Like, I've seen many smart people that are even, in theory, supporting of socialism and against imperialism who are well aware that there is a propaganda machine in the US and the west, who when it comes to anything about AES/past socialist states, they will just regurgitate state department propaganda without question.
Like, even if you bring up, for example, Xinjiang, and how virtually all evidence comes from some really bad research by a guy who clearly has an agenda, they will say something along the lines of "maybe that's true, but that doesn't disprove there's a genocide there". Which... is not how burden of proof works. Mind you, these are also people who clearly know about shifting of the burden of proof when it comes to climate change or evolution, but here? Then it's every logical fallacy, no critical thinking.
So what is it about these things that remove critical thinking from otherwise smart people?
The propaganda is very, very deep set and has basically total cultural penetration. Shaking that isn't about being smart.
There's a big difference between believing something and internalizing it. Someone can consciously believe in LGBT rights but still have internalized homophobia that comes out in knee-jerk reactions or unexamined attitudes, for example.
I think in the lib to left journey, people typically go through a stage that's basically just whining. We go around calling out contradictions and such but we haven't really internalized them ourselves. It is the classic lib thing of expecting teacher to listen and fix things. And so we'll talk about how our democratic process is gerrymandered and rigged but in the next sentence say that we need to pressure China to be more democratic, or talk about how important it is to :vote: After all, we already hit the "report" button about gerrymandering so that's been dealt with. At this stage we haven't followed through our criticisms to their natural conclusions, either. We might call out the media on one thing and then treat it as an unbiased source later on, because again, we already hit the report button so we already took care of that. It really is just the Report Button stage. And to be clear it's not like, the worst thing, it's often a step in the right direction, it's just not quite where it needs to be yet.
Imo part of why this happens is the excessive online focus on individual takes. "Look, bud, if it were up to me, we'd put a stop to gerrymandering right now." And that's all you need to think about with regards to gerrymandering. It's not based, it's cringe. Downvote. Done, next topic, new slop. "Yeah, I agree we should stop selling arms to the Saudis. If it were up to me, we wouldn't. But I do think we should sanction China over human rights." The first priority is showing that you're a good person with correct opinions, and having an accurate picture of reality or doing any sort of structural analysis is secondary to that.
yeah every individual person feels the need to have an exactly "correct" moral position on every issue even those they know barely anything about. part of that is for posting, you don't want to post cringe now do you? But it turns into people hearing on the TV "China bad and immoral" and then they think "oh shit, I need to remember that China bad or else I will be cringe"
I don't think anyone in the US really cares about China with everything going on, besides the ghouls at the top. Few people know enough about other countries to seriously analyze the so called evidence they see, so don't even worry about that if you are trying to deprogram. Honestly I think a simple anti-government message that talks about how the United States has an incentive to make up stuff about China because we are in competition works pretty well (for the lib at least, the crazy racist ones idk what to do)
Here's a question for you guys: is it necessary that every single person on this planet expresses every single opinion that they have on every single thing that occurs, all at the same time? Is that, is that, necessary? Or to ask it a slightly different way, can anyone shut the fuck up, can any, any one, any single one, can anyone, shut the fuck up about, anything, any single thing, can any single person shut the fuck up about any single thing for, an hour?
- Bo Burnham
Why do you rich fucking white people insist on seeing every socio-political conflict through the myopic lens of your own self-actualization?
- Socko
I've come to believe that for many smart people that moment before "maybe that's true, but..." isn't merely cognitive dissonance or the propaganda kicking in. It's them making a decision to keep believing the lie, to choose the safety of performative ignorance, because most people think - rightly or wrongly - that stepping outside the accepted narrative will mean ostracism, ridicule, and hopelessness in the face of that. And so they chose to believe the bullshit.
Yeah this, accepting that AES states are often good, actually, means incorporating real change in their worldview that they're unwilling to accept the consequences of.
We all have the subconscious choice to accept or reject the Matrix
Because nobody is immune to propaganda.
I feel like all baby leftists will have a moment where they realize discontent with the current system isn't enough, but have been steeped in the stew long enough they can't actually imagine what a different future would look like(and don't really believe in it).
Like, the spectacle is absolutely fine with showing you what discontent looks like. Propaganda loves the idea of rebellion, it's very marketable. It will never show you what a successful revolution looks like, but it loves it martyr complexes. It's a powerful strain of brainworms.
And once you've caught them you're either bound to shrink back into vague radlibbism, comforted that even if you couldn't do anything, at least no one else could either. Or you start reading theory with doomer-glasses and become a leftcom who's salty no one has pressed the communism button yet and despair nobody will.
salty no one has pressed the communism button yet and despair nobody will.
Killing me softly :sadness:
- Soaking since birth in an ocean of anticommunist propaganda from the best propaganda machine yet created.
- Wanting to think of one's self as a good person > good people support their country, which means my country is good > if my country is telling me Bad Country is bad, it must be, because my country is good and wouldn't lie.
- The aversion to truly re-examining something you accepted as fact long ago, which might mean admitting you were wrong, and have been wrong for years, and that you'd need to make significant life changes if you wish to be consistent with your new belief.
Most people haven't seen opposition to it that they didn't already discard. These AES countries like the PRC or Cuba, they don't have good safe white people like the USSR, or safe white theorists like Lenin (who is portrayed pretty positively in many lib history classes), or the safety of having already been annihilated by imperial power.
But maybe more so, I think these are people have an ultimately Utopic view of socialism/communism and don't know it. They have an idea of socialism that corresponds to the egalitarian shared poverty of early PRC or USSR. They're so traumatized by capital and never seeing a leftist victory for themselves that they just want to get right to the not having to do any more unequal labor. They have no sense of what a DotP actually is or means. They think it means getting rid of all inequality immediately. I think because people have all of these theoretical issues in their socialism, they buy into liberal narratives about freedom and journalism and state capitalism. They can't imagine a government by and for regular people, that has a different end goal than imperial core but genuinely need to grow productive forces to get there without getting crushed.
I have a lot of friends with super bad, easily debunked takes about AES countries, and it's always a failure to consider the possibility of good actors in places of power.
That was pretty much my journey over the last 5 years or so. I grew up around some actual communists so I never fully internalized the commie bad narrative, but at the same time I didn't think much of it or just thought of it as utopian idealism.
Being disillusioned by Obama and all the revelations regarding our continued war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and then the rise of Trump, the (bad kind of) radicalization of my friend, and the ratfucking of Bernie sent me down the road of educating myself.
For me it started with studying fascism and white supremacy, and the people that fought against those things, the Black Panthers, the early 20th century militant labor movement, and like you I started to realize that the only people that actually fought for good things were communists, socialists, and anarchists.
Never once heard good opinions of ANY AES state until I started digging DEEP into leftist shit online. USA here ofc.
Shouts out to Juche Gang on the old sub for helping me along. I was definitely one of those insufferable baby leftists and only learned from being yelled at over and over.
This is a main part for me. Most in the USA simply do not hear any defense of socialist countries, so they assume there isn't a defense. They're entirely evil places on their face devoid of any redeeming qualities and their people lack humanity. The base assumption around here is anyone living in a socialist country is doing so because they've been deceived or they're being forced, because there simply isn't any reason to have socialist political aims unless you're an evil dictator.
I broke out of that particular headspace when the Iraq War started, since that was probably the first instance where I realized there were clashing political interests that could not compromise. I saw that anti-war activists weren't being tricked or forced, rather, they had good reason to see things in a particular way.
Why are liberals so upset with the Afghanistan thing? They are Hegelian radical liberals who believe that "historical progress makes world better". So logically these CIA color revolutions are "shifting the Overton window" and "creating democracy" or whatever idealism these utopian imperialists believe.
There are so many pieces of anti-communist propaganda that do not make sense even if you were to trust them as facts. Like the Gulag Archipelago 11 minute applause story, they only make sense if you dehumanize their subjects. Dehumanization then makes additional propaganda more effective and even creates propaganda of its own.
Fighting propaganda is easy, you can just use your own propaganda. But fighting dehumanization is hard because you have to do it with rehumanization.
