The Economist is very familiar with pro-war propaganda
I'm imagining they drew the entire cartoon and then went "oh shit this could be the US, better write 'btw this is Russia' in the top left corner"
I straight up thought the cartoon was about the US until I saw that.
Literally just Russia where they do this.
We definitely don't do that here in the US of A, no sir.
- Saddam had WMDs
- The Vietnamese shot at us first
- Bin Laden was found in Afghanistan, where we always knew he was
- Every male over the age of 18 is a combatant when they happen to live in a war zone we created
only 2 labels and they are in english. 3 ben garrisons out of 7.
Oh and once a generation of Russian civilians are impoverished because of comprehensive sanctions and every Western company under the sun inflicting pain upon them, when they get angry it’ll be because Russian propaganda told them to be angry?
Getting ahead of the story basically, any Russian who has anti western rhetoric has nothing to do with the insane sanctions. We all know that sanctions just make people do democratic revolutions in their own nations because they'll blame their own leaders!
I think that lie might have worked 100 years ago when most people were either illiterate or had meager access to news, but now everyone's got the economic policies of the entire world presented in real time. All it takes for a regular Russian to allocate blame is 10 seconds on Google searching "why is the McDonalds closed?" Because they proudly exclaim the sanctions, somehow thinking they're humanitarian.
There was a guy on a local radio news thing the other day going off about how apparently Russians just aren't even cognizant of the outside world at all, and that the only way people are even learning about Western sanctions is by going to the mall, seeing the stores closed, and texting their friends and getting information that way.
Like, I'd love to see what actual Russian media says about shit like this, because to hear it from the west, they live in some mirror verse where reality isn't real and the war doesn't exist or something.
Do we even know what Russians think anyway? I see polling all over the place largely determined by who is gathering the data. If I had to guess, I imagine most Russians, like most Americans, are just trying to get by and don't really have strong opinions one way or another excepting a generalized baseline patriotism.
