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I used to dislike the liberal media and the left wing journalists in Europe. Now I really miss them. The news in Scandinavia is increasingly becoming press-releases from American NGOs and google translated Washington post articles. The media used to reasonably critical of power, now they are basically reporting their press releases. Scandinavian journalists have barely any knowledge of foreign affairs, they report what the US military industrial complex reports. The perspective is becoming the perspective of Robert Kagan, often with perspectives that don't even make sense for a non-American. Even our public service media is increasingly ending its articles with "according to the Institute for the Study of War".
There seems to be a link between having values on foreign policy similar to John Bolton and being woke in Europe. I strongly believe the consumption of translated materials from Washington elites are behind both trends.
The people who threw rocks at cops during negotiations over free trade agreements 20 years ago and demonstrated against the war in Iraq are turning into major war hawks wanting to defend American liberal hegemony.
You ever seen an explanation of what's the reason for it ?
Internet killing press media, collapsing budgets, leading to talent leaving the profession?
Generational change, with spooks being better positioned now to groom younger generations of journalists properly ?
Race to the bottom. It’s faster and cheaper to copy a press release than to write an editorial. And once someone does that, switching costs are so low that they will snag all the viewers. So everyone else has to compete on similar terms.
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Probably the internet killing their budget. Just rewriting a press release is cheap.
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The "trusting the experts" narrative might have a role to play here. ISW succeeded in becoming "the experts" in many circles in the early months of the war. A more critical appraisal might go against the consensus of the "experts".
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If there is, it's not a strong one. At least here, being anti-US and anti-NATO still correlates mostly to being far-left, though there's a smallish far-right section with that view, too. Of course, one could argue that the anti-US far-left is not generally the wokest part of the left, but I know both anti-American woke and non-woke leftists with equivalent views on NATO/US/Ukraine.
However, at the moment, being pro-NATO, pro-Ukraine and concurrently pro-American is the view shared by the vast majority of the population, with NATO support being something like 80 % at the moment. Within this section, the most fervent nuke-Moscow crowd tends to be politically of centre-to-centre-right variety and not really particularly concerned with things like wokeness and non-wokeness.
This tends to more old left rather than the super woke left.
The center right tends to support liberal interventionism consistently. The center right was the most pro war in Iraq, Libya and Syria to then start complaining about the millions of migrants these wars yielded. In Israel-Palestine the conflict is between those who want Arabs to live where they have lived for generations and those who want them to move. The center right strongly supports large numbers of Arabs having to move. That the same people who wanted to spend trillions defending feminism in Afghanistan are pro war isn't surprising. That the center right supports the next military venture isn't surprising. The surprising part is that the people who used to be opposed to the foreign wars largely falling in line this time around.
This is all very much at the margins of political discourse here but at least in Britain anti-NATO sentiment, which there isn't really that much of anymore, seems to come as much from Sultana-esque young left-wingers as it does from older Galloway-esque ones.
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One part of this might just be that the super woke left just isn't particularly interested in geopolitics, or only interested in a perfunctory way. However, I, at least, myself know people who could probably be put on the "super woke left" and are pacifists, or anti-interventionists
At least here (and I don't think that there are any countries where the switch has happened as hard and fast as here), this is mainly just an effect of the fact that in Feb 2022 (not literally on that month, but in and around the months before and after the invasion), the entire society fell in line around a new foreign policy consensus that is pro-Ukraine, pro-NATO and pro-American. Basically the only people that didn't were the ones who had a really firm anti-NATO line before that month, and even many of them (like me) were affected.
However, even after that switch, the super-woke types don't tend to be the most eager NATO supporters; that, as said, is mostly the avenue of he center-to-center-right types who, with some expections, tended to already be pro-NATO before the invasion.
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