Prior to the conflict, I wasn't a fan of liberals. But at least they were better than conservatives because they didn't want to glass the Middle East, protested against the Iraq war, made fun of right wing bullshit on Fox News, and didn't want to gun down Muslims or Hispanics. Or so I thought.
Liberals have gone full :frothingfash: and are literally regurgitating 1930s Nazi talking points about the Slavs. As I Russian speaker, I stopped going on most subreddits now due to the obscene racism. I've seen shit ranging from "Aktually, Ruzzians are not white or European" to "Lets break Russia up and commit mass ethnic cleansing". It's not even just Russians, I've seen a massive surge in racist posts about Chinese and Indian people since the war started.
Liberals are literally swallowing the most inane nonsense from Ukraine like "Russian orcs shocked at seeing toilets for the first time". And lets not forget the "Russian brainpan too smol to launch nukes so lets nuke them ourselves" posts all over :reddit-logo:
Anyone who even remotely suggests that we shouldn't arm and send 16 year old Ukrainians to be blown up in human wave attacks is called a Kremlin agent.
Amazingly, many right-wingers like Peterson or Candace Owens have better takes on the situation than liberals do. Does anyone have an explanation for this?
It occurs to me that some people on this hexagonal ursine website might be too young to remember the Iraq War, but yeah this is the exact kind of slavering bloodlust that swept the nation then too
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.
This. The Iraq War provoked one of the largest anti-war movements in US history. The Media simply ignored it entirely. They never talked about it and never aired footage of it. The media blackout was so complete that I don't think the average person even knows it happened. But it did.
This time there doesn't seem to be any anti-war resistance, at all. It really feels like it's literally just us.
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Someone get me Cindy Sheehan on the phone!
Cindy Sheehan, grieving mother of a son killed in Iraq, demanded that the US military not only pull out of Iraq but out of New Orleans as well, calling it "occupied New Orleans." She has chased the headlines to the Algiers section of New Orleans to regain her place in the spotlights. Cindy writes of her experience:
"One thing that truly troubled me about my visit to Louisiana was the level of the military presence there. I imagined before that if the military had to be used in a CONUS (Continental US) operations that they would be there to help the citizens: Clothe them, feed them, shelter them, and protect them. But what I saw was a city that is occupied. I saw soldiers walking around in patrols of 7 with their weapons slung on their backs. I wanted to ask one of them what it would take for one of them to shoot me."
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/cindy-sheehan/a-bright-spot-in-bush-wor_b_7433.html
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.