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?
1)Russia bad because 2016 election.
2)Cold war propaganda.
3)Social media and mainstream news are far more powerful than leftists gave credit for even though of course I think everyone understands the power of the media in the past, the success in creating a narrative today is far more impressive than what happened with Iraq and Afghanistan.
4)Simple racism, Ukrainians suddenly becoming honorary whites, the cringe news anchors talking about the "tragedy" of the first war in Europe in 50 years or whatever.
5)You can fool a lib into believing Ukraine is/was a "democracy" and that is far more effective than making people care about the US invasions against the authoritarian regimes.
Putting aside the Marxist analysis of class consciousness and capitalism for a moment, I think there is also an inherent desire for people to see the world as a simple my team vs the enemy team.
If you are on team democracy you'll die on the hill supporting this belief no matter what e.g doesn't matter how much evidence there is supporting nazism in Ukraine, if the nazis are on team democracy that is ok, good even.
Look at shit like this: The Fight of Our Lives: My Time with Zelenskyy, Ukraine's Battle for Democracy, and What It Means for the World. You could argue maybe nobody is actualy buying this shit or taking it seriously, but yet the existence proves there is an obvious attempt at pushing the narrative far beyond just the news cycle, but to make it part of western culture.
And as an extension of that perhaps there is also something more primitive or even religious. Zelensky is literally Jesus fighting to save "us" from the sins of authoritarianism and tyranny while bringing us to the promised land of democracy and "western values"(also a dog whistle for :us-foreign-policy:). To be clear it doesn't matter if these people are not actually religious or whatever, the cultural legacy of Christianity is still extremely powerful. After all I think narratives of underdogs vs bully, righteousness vs evil etc are still an intrinsic part of most if not all societies.
BTW I found that book while look for more sources on this Russian propaganda post "Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” and video
This world is a god damn comedy sketch at times.
no fooling necessary, maidan coup ukraine was a democracy by lib standards. they look at iraq and say "blah blah horrible but at least we brought them democracy", the neocons won that ideological battle. Criticizing the puppet government is implicitly supporting saddam to these people, same with anything you have to say about a westernizing nazi-infested ukraine.
libs barely care about pinochet and if you tell them about 70 years of america spreading fascism and being on the wrong side every time in south america and they'll still line up and lick the boot on foreign policy.
I convinced a lib relative that the maidan coup wasn't democratic since Victoria Nuland got to dictate who could be on the new govt. But they just moved on to "well it wasn't democratic under the Russian puppet Yanukovich either, and it became democratic with the election that came after maidan"
It's wild that Yanukovich was the duly elected president, and as legitimate as you could get in Ukraine, and Libs just... don't care, and consider the violent coup and the illegal subsequent government legitimate and "Democratic".
I am scared to think what the americans would say if they had won