I am currently working on a follow-up to the episode "How not to be a regime-change dupe" with a quick guide on **Don't Fall for the Same BS over and Over **
For those of you who were liberals, why did you repeatedly fall victim to regime change propaganda? Why didn't you mistrust all newssources after the first lie?
I know this question is loaded, but I have always been in and out of the US, so I could always instinctively understand when BS was peddled at me. So, I am trying to get into a mind of a liberal who falls over and over for all propaganda points so I can write this essay and I am unable to do it! I could use some help in earnest!
I apologize for calling the regime-change dupe an idiot. It was wrong.
I think you got to the crux of it already, you have been in and out of the US your whole life. Most of us haven't, and so the US and it's hegemonic media and ideology were the world to us.
I came of age during the Bush era as a liberal, so I was intensely skeptical of invasions and the vague concept of "war". But I didn't really understand color revolutions or using proxies to carry out US interests. The last time I think I supported regime change was during the protests in Iran in 2009. Social media existed but it was mostly used for trying to hit on girls and find new bands to listen to. For information, I'd watch tv. I trusted Jon Stewart especially. I mean, he was against Bush and his oil wars, right? He was telling me how awful Iran was, and how they executed gay people and the people wanted to live like us but the evil islamist Government wouldn't let them.
Obviously there was pushback on that narrative, but I didn't see it. They weren't pushing back on the news, celebrities weren't pushing back, and even the punk bands I liked weren't saying anything against it. Besides, it's not like Obama was going to send troops, and if he did I would've been against it. I had been to protests as a young teen and to see people protesting a government that does actually do some bad stuff, I thought of course I'd support them. I didn't know anything about the protestors, and what they wanted to accomplish. For years I went on just accepting that the Iranian government was "bad" and the protesters had been "good".
This changed in 2014 with the Euromaidan in Ukraine. I was no longer a teenager and had been exposed to alternative media via the internet, even if I didn't pay too much attention to events abroad. I understood that liberal media was owned by corporations, and I knew Democrats weren't good. My family lost their house to the bank that got bailed out by Obama, and my mother died of cancer after slipping through the cracks of Obamacare. I was skeptical of power and anyone with money.
I would watch these protests, and at first they seemed like heroes. They were fighting to be closer to Europe instead of "authoritarian" Russia. But I noticed something. A lot of the protestors looked like neonazis that we would chase away from punk shows here in the US. Next to the Ukrainian and EU flags were these red and black flags with some guys face on them. I wondered who this dude was, and looked it up. It was Stepan Bandera. These guys were everywhere in that crowd and yet the liberal media didn't say one thing about people waving around a holocaust collaborator. Why weren't they mentioning this? Even Vice would just kind of brush it off like it was no big deal. That right there got me to look into regime change ops, and now I'm here.
Ps, I left out the Arab Spring because I was addicted to pills during that time and didn't pay attention to anything except getting high and getting money lol. I learned about that after the color revolution in Ukraine. Also, I want to add that the only reasons I changed my view is that my life was destroyed under a Democrat president, and I had the unique experience with neonazis by chasing them away at punk shows. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have been skeptical and would've thought the Banderites were just freedom fighters.
I am so sorry about your family. I cannot think of a more traumatic event to happen during a childhood than losing your family home. From a child's point of view, it is probably losing a sense of self.
So, your unique experience where you recognized the neo-nazi symbols is what made you aware!
Did you assume all Nazis were German before then?
It all happened very fast. One moment I was in my parents house, and my mom's cancer was just a weird mole on her neck, the next moment I was living in an apartment in Baltimore trying to live out my young adult life until I got the news about mom. It all happened when I was just starting college and the fear of not having a place to go back to if things fell through was terrifying and then when my mom died I had no support structure. Feeling like an actual poor person for the first time led me to addiction (along with selling drugs to make money), and losing my mom reeled me back into reality.
As for the neonazis, nobody really thought about them! I knew about them from punk lore, but they were a 1980s phenomenon in my head until I saw them in real life. Chasing them away also gave me my first militant act of solidarity against a political enemy. We were literally doing antifascist action, and it felt great! This was Baltimore, these were our streets and they weren't welcome.
Realizing the regime change ops led me to read more about imperialism, and it wasn't for a while that I truly understood anti-imperialism. I began to realize that the neonazis, Bush's wars, the protests in Iran and Ukraine, Obama letting my family flounder while the banks got bailed out, even my past drug addiction; they were all connected. I had latent (though uninformed) sympathy for historical Communists, and it all started coming together for me in the past few years. The fact that I could draw a direct line from the war in Afghanistan to me snorting oxys off a stranger's car was freeing. I realized it's not my fault, and that I am just a little speck in a vast and disgusting system. And we need to crush that system, just like we crushed those neonazis trying to come into our punk shows.
Vice is so bad with the regime change stuff. The did a piece that consisted of them interviewing Syrians and condescendingly asking them "so, do you, like, understand why Americans think that Assad is a bad guy?"
That's actually one of the better pieces. Sometimes, they would go in and pretend Al Nusra was all moderate and stuff.