As an old who remembers those days starting in 2001 well, I totally agree - with one exception...

...This is worse. There's been a total and utter lack of any visable opposition ot this war or escalating conflict in general, the media consesus is far stronger, and notions of acceptable thought have narrowed far more than back then (unless you're some nazi-adjacent crackpot grifter).

Liberals have always been bloodthirsty, uncritically nationalist flag wavers for atrocity with the benefit of a 'just war' narrative. But I also think people are still underestimating the effects of a 20 year project of extreme media consolidation, the mainstreaming and control of the interent, and history's biggest ever domestic propaganda misinformation campaign over the last decade. The scope and ability of that last one especially puts anything the McCarthy era could have considered to absolute shame.

https://www.democracynow.org/2003/5/21/new_york_times_reporter_chris_hedges

Yeah. I was an adult when it started and it's very fuzzy for me. I can't imagine younger people remember a lot of the details and how incredibly jingoistic and vicious people got overnight.

Germany has been trying to decouple from America for the past 15 years or so. The only other trading block they could be part of while maintaining their productive output is Russia/China.

Even if their leadership is now fully in on NATO, the rank and file workers know that their best bet for independence from empire is close relations with Russia and China. This war has solidified that as Russia has the cheap energy they need to keep their factories open while America is price gouging to maintain its own bloated domestic profitability.

Americans are unique. Their entire history is that of colonialism, exploitation, and anti-communism. Their culture is plainly and simply anti-communism and pro-capitalism. It is shaped entirely by the most masterful propaganda campaign the world has ever seen. If they hadn't done the bare minimum and had Goebbels killed, I would say the americans brought him over and did it. The Americans are normal people with access to a fair bit of resources. They are almost normal and average neoliberals.

Except when it gets political.

When it gets political, or more specifically, when their media gets political, the masses are codified into the perfect system to point and direct them to each necessary political agenda. They in-fight on internal issues, sure, they support radical issues sure. But the infighting is always dragged out instead of diffused. The radicalism, instead of even addressed, pacified and co-opted into simple, easy nothings. When America needs to demonize, the American people are right there beside it. When America needs the people to forget, the people forget. When America needs a war, the people are ready for war. This is not new, this has been happening for generations. Even we truly anti-American leftists still have the vestiges of this great brainwashing eating away at us, its catchphrases and carefully programmed trains of thought gnawing away at our minds. It may never be truly broken in the near future, and it will affect our personal ways of thought for the rest of our lives.

Germany was only fully incorporated into this sphere of propaganda recently, and even then, their leaders are afraid that the US has such dominion over the minds of the people. The Bourgeoisie of Germany and the USA are in a state of conflict and that is a reason why they aren’t as Americentric. There’s also the fact that Germany is still suffering from generational trauma of the last few times they tried to go to war with anyone, so their population is rightfully hesitant about being a part of another one. But their opinion matters little more than that of the lowly american. They agree for the most part, so they are a part of the great political engine that grinds toward our downfall. They are also at the mercy of their own Bourgeoisie dictatorship, and thus have little power over anything done at all.

Is German media just not blasting anti-China and anti-Russia propaganda 24/7?

It absolutely is, but we have a different material relation to the war because it is just two countries away from us, a million Ukrainian refugees are here, our gas prices are soaring, a pipeline that was a Russian-German project got blown up, we're a vassal state instead of being the center of the empire and so on. It affects us more directly than it affects Americans. The war is so close that many of the people that fled it just drove here in their car. It has suddenly become a normal, everyday thing to see UA license plates when you're driving. And while US propaganda is nothing new here, it is a relatively recent development that it has been this intense. During the Iraq war, there was widespread opposition here, and that absolutely included the press. There's nothing like that anymore, even critical journalists have been successfully muzzled and need to hide their criticism of UA behind a thick layer of jingoism. For example, i recently read an article about the dire situation of LGBT soldiers in the Ukrainian army. As gay marriage is illegal there, people can't even burry their partner when he has fallen in battle. Many have to completely hide who they are. But instead of calling that out openly, it was burried deep in the article, which started out with emphasizing how patriotic the queer community in Ukraine is. It just went on and on telling us how much the gays love fighting for a state that constantly oppresses them. As a cherry on top, the whole thing was illustrated with a picture of a car flying rainbow and Ukrainian flags. Absolutely sickening how they instrumentalize LGBT people and pinkwash Selenski's reactionary regime. Stuff like that is very common now. And it used to be totally different. When the US made up its lies about Iraqi WMDs, our press very publically called that out. When the US went to war, they explained concepts like embedded journalism, told readers expressly to view info from the USA with a huge grain of salt and pointed out the propagandistic dimension of American news coverage. That was just 20 years ago. We now see that America has made sure to never let that happen again.

But some people remember. You're not gonna notice it in a comment section under one of these propaganda articles, where warmongering libs cheer each other on in their vitriolic hatred for Putin while nazis sneak in and use the opportunity to spread revisionism like the "double holocaust" narrative. But when i talk to people in person, i see opposition to the war all across the political spectrum. From communists to radlibs to socdems to conservatives. Unfortunately the most vocal opposition comes from the far right, where it is not driven by an opposition to imperialism, but by nationalism, hatred for refugees that easily rivals the russophobia of libs and a glowing support of Putin's most reactionary policies. There is mobilization for anti-war protests from both the left and the right (and the left mostly pays close attention to not be infiltrated and avoid a "querfront" type situation), but as of now, the cryptofash who already built up a strong presence on the street during the anti-mask protests are seemlessly moving over to pro-Russia protests, sometimes including assaults on Ukrainian passersby.

It's a messy and complicated situation here. Very hard to agitate against the war outside of far right brigades. I've tried, but i found that thought-out, analytical, sourced posts critical of the US propaganda are more likely to be removed than the most shallow pro-Russia posting that just treats this war as a team sport where they're stanning the out-of-town team. There's an active effort to only allow reactionary opposition to be platformed, as that makes it easier to uphold the lie that this is a fight between a progressive defender and a reactionary aggressor when it's actually two reactionary powers struggling over their spheres of influence. The biggest callout of the war early on came from Alice Schwarzer, the most influential terf in Germany. The press uses these people so they can uphold the illusion of pluralism and impartiality while at the same time being able to discredit any critics as chuds.

Germany has some of the most blatant propaganda and was run by nazis, but part of it was literally orthodox communist till 1989, some of that lingers

German media is currently blasting anti-China and anti-Russia propaganda almost all the time (though possibly still less than in the US), but it wasn't always this one sided. Many capitalists here have benefited from the business with the east since cold war times. Some have been trying to do their own independent policies, probably because they think they don't need their liege anymore, and can strike out on their own for greater profit. Also the allies did try to subdue German militarism leading to the opposite of the hammer → nail logic, i.e. German capital went very hard on the soft power train and that has worked pretty well for them so far.

So these interests are reflected in the German media. There are real differences in material interest vs the US. Doesn't mean Germans are any less propagandized.

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Is German media just not blasting anti-China and anti-Russia propaganda 24/7?

Probably. Americans have a huge cultural disadvantage because we've been indoctrinated our whole lives to believe that we're immune to propaganda, that the news doesn't do propaganda, and that even if the government is lying to us it doesn't try to propagandize us.

Look at how the Libs reacted to Russiagate. If I recall correctly the initial allegation was that Russia spent something paltry like 200,000 dollars on targeted ads, and the Liberals lost their goddamn minds. They were utterly obsessed for years and years on end. It was all over the media, it dominated their analysis of the election. And even if it was true the way they thought it was it was a drop in the ocean. Hillary spent an unprecedented one billion dollars on her campaign. No reasonable person would believe that the tiny amount of ad buy Russia did would tip the scales.

They were also in complete denial about the nature of the American electorate. Many of them simply refused to believe that the GOP's core voters really were exactly as mean, cruel, racist, and committed as they appeared. They couldn't accept that their idealistic, unrealistic vision of America could elect someone like Trump, so they grasped on to any explanation but the truth. Bernie bros, ignorant rural voters, Russian interference. But the simple truth they failed to accept was that the petiti bourgeoisie wanted Trump, they voted for Trump, and Trump got enough votes in America's stupid election system to win.

Americans taken as a whole have very little media literacy and are not skeptical about the media they consume. Whatever you put in front of them, if it confirms their biases, they just uncritically accept without a second thought.

I assume that at least some nations in Europe just don't have as intense of a propaganda saturation as the US. I also suspect being outside the core of the Evil Empire gives people a little more perspective to see that America is full of shit.