Shame on America and shame on most of Europe for abstaining
Especially the UK, Ireland, France and Germany
“But it’s deeper than that! The resolution is an evil Russian plot to trick people into condemning nazism, so we actually have t-”*deflates like a balloon and flies around the room comedically in a way that undermines my point*
right, i’m sure everyone on this post how feels bad, and i’m not reblogging this to drag anyone, but we need to talk about propaganda in left-wing spaces, especially online spaces
when this post was first going around, i went and read the U.N.’s report on the debate, and a bunch of different articles on it, and wrote a long rebuttal, explaining that this was russian state propaganda intended to try and get international support for a proposed invasion of ukraine by claiming that ukraine was full of nazis
(this is not me telling you how clever I am, I was just repeating back information from other people who know a fuck of a lot more about international politics than me, because the people who know about that shit all knew what this was)
[the tldr for anyone who didn’t see a rebuttal is that the bill was basically just the words ‘nazis=bad’ not any kind of attempt to combat nazism, a lot of countries abstained because they thought it was stupid, the usa voted against because any condemnation of free speech is considered unconstitutional, and ukraine voted against because they were 100% aware of why russia proposed the bill in the first place]
mostly it was ignored, and the responses i did get were from people like the ones above, telling me i was shilling for capitalism or whatever
because this doesn’t look like what people in left-wing online spaces expect right-wing propaganda to look like. it says nazis are bad, how can it possibly be pro-facist? it’s reporting accurate facts, how can it be propaganda?
because it is technically accurate. this bill was proposed, it was voted on, and the usa and ukraine were the only countries to vote again. that’s all true
it’s just also only a tiny part of the picture, selected to make people who don’t like nazis (also do note it’s specifically neo-nazis not white supremecists or facists – russia has major problems wth the last 2 but historically hasn’t been a big fan of nazis, hence the very specific wording) think russia is good and ukraine is bad.
when you’re used to shit like prageru it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking right-wing propaganda is just really obvious lies, but prageru is 5 dipshits with access to powerpoint (they’re 5 dipshits being funded by oil barons, but the point still stands) of course the stuff they make is going to be obvious bullshit. the tweet at the top of this thread is propaganda by people who actually know what the fuck they’re doing and have spent a very long time getting extremely good at it.
if they just lied, people would notice. not everyone, obviously, the internet left contains people who thought wayfair was selling kidnapped children locked in overprice wardrobes ffs, but enough people
so they share what is, very technically, the truth. they edit it to fit their needs, they obsfucate the background, but they tell the truth. and it works. thousands upon thousands of people shared this. people who quite rightly view the invasion of ukraine as absolutely monstrous went to the matt for russian state propaganda over and over. they drowned out anyone trying to add the context back in
this is what effective right-wing propaganda looks like. this is why people yell about reading beyond the headlines, doing research, and most importantly, applying common sense!
I didn’t go and read up on the context of this people i’m cleverer than you. i noticed germany was on the list of people who abstained, and i know enough about germany to know they have very strong opinions on nazis, and that made me think probably it was bullshit, so i went and did some research.
if i didn’t know that about germany, i might have shared this uncritically, because it’s really fucking easy to hit reblog and a lot harder to go and read reports on united nations debates (it’s actually surprisingly easy to do that, but they’re mostly boring as shit)
but the existence of this post, and the sheer number of notes it has and the number of retweets the original had, are a reminder that doing that extra work is very very important. there are people in left-wing spaces right now loudly supporting the invasion of ukraine, because they read shit like this uncritically, and that’s really fucking bad! i hope we can all agree that the invasion of ukraine is bad, and supporting it is a sign that something has gone very wrong.
and i want to say that i’m different, i’d never drink the cool aid, and on this specific issue, no, i probably wouldn’t. but i’ve done it in the past, on less important issues, because it’s easy. the internet makes it easy. propagandists who know what they’re doing make it easy
so please, if you see this post, let this be your reminder to always look for context, to not share things you haven’t verified, and to stop and ask yourself who the imformation benefits
