultivated: God forbid to use one's smartphone to check an information publicly and easily available.

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I find the claim that people are generally more well informed about the state of the world in countries without a free press and independent institutions quite absurd. The western societies are certainly not perfect, but the messy information landscape in some of them is in my view an indication that different views are able to clash and make their cases with relatively little intervention from the authorities.

There is no such thing like a free press. Most media is subject to financial incentives and right and left there are topics that will never be covered even without censorship.

I mean, kinda? But with this logic it's impossible to ever have a freemedia, or anything really. No human is ever free because there are always some incentives, or even needs (financial, social) one has to adhere to.

That type of information landscape isn't a threat when it is lies to various degrees, in total.

Polls indicate that most Americans don't see the Press as free (trustworthy). They now view it more akin to how people do in authoritarian states. There are reasons for that outside of observer error.

What's more insidious? An openly captured press that is expected to lie or a captured press that claims the banner of freedom?

Last, objective observation of lock-step action of institutions over the past seven years or so, for example, seems to hint at a lack of independence.

As would any indication of a concrete lie that the press seems to be cooperating in hiding.

> At least in an autocracy you'd assume most "information" is somehow propaganda but here people believe whatever the press and government feed them

Pretty much the opposite. In authoritarian states, people grow up under the culture of just accepting things as truth, you don't have the option of not believing. What you are describing is not about believing the press, but polarization / radicalization / isolation - the fact you're even pointing to the 'press/propaganda' is a symptom of it.

^ person that has never spoken with a Chinese national spotted

haha, no

Surely you can produce examples of obviously false things that are close to universally believed by “the West” then?

Usually when people make this claim they go on to list actually ambiguous or actually controversial topics.

Some obvious false things only need to be true for a limited time : Iraqi forces throwing Kuwaiti babies from their incubators, Iraqi WMDs, the 'missile gap'.

These were universally believed by "the West".

The Iraq WMD thing is the one everybody has been falling back on whenever they need to prove their claims that "all western media are propaganda" for a decade or more. It's been 20 years, the NYT recognized the lie and apologized, and these guys still haven't found a better example.

Doesn't the lack of newer, more convincing examples tell you a lot about the veracity of the claim?

Edit: didn't see the missile gap thing, did you add it later? AFAIK, that was more of a lie by the US Air Force to increase their funding and actual government officials believed it.

I am not sure how to respond to your comment : one gets the impression it is a criticism, but actually you are only acknowledging my claim 'things only need to be true for a limited time'. Who cares about the NYT?

I did add the missile gap later, I am sorry. What does it matter who's lie it was? Kennedy ran with it.

Iraqi WMD was believed enough by the public to make it politically infeasible for most Congressmen to vote against authorizing war against Iraq. That the NYT later issued an apology is irrelevant. Iraqi WMD is a great example of manufacturing consent long enough to push through a major policy blunder.

In retrospect the effort was comical enough, in light of the fact that none were found, that the one responsible for it (President Bush) famously joked about looking for WMD under a desk. He received no real political backlash for his joke or for being vile enough to start an unnecessary war that killed hundreds of thousands.

The propaganda surrounding the global war on terror was effective enough that when the U.S. performed terrorist acts on weddings that killed innocents it was labeled “drone strikes” and when the enemy performed acts that killed innocents they were labeled “terrorist attacks”.

People initially believed the b.s. the Pentagon said about Tillman’s death. People largely believed that Chalabi would be the political savior of a new Iraq until our government no longer liked him. There are people who still think we shouldn’t trade with Cuba because they are communist but see no problem trading with China. Criticism of Israel is often times labeled anti-semitism. Do more than a small minority of people understand that Jews aren’t the only semites in the world?

I can’t point to too many specific instances of U.S. media engaged in outright propaganda but there are some clear trends where the collective attitudes on certain topics/beliefs are engineered to be a certain way. The fact that people even ever seriously uttered the phrase “war on christmas” is enough know that opinions are deliberately being manipulated by media.

Although I agree with your post, the invasion of Iraq can not be seen without taking the US PTSD about 9/11 into account. The WMDs were just a parallel construction.

My memory of the events is that pretty much everyone supported the invasion of Afghanistan. Manufactured support was needed for Iraq. Invasion of Iraq was 1.5 years after 9/11 and Iraq wasn’t tied to 9/11.

I think our overreaction to 9/11 is itself an example of manipulation by media. We’ve done 9/11 type events on other nations for decades and those nations didn’t get PTSD from our actions. This leads me to think that our over the top outrage was partially fueled by media narratives.

> We’ve done 9/11 type events on other nations for decades

Please name a few examples of US peacetime attacks on civilian populations

It’s an easy way to absolve a nation of guilt if you negate any examples done during war. Our bombings in North Vietnam were entirely immoral and are not less so because we were at war. Though no actual declaration of war was made. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was made up to justify enlarging the war. Does McNamara’s Morons count in your mind as an example? Maybe not since that was done to our own people.

Nevertheless, you should read up on the history of our shenanigans in Latin America. One example: while Americans didn’t do the actual killing and torture of Catholic priests and nuns our proxies did. You should also read up on things we funded the Iraqis to do in their war against Iran. Paying someone to do your dirty deeds is just as bad as doing them yourself. We did shoot down an Iranian airliner and later promoted the captain of the ship. We weren’t at war with Cambodia but did terrible things to that country during the Vietnam war. Bay of Pigs.

Look at who we funded and ended up enabling to gain control of Afghanistan during Soviet Union’s involvement there.

Regardless of the ultimate moral judgment, it is obviously not the case that a bunch of civilians dying during warfare is the same as an attack committed solely to target civilian populations during peacetime.

Even granting the premise of “paying is equal to doing,” none of your examples are anything like 9/11. The defining characteristics of 9/11 are obviously these: peacetime, intentionally targeted at civilians, killed a large number of civilians.

The best way to absolve a country of guilt is actually to make divorced-from-reality equivocations so that every less than ideal outcome looks equally evil, equally preventable, etc. The US has done plenty of truly atrocious stuff overseas and at home, silly arguments like “the US committed decades of 9/11-style acts” is counterproductive if your mission is accountability.

War is the ultimate act of overt violence. Discounting examples from war is strange. What does it matter to the victims if a piece of paper somewhere declares it a war?

I can’t point to a single act that satisfies your criteria. The U.S. does not wage peacetime violence in the same way that terrorist groups do. We prefer to do the damage over time. We prefer to avoid headline capturing violence. But the victims don’t care and the point I made is not diminished by this. Our reaction to 9/11 was an overreaction. Lots of places have been devastated by U.S. actions and those people haven’t had similar overreactions.

2000 people weren’t killed in a single day in Nicaragua in the 80s. We did it over time and in a sustained way. The Nicaraguans don’t obsess about how this changed the whole world or desire to go on a 20 year killing spree in reaction to what we did.

It doesn't matter to the victims but it does matter to the frameworks used to make decisions going forward. If your argument here is, "wouldn't it be nice if there were no war?" Sure would!

Our reaction to 9/11 was an overreaction. Lots of places have been devastated by U.S. actions and those people haven’t had similar overreactions.

Agreed!

Different claim than this one: “We’ve done 9/11 type events on other nations for decades”

And FWIW other places couldn’t overreact the way the US did even if they wanted to, and I’m sure on more than zero occasions they did. The US is a phenomenally dangerous giant lumbering around. Don’t presume that others would do much better if they were equipped the same way we happen to be.

You agree with the point I made but don’t like the statement, “We’ve done 9/11 type events on other nations for decades.” I’m perplexed by this. Don’t see how it can be a fruitful experience to nitpick that statement of mine when you agree with the point I was making. The examples I gave weren’t close enough to the 9/11 in details for you so you nitpicked that and ignored my point. Which you have now stated you agree with. This is why I periodically delete my account on this site. Yes, I know, delete isn’t the technically correct term but it is close enough. I change usernames and reset my previous password to a random string so that I can’t use it anymore. It is a deletion of sorts.

Because it's counterproductive to accuse people of routinely executing massive terrorist attacks against civilian populations when they aren't routinely executing massive terrorist attacks against civilian populations.

There wasn't a 9/11 justification to invade Iraq without the WMD excuse. Which is why they used it.

I know why they invaded Iraq. It has nothing to do with 9/11 PTSD nor oil except as a secondary or tertiary benefit.

Whether or not the actual reason is a good one is another debate. But that doesn't change the fact of the WMD lie, but most importantly that of the observation that the Press is an in-total propaganda arm of at least one sect of the government. Which has a lot of downstream implications for the twenty plus years since.

What was the real reason?

https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=128491&page=1

Sheesh, a bit on the nose eh! The memo does seem to still be concerned about WMDs though? Curious if there was an even more ulterior motive under the hood there. The WMD concern, as I mention in other comments, wasn't fully out of left field. But I am curious why it was so top-of-mind for a certain wing of the American political sphere at that time. Presumably not humanitarian concerns?

There's no lack of newer examples. There's only a lack of apology and scale of consequence. That scale being the only reason why the NYT was compelled to apologize.

The WMD lie shouldn't be the "well, it was twenty years ago" example. It should be the "look what they were willing to do, they can never be trusted" example.

Apologizing after the fact of a willful action of that type isn't an apology. It's a vain attempt to reduce consequence for themselves. If only reduced trust, which people like yourself try to still stem citing that lame "apology".

How was it “obvious” exactly? Iraq had already used chemical weapons against Kurds and in early/mid-90s the UN found large scale bio weapons programs. It dismantled these programs but then left the country in 1998.

Saddam denied it, Blix and Ritter were sent in and acknowledged there were no traces of any program whatsoever and what had been sealed earlier, was still sealed.

Saddam is a lying autocrat who was making extremely cryptic remarks about WMDs

Ritter was last in Iraq in 1998 when he was denied access to several inspection sites. The question was always what happened between 98 and 03.

Blix gave his report of no WMDs in June 2003… several months after the invasion which he was deployed into to find WMDs. Again, question was what happened between 98 and 03.

So none of this was “obvious” at the time. There were bad decisions, bad information, and straight up liars, but it’s really counterproductive not to assess these decisions honestly in light of the available information of the time.

I had to look up the Blix timeline, and the article I read ( don't have the link on this machine ) says Blix was in months before the invasion and had conclusions about a month before the invasion.

Yep, he was there and issuing statements & reports before the invasion. His team had to leave because we were about to invade and it wasn’t safe to stay.

I truly can’t believe there are still people who buy the lies. They were lying about Afghanistan[1], needlessly because that war had plenty of support, so why would anyone suppose they weren’t lying about Iraq? FFS, half the important people in the admin signed and/or penned published documents advocating that the US look for any excuse to invade Iraq, in the late 90s. It was beyond plain they were bullshitting about the justification.

[1] example: the insane GI Joe playset diagrams of massive, secret, advanced underground bunkers they claimed that Al Qaeda had a bunch of, despite it being impossible to carry out that much earthmoving and concrete pouring (let alone buying all that equipment) without giving away the location to everyone with satellites. Tenfold as true if you tried to do that somewhere not right next to a city (because your supply lines for the huge hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars construction project would be even more plain, and the work itself would stick out like a sore thumb). It was clearly a lie.

No one is claiming that no one lied. I am claiming that the truth was either non-obvious or was controversial. In this case, it was obviously at least controversial. I’m arguing it wasn’t that obvious either. Part of that ambiguity came from lying, part came from Iraq’s track record and secrecy (which of course IMO sovereign nations to some degree have a right to), and part of it came from the usual lack of information that afflicts such adversarial relationships.

Anyway you’re right that Blix was there prior to the invasion even though his report didn’t come until after. The report is not nearly as confident as you’re suggesting though. It wasn’t “no weapons,” it was “no evidence of weapons.” We all know, under circumstances less dire and less confusing than these, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I think it’s important not to write these situations off as “well duh they were lying because they’re Bad Guys and we all knew that” because these types of situations will continue to repeat themselves. We need a deeper understanding of what went wrong and how to do it better than “wait a few months (or years) then claim it was obviously knowable all along.” It’s actually quite hard to know things, which is why this stuff happens!

> wait a few months (or years) then claim it was obviously knowable all along

I was claiming that before the invasion. Because it was. 100% for certain? Of course not. As knowable as anything like that is? Yeah.

That the guys who said a couple years earlier we should take any excuse to get rid of Saddam, who were already lying about a popular war (which I was also against, incidentally, for the practical reason that it was gonna be incredibly expensive, far outstripping any benefit, and wouldn’t result in a stable democracy in Afghanistan as the admin claimed it would—go figure) and funneling money their own direction all over the place, might be lying to get their excuse, and more opportunities to loot on a grand scale… yeah, far and away the most likely explanation, and their thin evidence was mostly laughable (I think I may literally have laughed at parts of Powell’s presentation, which was the point at which I gave up hope they had any real evidence)

For fuck’s absolute sake, a bunch of these chucklefucks running the show were Iran-Contra alums! Just… wild gestures of exasperation

Yes. IT WAS OBVIOUS.

And yeah, next time the same thing will happen. That’s just how we operate. We go to war on pretty weak lies every so often. All Iraq did (for me) was hammer home that that hadn’t changed (for some reason I supposed it had?) and, so, probably won’t. That anyone’s still treating that situation as oh so muddy and hard to read just confirms that. We’ll do it again.

As mentioned elsewhere: the guys who already wanted to invade Iraq, AFAICT, (e.g. according to the memos) still wanted to do so because of WMDs. So “they already wanted to go” doesn’t really change the substance of the conversation. Curious if you have any read on why Cheney et al were so fixated on WMDs at the time they wrote the memos. Was that all completely a ruse? (I am legitimately curious, idk how to interpret that)

Yeah it’s astounding anyone involved in Iran-Contra was allowed anywhere near a seat of power.

To be clear, I’m obviously not treating it as if it’s muddy now. I am saying that it wasn’t that clear then, for reasons that include people simply lying.

Ok, maybe we’re not as far apart on this as I read it. Sorry.

> Curious if you have any read on why Cheney et al were so fixated on WMDs at the time they wrote the memos. Was that all completely a ruse?

I think they may have worked themselves up a little with their what-if scenarios (their concern was what he might do with a bunch of ifs) and, further, selected that in particular for the infamous open letter to Clinton because most of the rest of what they were selling had no urgency, even by what-if standards.

They had a fundamental problem with that requirement, in fact, that there be exigent need for US intervention before we undertake it. Their whole deal was that we should embrace and proactively enforce hegemony (because the Pax Americana’s just that good for the world—it’d be immoral not to, you see!).

I would guess some mix of genuine ideology and connection to a MIC that wanted those sweet Cold War dollars back and to whom they were receptive (for those ideological reasons), were behind that, but I don’t know and it was enough people that I expect motivations varied.

[edit] I should perhaps add that I’m not categorically opposed to the kind of thing they were getting at. Is the Pax Americana some greater-good thing with breaking a few eggs for? Maybe! It really might be! I’m at least open to the idea. I pull the lever on the trolly problem all day long.

My opposition to their ideas had (has… a lot of these folks are still kickin’ around) less to do with some wholesale disagreement with the very notion of what they were about, and more to do with the specifics of what they wanted to do having a history of costly failure, of that being a risky sort of road to begin with, and of these people in particular having a history of making a huge mess of things while having their hand in the till and technocratically lying to manipulate a democracy into “what’s best for it” (consistent with the means-to-the-end greater-good thing! But far, far too dangerous)

Yes I think we see pretty much eye to eye on this stuff. I am trying to give the benefit of the doubt not because the principals involved deserve it, but because our own thinking for future ambiguity does.

It’s very hard to know things, and it’s easy to forget how hard it is to know things in retrospect.

Does nobody remember the memos?

https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=128491&page=1

Iraqi WMDs were most certainly not universally believed by "the West".

The Iraqi WMDs were never universally believed, neither in the US nor in Europe. There were widespread protests against the Iraq War (before it started!) in the US and the rest of the world. France, Germany, and the Benelux vehemently opposed the war, to such an extent that (some) Americans even renamed "french fries" to "freedom fries"!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20_March_2003_anti-war_protest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries

I am aware of the opposition at the time : I joined the protest in Amsterdam.

Still it was universal enough to invade a country for no proper reason whatsoever. Hell, much of the non-believers joined the conflict later on ( even the French ).

The fact Earth is a sphere isn't universally believed either.

Even the author fell into that trap. In his video he claims MKUltra was created to understand the Korean brainwashing of US pilots who turned against the US. In fact they were not brainwashed at all, they were simply furious to be involved into the US warcrimes over Korea and China. So US psyops turned this into a brainwashing incident, and used psychologists to discredit them. And were successful. So here we are are with too many successful lies and discredited sources. Normally historians are used to whitewash criminal regimes, but then it became the press and doctors. And now the internet infiltration, psyops and censorship is enough.

Just 38 years ago, there were 50 companies in charge of most American media. Now, 90% of the media in the United States is controlled by just six corporations: AT&T, CBS, Comcast, Disney, Newscorp and Viacom. This means that just 232 media executives are calling the shots for the vast majority of the information we are presented with as a society.

Let that sink in.

And remember media bias and polarization is presented as a broad conflict that can’t be managed and is out of control to the point of causing extremism.

Consolidation of platforms and reach is much greater in the tech side of the arena.

Then there is the consolidation of independent media on tech company platforms like YouTube. If they ban someone, are they really running off to make a living on Rumble? No.

There are only 11 independent investigative journalism groups like ProPublica and The Center For Public Integrity but they are a shadow of their formers selves.

https://civilination.org/resources/investigative-journalism-...

You can check all the information sources you want, but primary source information means very little when the landscape lacks real diversity and the only substantive public oversight is underfunded or politically connected.

And then, there’s the research that shows fact-checker bias:

https://phys.org/news/2023-12-fact-checkers-tend-validity-ne...

CBS-Viacom is now Parmount

The key difference is that in autocracy you'd assume that most information on the controlled media is somehow propaganda from your government but in a free media environment you'd assume that you're getting a mix of psyops operations from all the major powers in addition to your own government's propaganda, and also media controlled by specific wealthy private players with a personal political agenda.

I would say that the reality distortion field is way stronger in the east... and if you are in a professional discourse it's fine not to have the Junior Dev go "achtually" all the time because he googles shit he doesn't understand.

> The matrix is indeed really strong in the West

Which is a very stupid "strategic" move by the powers that be in the West, because if you control and strongly influence the discourse in the direction that you want that means that you impede the system the opportunity to self-correct. And that opportunity to self-correct in the past was one of the main advantages the West had, an advantage greatly facilitated by a reasonable open and free discourse.

> about information that are available in primary sources.

Can you give an example?

The flip to "Russia == Evil" when they invaded Ukraine (the most recent time) was impressive.

I'm not an apologist, I think Russia is currently [insert long list of bad things here], I'm just impressed at the speed we went from indifference towards Russians, or tacit approval (oligarchs in London), to sanctioned hatred.

Similar flip with China. I do read user comments on our Dutch news-sites, just to keep an eye on 'average Joe'. I am amazed by the hatred towards China.

I think you're missing a big part of XX century history on the factors that lead to that

Maybe, but I don't think so. The 2014 invasion was met with a resounding "meh" in the west. So what 20th century factors caused us to go "meh" in 2014 and "orcs! orcs!" in 2022?

MH17, and the lack of plausible deniability.

The 2014 invasion was just that, but was dressed up as something else and didn't include massive Russian army deployments in the build-up. It also didn't look like something that could happen to Romania, Poland, the Baltics or Finland.

All of which have more in common with Ukraine than they do with say Afghanistan. So 2014 wasn't 'meh' for those that are more politically informed but it wasn't something that registered as a threat to the bulk of the EU and didn't include actual threats not to get involved on punishment of nuclear bombardment by the belligerent.

But even today there are a lot of idiots here who are still in 'meh' mode and who couldn't care less about what happens to Ukraine and who would rather think about this in financial terms than in loss of life or what it means for the future.

Starting a war can do that to a country.

Americans didn’t seem to care when Russia invaded Georgia (or Chechnya).

It’s only when Russia started protecting its GDP by eliminating its only meaningful competition for selling shale gas to the west did it become geopolitically critical to turn public opinion against it.

Russia’s GDP eventually collapses if Ukraine remains intact, as the west will buy gas from them instead. There are no meaningful quantities of petrochemicals in Georgia.

Inside that quite rational in a way? When Putin hadn't launched a full-scale invasion of a country, I considered him a bit evil; after he invaded a country, I consider him truly evil. Am I making this decision based on my state's media and propaganda, or on his actions?

Well, have you considered US presidents evil for their invasions, occupations, and wars, or do you consider the people they invaded to be evil? When whole countries are being starved and routinely bombed, is that what they deserve for not being correctly enlightened and choosing the wrong leaders, or is it the fault of bombers and blockaders? Are some brutal dictators not so bad because they're on "your side"? Are accusations of genocide against enemies believed even without solid evidence while accusations against allies are misinformation?

Apples and oranges. The US had done plenty of atrocities since the CIA branched off after WW2, sabotaging foreign governments, temporary invasions, etc. But, if the US was Russia, all the Americas would be Russia by now.

Why? It's perfectly normal human behavior.

You don't care very much for most people by default. Even if you think they're not very good people, because caring takes effort. But once they punch you or a friend in the face? now you have a reason to care.

Everyone just thought that Russia was sabre rattling and that they weren't actually going to do it. Once they did it, that caused a lot of people to re-assess their views.

Then why not 2014? Why don't a dozen other wars around the world get the same reaction? Why not the Uyghur genocide? Why this one?

Yes, it's normal human behaviour, but it's normal human behaviour with a propaganda pump behind it (IMO). Of course, I can't prove this. Maybe it was all just completely organic and I've just watched one too many Adam Curtis documentaries.

I don't think we need to put the Uyghur genocide on Russia. Syria sure.

> Then why not 2014?

Because Crimea is in a weird political situation where it sorta arguably belonged to Russia before Khruschev did a bizarre stunt with reassigning it to Ukraine, in a time when that didn't matter, which suddenly started to matter post USSR. That plus it having a huge Russian population.

All of that muddled the waters enough to make it very unclear who was in the right there, and that leaves the easy default of not caring.

Meanwhile, the current war was extremely unambiguous.

> Why don't a dozen other wars around the world get the same reaction? Why not the Uyghur genocide? Why this one?

Because it's physically closer, and because Ukraine is a lot more culturally closer to us. Uyghurs are Muslim, while Ukraininans are Christians and generally a decent cultural fit with the west.

And because Ukraine had been moving towards a more democratic government.

And I think Zelensky can take a lot of credit for being a great communicator at exactly the right time.

> And I think Zelensky can take a lot of credit for being a great communicator at exactly the right time.

I'll definitely give you that one. Ukraine's social media game was... well, they could have taught Wendy's a thing or two.

And the rest of it sounds reasonable, but how do we prove it's not just a post hoc justification? This is why I'd hate to be a sociologist...

> And the rest of it sounds reasonable, but how do we prove it's not just a post hoc justification?

I don't think any of it is particularly controversial?

Crimea's situation is well documented, and you can easily search online for posts before the current war. It belonged to Russia since 1783, and Khruschev reassigned it to Ukraine in 1954, which I understand at the time was nigh practically meaningless and a sort of PR stunt more than something that was intended to actually do something.

It's also been a very common vacation spot for Russians, and has a huge Russian population, and it's arguable that if Russia did rig the referendum, they probably didn't need to.

So it's an already messy matter even if you're close to the issue. It's very hard to foreigners to clearly pick a "right side" in this conflict, and it's not hard to argue that Khruschev's action wasn't intended to actually do anything, and therefore should be disregarded.

We must be talking at cross-purposes. All your statements can be true and uncontroversial, and still not be resposible for the groundswell of hatred towards Russians in Western populations. Or, more subtly, would have been ignored without a propaganda pump drawing the public's attention to them.

All I'm saying (and it's not a particularly useful statement tbh) is that it's damn hard to tease out cause and effect here.

The feelings were always there but the cost was too high to do something about it. Now that the cost is already paid, there is no reason to hold them back.

Lets not forget that there is more than enough reason for that hatred. As a European:

Russia regularly kills people on our soil. We do not kill people in Russia.

Russia supports extremist political groups in Europe with the sole aim to do damage.

Russia runs media organizations like RT that also have no ideological orientation but will always report the take that will do the most damage to society.

Russia used gas as a weapon to blackmail Europe. Already in summer 21 Gazprom reduced its supply to the spot market to increase the gas price and keep storage low. Later Gazprom rented storage facilities but kept them empty.....

Russia buys politicians like Orban to weaken and disintegrate EU and NATO.

There are many millions people in the EU who lived under and still remember the repressions of the SU and Warshaw Pact states....

Putins Russia had declared itself as an enemy of the western way of life and political order.

Notably, Crimea belonged to Russia since the defeat of the Crimean Khanate in 1783, when Russians ethnically cleansed half of the native Crimean population, and in 1944 Stalin deported the entire ethnically Crimean population that was left to Uzbekistan. The only reason there are Crimeans in Crimea today is that after the fall of USSR, Ukraine allowed them to return.

Also, Crimea voted 54% to stay with Ukraine in 1991 referendum.

Because 2014 was not a blatant full invasion of a country with hundreds of thousands of troops, it was a coup with little green men showing up, carving out a region on the outskirts of Ukraine.

> Why this one?

This one because it was a full blown invasion of the 2nd largest country by landmass in the European continent, it's a huge difference in level and degree... That's the simple why.

Of course the propaganda pump went full on when that happened, it was a major development compared to the annexation of Crimea or helping some militias on breakaway regions, a country tried to take over another country's capital in Europe. It doesn't mean no one would've cared if the propaganda machine didn't start turning but that was just to drum support, not to change completely the public's opinion.

Flip? We already knew he was evil. Then the invasion happened and the war crimes came. But yes do go on about how we all got brain washed. Good grief. Stop commenting.

A smartphone that delivers an infinite buffet of hearsay isn't precisely smart.

One fundamental fact is that psyops can be benevolent. Psyops are made by elites to affect the masses' beliefs and behavior; they reflect the interests of whichever segment of the elite has manufactured them, but sometimes these interests overlap with our interests.

For example, "the War on Terror is necessary to protect America, democracy, and our freedoms" was a psyop driven by dubious foreign policy interest. "Kindness, dignity, empathy and tolerance are good, racism is bad" was a very benevolent psyop which you can recognize throughout elite cultural products (12 Angry Men, Mr. Rogers are just two examples), where the elite tried to cure the masses of their bigotry through psychological means (identity, social pressure, morality), with relative success. "Russia's invasion is morally wrong and must be defeated" is both aligned with US geopolitical interests, and aligned with defeating international anti-democratic anti-liberal forces, which is in our interest. There are obviously Russian/Chinese/Iranian psyops deployed against us, and some of our elites' psyops are just designed to counteract that.

I doubt the masses will ever have the ability to fight back against psyops, because in a battle between psychology PhDs and confused laymen, the PhDs will always win. We might learn the truth about specific psyops 30 years after the fact if we're lucky, and the well is highly poisoned by paranoid conspiracists. So a more realistic goal is to select trustworthy elites that are more likely to engage in benevolent psyops.

Another key concept is that there's no "elite", there are elites, plural, which may cooperate or engage in intramural conflict. The military-industrial complex, Republican elites, media elites, and to some degree Hollywood elites cooperated to our detriment during the Bush years. But any analysis which sees them as a single blob will miss the conflicts and realities, hence the inane schizoposting ("Soros = CIA = military-industrial complex = mainstream media = Chinese Communist Party" as an all-powerful colluding elite, which prevents any useful analysis).

Yet another problem is that once people realize psyops exist, they tend to go off the deep end (if they already distrust any elite interest group) and reflexively disagree with all goals they attribute to those elites ("they say Russia bad = I'll support Russia"). Essentially the psyops are backfiring and creating a populace so distrustful that some people will reject domestic psyops only to replace them with foreign psyops, because they have a strong need for a narrative, and a great number of narratives are elite-created.

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