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  • they are not my friends, but i know some libs that cosplay as leftists and they completely bought into the nato-framing of the russo-ukrainian war from the jump, while they are generally opposed to what is happening in Gaza.... but not enough to voting for Genocide Joe, ofc.

    for russo-ukraine, it was a part of the world they have fuck all analysis about but the news footage really played up how sympathetically white ukranians are. like one admitted that the footage of ukranians being displaced bothered them more, on an emotional level, than the US invading and displacing iraqis. major

    vibes. combine that casual racism with the fact that there was no geographical placeholder information for them about eastern europe. NATO aggression? what's that? total clean slate for the media blitz to fill.

    with Gaza, the extermination and land grab has been a project for a long time. these libs have met muslims since 9/11 and heard voices contradicting state department messaging about the middle east, a place the US has been terrorizing and bombing and invading multiple times in our lifetimes. they have developed their own opinions in that time and there is even acknowledgement of Biden's enthusiastic role in the 2003 invasion of iraq.

    of course, they are libs so A Dang Cheeto In The White House is more of a threat to their comfortable brunching than Genocide Joe exterminating Gazans, so their aversion to genocide isn't that motivating.

    i will never, ever forget something i think Christman said about how genocidal war was not a problem for Europeans/The West until Hitler committed the unpardonable crime of doing it to Europeans. i have never heard a more succinct framing for perennially fickle western outrage about slaughter.

  • Media about Palestine in the West was infinitely more than Donbas (literally nothing)

    Also big strong countries bad and scary (like China despite doing literally nothing), weak and underdog countries good (notice how nobody supports Yemen because they're a real threat)

  • Basic premise most agree with in 2024: wars of aggression are bad.

    Who is the aggressor, what is their political history, what are the skin colors involved, what are the respective ideologies, who are 'allies'... all of those things influence how the baseline premise is perceived.

    • Basic premise most agree with in 2024: wars of aggression are bad.

      I mean, yes, but also no. In most wars, you could make some argument for either side being the aggressor. For some of them you'd really have to work hard for it, but it's generally possible to at least conjure some flimsy rhetoric around it. The Iraq War, for instance, was very obviously a war of aggression by the US against Iraq. ...or was it? I mean, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and they have WMDs!!! Iraq is actually declaring a war of aggression against the concept of freedom and democracy! We've gotta respond to this attack!

      So what's actually going on here is "If your government can successfully persuade you that they aren't the aggressor, and in fact they're actually the victim, then you'll probably support the war a lot more than if your government isn't able to do so."

      For the Russia-Ukraine situation, portraying Russia as the aggressor is quite easy, because... well... they invaded Ukraine, and almost nobody knew anything about the Donbass. I only very vaguely knew about it before 2022, and the extent of my knowledge was "Oh, there's some territorital disputes and fighting going on between Ukraine and Russia over something or other," and I was fairly geopolitically-minded. So if you're just the average guy on the street, you might not even have known anything about Ukraine, let alone the Donbass. But if you did know about the general sequence of events since the fall of the USSR; the US-sponsored coup in Ukraine, Russia taking Crimea in response, the West arming neo-Nazi groups, the diplomatic efforts taken by Russia to try and not go to war while Europe was arming Ukraine for the sole purpose of trying to weaken Russia (as Merkel explicitly admitted in an interview), the mass murders of the Donbass people, etc - then suddenly, NATO looks a lot like the aggressor in this war. The Russian people certainly know this sequence of events, which is why most of them support the war. It's not that Putin has weaved a magic brainwashing spell on the Russian people, or that they're all secretly too scared to say their opinion - they legitimately, and quite rightfully, believe themselves and their fellow Russians in the Donbass to be the victims of NATO and Ukrainian aggression. NATO has been on the offensive against Russia since 2014 - I mean, really, since NATO first expanded after the USSR fell. February 24th 2022 was merely the start of the Russian counteroffensive.

      For Israel-Palestine, efforts to portray Palestine as the aggressor did kinda work initially because the October 7th attack was so effective. But in the months that followed, and as Israel further bombed and invaded Gaza, it became increasingly difficult to say that Israel somehow isn't the aggressor here, and because most people are at least generally aware that the Israel-Palestine conflict exists and that the Palestinians have been suffering for decades, Westerners were primed to be able to experience sympathy for the Palestinians. The legacy of the Holocaust complicates the matter sufficiently that for a big chunk of people, the whole conflict just becomes this big complicated blob of "Well, both sides here have reasons to hate the other and fight, idk what to think really, I'm gonna go back to watching Love Island or whatever," but generally speaking people believe that it was a war of aggression by Israel. The footage that has come out of Gaza helps in that regard, compared to Israel's unwillingness to show their own pain and suffering publically because they want to maintain their image as God's chosen superior ubermensch to the inferior, weak, untermensch Arabs.

  • Ukraine piggy backed off cold-war & neo-cold war propaganda decades in the making. theres been a basically unbroken stream of anri-russian media since 1917

    Israel ooth doesn't always enjoy such bias, when the proverbial 'chips are down' the imperialists back them but there's plenty of liberal scolding and bones thrown to arab allies in intervening years. there's also something abt all the cameras israel is just gleefully advertizing genocide on that makes it hard for anyone plugged into anything besides cable news to ignore

  • Everyone knows what russia is and 'know' about it being bad and evil and violent, very few actually knew much about israel and palestine other than that it was 'complicated', and basically no one knew what a "Hamas" was, that makes it a harder narrative sell on its own, but then you have just the sheer absurdity of the disproportionate violence and blatant lies, fucking "Voldemort knows evil" shit lmfao

  • You don’t remember the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war when western news anchors were shocked and nearly speechless, only able to say how horrible it is that this is happening to people who “look like us” ??????

  • because israel is just on its face so much more evil. like, ukraine is very bad, but they aren't run by azov guys openly talking about how it's good to kill children for fun every single day at every single level. zelensky isn't going on talk shows saying "please let me slaughter children in the streets :((((" he's managing to convincingly act the victim. and russia is just on its face much less of a victim than palestine. russia has a military, and isn't being invaded and having all its infrastructure destroyed and children murdered in the streets on the scale that it's happening in palestine. they managed to keep donbass completely out of the limelight

    • they aren't run by azov guys

      yo that reminds me, yesterday Al Jazeera did a piece on older Ukrainians who are signing up to the military to help with the war. They interviewed an older bloke at a military recruitment centre, and after that interviewed one of the soldiers at the centre who was STANDING IN FRONT OF A GIANT FUCK-OFF AZOV BATTALION BANNER AND NOBODY MENTIONED IT. Not a single word. Normally photos/video of Ukranian soldiers is like Where's Waldo for Nazi symbols but this one was on extra easy mode.

      I was expecting the journalist to say something like "Hey what a cool banner you're standing in front of what does it mean?" but no. Crickets. I wish I had grabbed a screen capture because I couldn't believe my eyes, and I spend like half an hour last night looking for the video but it wasn't anywhere on Al Jazeera's website or youtube page.

  • I think at least some of it is the extreme, outrageous, unbelievable levels of incompetence from the Israeli propaganda machine. There's a lot more clear evidence of straightforward war crimes coming out of Palestine, and much of that evidence is posted to Twitter by Israeli soldiers. If there was a daily drip feed of, say, Ukrainian soldiers just setting children on fire for fun, I think you'd see a dip in the public support of that war also. Israel was so convinced that they had the unwavering support of the

    to do whatever they wanted that they really have made no effort to do genuine propaganda or cover up their worst excesses. It turns out that they were right to be convinced of that, since nobody has actually done anything about it, but their laziness has eroded their popular support.

    Most of the really awful stuff coming out of Ukraine requires you to be familiar with fascist iconography (the Black Sun, wolfsangel, etc.) to appreciate and find horrifying. In contrast, to be horrified by Israel you only need to have eyes and not be really super racist.

  • Because the US was preparing for a proxy war with russia, and had a planned propaganda camplaign in place to keep domestic discord suppressed.

    In contrast, Hamas had been planning Al-Aqsa flood and had prepared to spread their propaganda well ahead of time, while the occupiers and the US were caught flat-footed.

    Hamas knew the importance of contrilling messaging, and used social media to get out shocking images the people have a hard time ignoring, as well as heroic combat footage.that people are eager to share.

    By the time social media companies had prepared to suppress the info, it was too late.

    This is what they mean when they say that information campaigns are a huge part of modern warfare

  • I think the audience was prepared for a long, drawn out war between Russia and Ukraine.

    I think in October ‘23, even the most loyal Zionists in the U.S. and Western Europe were expecting a military operation similar to previous invasions and incursions into Palestinian areas, as Israel had been doing between roughly 2000 and 2021. (I’m using the language of a typical assumption, so I apologize as this does dehumanize and minimize the value of Palestinian lives.) The fighting might be ugly, but it would be contained, a few mid-level leaders would be targeted, and Israel would rebuild their “security apparatus” and leave within a few weeks.

    As the human cost in terms of the suffering of the sick and most vulnerable, the disproportionate deaths of children, the targeting of whole families became clear through better technology channels, I think the libs who already were sick of Netanyahu got tired of a strategy that was at once brutal and ineffective.

129 comments