chat

energy. He "studied communism" for 20 years by being really mad at the USSR, collecting memorabilia of the USSR, naming his daughter after Gorbachev, and reading nothing about communism except maybe the manifesto.

(cw: a reference to animal cruelty)

The kitten-burners seem to fulfill some urgent need. They give us someone we can clearly and correctly say we’re better than. Their extravagant cruelty makes us feel better about ourselves because we know that we would never do what they have done. They thus function as signposts of depravity, reassuring the rest of us that we’re Not As Bad As them, and thus letting us tell ourselves that this is the same thing as us being good.

from https://redsails.org/false-witnesses/

usians are the most propagandized people on earth

Let us look at a specific example. A claim like “There’s cultural genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang” is simply unreal to most Westerners, close to pure gibberish. The words really refer to existing entities and geographies, but Westerners aren’t familiar with them. The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them. It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.

What is this social purpose? Westerners want to believe that other places are worse off, exactly how Americans and Canadians perennially flatter themselves by attacking each others’ decaying health-care systems, or how a divorcee might fantasize that their ex-lover’s blooming love-life is secretly miserable. This kind of “crab mentality” is actually a sophisticated coping mechanism suitable for an environment in which no other course of action seems viable. Cognitive dissonance, the kind that eventually spurs one into becoming intolerant of the status quo and into action, is initially unpleasant and scary for everybody. In this way, we can begin to understand the benefit that “victims” of propaganda derive from carelessly “spreading awareness.” Their efforts feed an ambient propaganda haze of controversy and scandal and wariness that suffocates any painful optimism (or jealousy) and ensuing sense of duty one might otherwise feel from a casual glance at the amazing things happening elsewhere. People aren’t “falling” for atrocity propaganda; they’re eagerly seeking it out, like a soothing balm.

In 1981, Americans thought the Soviet Union was an Evil Empire that would battle the US for eternity.

In 1991, Americans thought the USSR's collapse was inevitable and obvious while questioning only why it didn't happen sooner.

it's even worse with the descendants of euro-immigrants. I know a polish guy, gay, super liberal, who is absolutely convinced of the most bloodthirsty and reactionary narratives about the USSR because he's from a polish family, and his polish grandma would never lie. If I'm talking about any kind of effort to improve society somewhat he will go full and say "socialism is a good idea in theory, but never in practice, I should know, I'm polish, and both hitler and stalin genocided my people." He's generally a kind and friendly person who has been helpful on numerous occasions in the decade I've known him, but the second we start talking politics the gloves come off. He has a STEM background and gets paid fairly good, so I especially don't care for the way he talks about working class people like they're all ignorant trumpers who just need to learn to code.