The Anti-Corruption Foundation, which criticizes Putin and is reputed to be the best independent pollster in Russia, just did a poll in Germany & France. It asked: who's responsible for starting the Ukraine war?
Here's Germany's result:
Here are the polling numbers from France:
It appears that both in Germany and France, more people believe that the US is responsible for starting the war in Ukraine than believe that Putin is responsible.
Leonid Volkov of the Anti-Corruption Foundation claims that these numbers show how effective Putin's propaganda is in Germany & France.
This is a laughable explanation of the numbers given that populations of Germany and France are exposed to US propaganda to a far greater degree than they are exposed to Russian propaganda. In fact, much of Russian media is even banned in EU at this point.
One can only imagine what these numbers would look like if the populations of Germany and France were not being bombarded with US government propaganda about the origins of the Ukraine war.
Who the hell wrote those questions, why is Putin even separate from Russia and why Russians are singled out as a nation here.
the answer being "Vladimir Putin" instead of "Russia" or "the Russian government" is just peak liberalism
I noticed that as well, I love how they keep trying to pretend that Putin just rules by decree. You even see it in articles about the military news as if Putin personally commands all the forces, like he's playing an RTS there or something. It's absolutely incredible framing. I guess it's necessary to keep the whole if we only got rid of Putin everything would be great narrative going.
they do it for all enemy countries (Xi, Kim, Assad, Maduro, etc.), and to shift blame domestically onto individuals rather than the system
It's a deliberate tactic to drum up support for regime change. It also discourages people from looking at the larger picture.
Indeed. If it was the "system" of enemy nations that was causing the problem, people would start to notice it functions the same way as their own system, and if the system is the problem...
Putin is god almighty vs all Russians are orcs - two button meme (liberals press both).
Actually this narration is quite understandable for two reasons, first is idealism and fear of marxism, capitalist media fear doing the materialist analysis of material conditions, so they instead press the most vulgar idealist interpretation for which even Ranke and Gibbon would kick their asses. And no wonder, imagine what would happen if people suddenly started to use historical materialism! Second is the realpolitik, if they manage to get rid of Putin and vassalize Russia they would need to tone down the hatred in order to control it and direct it to next target.
I'm also at a loss as to what these people expect will happen if Putin somehow got ousted. He's basically a moderate in Russia, it's likely that Medvedev or maybe even somebody like Kadyrov could get in power after. The fixation on Putin shows utter lack of understanding of Russian politics.
I feel like people vastly overestimate the scale of russian influence over the internet. I can't wait until the CIA and FBI start blaming all of the shit they do on the russians.
for some reason my parents got really strange when I brought this up
do people actually believe the highway of death was caused by russia
It's clearly nowhere close to US influence, and it's interesting that people seem to be far less worried about that.
Because USA good. USA make entertainment that me like. I want to move to LA like on Netflix show. So USA good and Russia evil because USA show tell me so.
Your joke is actually spot on. I can’t count the number of people I spoke to who thinks that anyone can afford to rent a big apartment in Manhattan like in Friends or brand new 2023 cars easily affordable by anyone etc.
They don’t understand that most do not live that way and especially if you arrive as an immigrant. American entertainment media very rarely portrays the real struggles of working people. So when that is all someone sees of Americans, they become detached from the actual reality and think it’s just so easy for anyone.
That was the point of Russiagate. The picture of Russia as weak and pitiful failed state was already ingrained since 90's, but since you can hardly fearmonger your population with a weak and pitiful failed state, a new narration was added. So now it is a weak and pitiful failed state with inhuman propganda and corrupting power (sounds kida like... projection? or soon will be). The enemy must be at the same time weak and strong, as per usual fascism.
The Anti-Corruption Foundation
Asks "Please select who is responsible for the war? Is it:
A) A country (USA)
B) A person (Putin)
C) A transnational nuclear military (NATO)
D) A continent (European Countries)
E) A country and its people (Russia and The Russians)
F) This question is hard to answer "Not the USA and it's people. Not Joe Biden. Not European people. Not Ukraine and The Ukrainians.
It's laughably corrupt
I remember taking English classes and learning about how to avoid biasing polls and such. But these professional journalists don't even try to have the same level of integrity as school children. Western media is truly incredible. Incredibly shit.
My fav part is that the whole Russiagate has been debunked at this point, but liberals are still running around parroting it. These are the people who pride themselves on rational thinking, but in practice they're no different from qanon nuts.
yeah would be awkward to talk how much foreign interference there is from Israel in US
resurrect extinct animals
Wait what? Are we finally getting cloned mammoths?!
germans are probably still pissed the US took out the nord stream 2. if you want to overcome a 12% spike in energy costs, you gotta spend way more on the propaganda. like yank burgerbrain levels. we're talking multiple $100 million budget blockbuster summer movies, children's toy tie-ins, video games. smoke machines, laser lights, 100 meter tall robots breathing fire, all you can eat fried meat, monster trucks crashing into each other, music so loud even the young people think the world is coming to an end.
turns out that no amount of propaganda can compete with the material conditions people experience
For sure, world class propaganda machine is basically what allowed this war to go on for as long as it did.
It takes a lot of guts for a multi-millionaire politician to tell the common people "you're gonna have to make do with austerity because we decided for you that we need to beat the russians" at least I can recognize that
Here's to hoping that Europe can separate from the US and integrate with Eurasia 🥳
That's basically the process that US was aiming to prevent from developing with the war. If Europe continued economic integration with Russia and China then US would necessarily start losing political influence over it. Now, Europe is stuck with US unless there's a massive political upheaval, which may yet happen.
I wonder how many demands the US can make to Europe before the camel's back breaks. No gas, no chips, no huawei, no 5G... they're not seriously going to let themselves get strangled to death slowly right?
As long as European capitalists keep making money with the US, they’ll keep going as long as they like and they keep the people under control with western media. It will take a significant downturn even greater than this one for the people to unite and either overthrow their government or force it to break away from the US sphere of influence.
Slow strangling is exactly what is happening though. Problem of Europe is not even that they have compradors in power, problem is that basically every forseeable alternative are also compradors, or open fascist (who are also usually compradors).
so, experiment a little bit of what cuba and drpk has suffered for decades?
I haven't been able to find the original source for these polls. Does anyone have an archive link?
I found the original thread from that Volkov guy, maybe they haven't published it? https://twitter.com/leonidvolkov/status/1691490561604071425
Yet they pretend that the EU countries were not the instigators of this conflict as well.
To be fair, it's not like EU has any sovereignty at this point. It's a vassal of the US and the bureaucrats do what the empire tells them to.
It's funny isn't it. That's how you know it's an anti-Putin pollster: it's split the vote against Putin in Germany by separating US/NATO/Europe (with or without Ukraine) – 53% or 62% to Putin/Russia's 27%/29%. That's a damning indictment of the pro-war machine. Who knew that if you turn off the gas tap you piss off enough people that they start asking questions like, 'Which scheiß put the price up?'
In France it was multiple choice so people could pick more than one option and it's closer to the combined German results although there are more answers for every category. That makes sense; the real answer is 'all of the above' except 'and the Russians' and, although it's not on there 'and the Ukrainians'. A better question would be who is most responsible, which seems to be how most people have interpreted it.
One question is why change the methodology? Did they think the French would give even more damning answers than the Germans? Or did the pollsters see the German answers and say, 'Quick, how do we make Putin look worse?'
The real nugget of gold from this is that it reveals 62% of Germans and 43% of the French are lemmygrad lurkers: guten tag / bonjour comrades!
I mean, the way you know it's an anti-Putin pollster is by going to the website for the Anti-Corruption Foundation and seeing that the button for donating money is labeled "Help defeat Putin"
They could spend all the money in the world on propaganda, but it won't change people's material conditions.
The crazy thing is that they'd rather try that than just...give concessions to the working class and prevent a revolution.
In fact, much of Russian media is even banned in EU at this point.
Yes but the truth can't be hidden from investigative Europeans, with all their freedom of expression and thought. They will search out the truth wherever it may be and recognise it when they see it. Hang on, no, wait, that doesn't work, either. They aren't allowed to see that propaganda because they're too gullible and believe everything they hear. What? They're only allowed to hear anti-Russian propaganda? Well, no, I didn't mean it like that.
it's really getting hard for the propagandists to keep the narrative straight
It's because Germany and France are experiencing direct economic consequences from the invasion, with the US strategy being to use this war to screw over Europe.
Material conditions will always trump propaganda.
What is up with those French numbers? That's way more than 100%
Ah, good catch. Still weird that they used two different polling methods though.
I guess these aren't mutually exclusive. You can believe that both US and NATO are responsible for example.
I had considered that, but I find it weird that Germany's numbers seem to add to 100% (can't be bothered to do the math).
Now consider that the U.S. runs NATO and has a similar degree of control over their European vassals.
i mean, germany and france know about nazis, so they'd be more knowledgeable that putin is truly "denazifying" ukraine and US is lying
