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Notes -
I find all the propaganda around Ukraine to be weird just in how often it’s being sold as various tropes of sci-fi, fantasy and anime tropes to sell various forms of support for the war. Dehumanizing people in wars is definitely normal, but there’s just something creepy about the way that the war is sold.
Russophobia has been a trope of western propaganda since well before the Cold War. But they were never “orcs”. And there were varying ways of saying “just the military,” even if that part never really made it to the homes of the working class. Not only that, but the rapidity of shutting down Russians in the West (or suspected Russians) and insisted on inane changes (Kyiv may well be the technically correct transliteration of the Ukrainian city, but until 2022, nobody in the West cared about the spelling). Russians were banned from public life, or permitted only if they took special pains to denounce their home country (including rather absurdly, opera singers and dancers) Russian themed restaurants were shuttered. Likewise, Ukraine has been lionized as all kinds of things, Zelensky was memed as Captain Ukraine, Miss Universe featured the contestant from Ukraine dressed as an anime angel with fully articulated wings and a sword.
The issue isn’t just dehumanization, which has been happening, but the extremes and contrasts are such that talk of peace and real politik become impossible. If Ukraine is Marvel superheroes and Russia is orcs, how do you sell negotiations? How do you prevent escalation? How do you have sober conversations at all. And what does it say about the seriousness with which we’re taking a war if we’re discussing it on the level of action movies and genre fantasy? It seems in the past, even if we were dehumanizing the enemy, we were at least aware that it was a real war, against people, perhaps barbaric people, but people, with real weapons being deployed against real cities with real people in them.
This is a problem because without taking the war seriously or acknowledging that people are dying and cities are being destroyed, there’s a risk that this conflict escalates to much higher levels, going from being a US-Russian proxy war into being a full on world war, potentially even a nuclear one.
No more creepy than, for example, WWI propaganda, only as advanced as modern weapons are compared to WWI weapons.
You do not have to "sell" anything to the public. Negotiations could be going on and are going on behind the scenes without consulting the public.
Easily. MSM stops talking about Ukraine 24/7 and starts talking about something else (for example: drag queens).
Everyone who cares about Ukraine because MSM told him so, will forget Ukraine and starts agonizing about the new burning issue - are drag queen shows necessary part of modern 21st century education?
People who cared about Ukraine before, who could find Ukraine on the map before March 2022 might continue to care, but they are small minority.
When, after few months or years, everyone forgets, you can even do 180 turn and show Ukraine as racist nazi homophobic transphobic corrupt shithole. Many such cases.
I say.
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