Why Russian Propaganda Works – and How to Stop Falling for It
economicsofpower.substack.com
economicsofpower.substack.com
I think that is maybe a little naive. In a world where Russia spends ~$2bn a year on propaganda and has the US president who had no doubt received a lot of Russian money saying Ukraine shouldn't have started the war, you have to actively propagandize / argue back. The NAFO lot are quite useful. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAFO_(group))
It's information warfare and to win in war you have fight back.
It says that smart people are taken in by propaganda, and the reason we know this is because of vigilant even smarter people.
It declares that the Ukraine people are interested in joining NATO because of Russian attacks not the other way around. But since when did the U.S. policy makers seriously care what the Ukrainian people? They don't care what the people of U.S. want!
Why are they making categorical claims about a population at large but picking on 3 influencers?
It's very well understood across all forms of mass media that the primary purpose is to psychically agitate audiences while rendering them passive to policy. This is merely confirmed by the engineering of social media, not a new cause.
There's no honest reckoning that can blame NATO for the Russian invasion, but the U.S was carrying out provocative political moves knowing this must arouse Russian aggression.
Eatern Germany is the line that has defined expansionist policy overall. As to the legalese of international law...
The article's litany of Russian aggression being not limited to NATO includes events before the formation of NATO, and strives to dump the history of two world wars down the memory hole.
Morally, Chomsky would be the first to say that responsibility for events belongs to the predictable consequences of one's own actions. But this article pleas that actually Russia is responsible for U.S. actions to destabilize the region, you know, because freedom!
Regarding arguing for truth in a "post truth world": Sounds like propaganda rules the roost.
As to telling others how to think about democracy, the U.S. really needs to look in the mirror.
The first thing the Ukrainian parliament did after the coup was passing the bill that repelled the law protecting the Russian language in the Ukraine. [1]
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_Ukraine#Att...
When a nationalist movement has garnered support centuries ago from the Ottomans, Nazis, etc. it's a hard sell for me to believe it was not inevitable.
My understanding of Mearsheimer, the only person whose work I've seen, is that the U.S. dropped the ball and made the conflict an inevitable and deadly one which will end in a frozen conflict.
I believe he has argued the U.S. should have supported a Ukrainian nuclear weapons program or accepted its existence as a buffer state controlled by Russia.
Even if you accept the most charitable estimation of the number of people on Maidan in 2014, it's less than 2% of Ukrainian population. Hardly a majority.
>against their Russian dominated government
It is the government that the Ukrainian people democratically elected not a long time before the coup.
>it's a hard sell for me to believe it was not inevitable
The Ukraine was evenly split between pro-Russian South-East and pro-Western, well, West. The only chance they had for stability is respecting the democratic principles when people respect the authority of the president who won an election even if they voted for a different candidate.
The US supported the coup and broke that system. Despite famous Bush Sr.'s speech in Kiev in 1991[0] that warned of 'suicidal nationalism', the successive American administrations nurtured Ukrainian nationalism, supported and fed it.
>its existence as a buffer state controlled by Russia
Ukraine being neutral was enough for Russia, but not for the West.