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Comment by sugarkjube | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of this old joke.

A Soviet citizen and an American are sitting next to each other on a commercial flight.

The American turns to the Russian and says, "I have to hand it to you — your state propaganda is very impressive. You really know how to shape what people think."

The Soviet smiles, nods, and replies, "Thank you, but it's really nothing compared to American propaganda."

The American looks shocked and says, "What are you talking about? We don't have any propaganda in America."

The Soviet smiles again and says, "Exactly"

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What I think you're missing on the joke is that free speech in the USA makes it look like there's no propaganda, because of the plurality of opinions, media and propaganda.

And the Soviet has no conception of what that is - in his fantasy the US state, and all the "satellites" are controlled by one single narrative thread like in the USSR.

I think that's the actual punchline: he doesn't know what free speech is, so he thinks he's the one with the insight over the American.

The sad thing is that still echoes today in Russia, they tolerate a corrupt regime and cope saying "the others are also corrupt and filled with propaganda, so this is ok, at least we know, but they don't" not realizing there's no free speech.

Nobody is denying the existence of American propaganda, but it's an absurd false equivalency to pretend it's comparable to Russia - the country where there are multiple Wikipedia articles with lists of murdered journalists and there is a day of remembrance for murdered journalists. The country which sends assassins to kill dissidents abroad. Especially when we have the Mitrokhin archives since the 1990s in which a KGB archivist painstakingly tried to warn us about the firehose of shit method. Do you know the conspiracy theories about AIDS were started by the KGB? This is the kind of shit we're talking about, not Americans jacking themselves off on their anthem thanking troops for their service.

Actually sorry, it's beyond absurd.

> Actually sorry, it's beyond absurd.

So is Fox News. That's the OVERT propaganda.

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