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Comment by abalashov | Hacker News Reader

As a Russian, I deeply appreciate this. In Russia, it seemed obvious to even the most parochial peasant that there was propaganda, while in America, the vast majority of the society not only fails to consider the possibility, but is cholerically allergic to the very idea.

Edit: recognising that there is propaganda != knowing what is and isn't propaganda. That's all I meant.

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The American government has propaganda but it really sucks at it. All the people skilled in manipulating behavior work at our ad agencies, and hence our actual propaganda is mostly "Use this detergent! Take this drug! Drive this car!"

Lol, someone completely missed the point… American propaganda is such a part of the culture, it gets barely noticed. Even movies that has military equipment, the military gets to have heavy input towards positive depictions of american military. US military has paid millions in marketing to all the sports organizations for promoting the military. Etc etc. This is just one aspect of the propaganda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93entertainment...

>etc etc

please, keep going...

Americans literally recite a brainwashing mantra every day in school and are punished if they don't (despite the constitution).

Propaganda is just advertisements for the government, right?

Hard to say. Advertisements have at least a pretense of persuasive intent. Propaganda mostly operates in the absence of contrary information.

If every parochial peasant could recognize Russian official propaganda, why are so many people on board with whatever the propaganda says?

I mean, it took longer than the Great Patriotic War before Putin's popularity started visibly falling and people started questioning what the entire "SVO" is for.

Surely [a] they don't really give a shit anyway and [b] they don't want to fall out a window

I think Russians are used to knowing it's dangerous to disagree with dear leader and there's no advantage to disagreeing so they just go along with whatever he says

I mean, if the American propaganda is "you are evil" and the Russian propaganda is "fuck those guys", you don't have to agree on every particular. People have nationalism everywhere.

The Russian propaganda is more along the lines of "Ukraine is an illegitimate state led by Nazis and drug junkies, they steal children's organs and sell them to the West, cook up dangerous viruses in their labs and prepared to attack innocent Russia, hence they have to be crushed, which our glorious Russian power will soon accomplish with mighty Oreshniks that have no parallel anywhere".

There is way too many mixed marriages etc. for any reasonable Russian to believe that their formerly-closest East Slavic neighbour has turned into a Fourth Reich.

The glorification of Russian military power after almost five years of static attritional war and dozens of burning refineries and ships is in a category of its own...

> There is way too many mixed marriages etc. for any reasonable Russian to believe that their formerly-closest East Slavic neighbour has turned into a Fourth Reich.

Exactly. The distortions in American public life are quite a bit more intricate and artful.

hey what a coincidence that's basically the exact same thing our own government tells us about Palestine

Yes, but we have far fewer reasons to think otherwise, since we don't know anything--if you're talking about Americans.

Recognising that there is propaganda != being deeply savvy about what the propaganda is. However, I've found it to be an article of faith in America that the US just doesn't engage in that kind of thing--less so in recent years, as the crisis of belief and confidence in institutions has ricocheted, egged on by the disinformation and demagoguery of the Trump years.

Well, these days there's little need for propaganda when people just blatantly do sh!t in the open and get away with it.

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