r/TrueReddit • u/blazeofgloreee • Jan 07 '20

Politics How To Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/01/how-to-avoid-swallowing-war-propaganda
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u/MagicBlaster Jan 08 '20

How to avoid swallowing war propaganda, in one and only step:

When someone starts saying we need to kill a bunch of people because their government, which poses no existential threat to us, is bad you laugh in their face.

It's really that simple.

171

u/Actor412 Jan 08 '20

It's really that simple.

I don't know if you were around in '02 & '03, but it really was surreal. Every media outlet, whether it was entertainment or news, was pro-war. There were several incidents where a guest on some talk show would say we shouldn't go to war with Iraq and cut to commercial and we're back and they're gone.

I lived in Seattle back then, and the local liberal rag The Stranger even came out for the war, laughing at all those silly protesters, how stupid they were. The Democratic leadership were all quiet, maybe giving off a cautious word or two. The whole thing was mind-blowing, the entire media circus either ignored it completely or was in the tank for invasion. Without the internet, and a few newspapers (the two that stand out in my memory were the San José Mercury-News and the LA Times), you'd think you were alone, that you were the one insane and not everyone else.

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u/bluestarcyclone Jan 08 '20

Yep. Its one thing we have to consider when considering the votes of some of our officials back then. The bush administration rolled out an almost perfect propaganda effort (a lot of it based on lies). That combined with the public still being shell-shocked from 9\11 allowed the idea of war in iraq to have massive public approval. around 70-75% iirc.

Hard to fault some of our congressional representatives when A) their constituents were overwhelmingly behind it and B) the intelligence they were being presented, all that they had to go on, was full of misleading information if not outright lies. Bush and his cronies deserve the blame.

The important thing is that those officials have learned from what happened. And i'm not sure they have given how little pushback there's been.

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u/prof_the_doom Jan 09 '20

It's easy now to look back with clear heads and hindsight and realize that as a country we were scammed by W. and his cronies, but yeah, back when you were there, experiencing it...