I have a russian friend living near Moscow, and he can fully use discord, chat to whoever he wants, view any region free video on youtube (be it extremely anti-Putin or anti-russian) etc. etc. without any effort on his part, just using normal programs, no tor or vpn. It seems that there are just so many avenues for information on the net, anyone in Russia who cares to know about something can find out immediately with minimum effort and zero technical knowhow.
It's just the majority of Russians dont want to know anything. Just like US citizens during the invasion of Iraq, most of them barely knew what was happening and simply didnt care to know. They were just comfortable in their assurance that USA was #1.
As I understand it, a ton of Russians, especially older ones, just rely on TV and print media for news, and those are much more tightly controlled by the Kremlin.
> Just like US citizens during the invasion of Iraq, most of them barely knew what was happening and simply didnt care to know. They were just comfortable in their assurance that USA was #1.
While the WMD aspect of the invasion of Iraq was bullshit, the rest of it didn't seem to contain nearly as much propaganda -- as in, just blatantly lying -- as what Russia's doing here. I don't think the US lied about US soldier casualties, for instance, acting like they were taking a small fraction of the actual injuries and deaths. Not to mention the war crimes seem enormously more common and severe with Russia's invasion, and those are all getting covered up by the Russian media within their country (e.g. "Azov/Ukraine did Bucha").
Basically any war will involve some amount of propaganda and atrocities, but some people are acting like the way Russia and the US prosecute war are the same, when that appears to be clearly wrong.
From my European perspective there's very little difference between the magnitude of terrifying things done by either the US then or Russia now... except maybe that Russia has less reach and power in the bigger scheme of things.
Abduction of people in allied countries to be brought to black sites, torture of inmates at Guantanamo (construction starting 2002), puerile attempts by officials at "downranking" the amount and definitions of torture inflicted upon people, varying degrees of war crimes committed while the highest instances of the world's powers debate vague points or outright lie about the very foundation of why they militarily attack another country, and this continued despite very public outrage at a few strikingly depressing "leaks" (smiling soldiers torturing inmates) or testimonies, and violence inflicted upon specific targets while keeping constant pressure on third parties to remain by the sidelines.
> Both of Thursday’s Al Nashiri and Zubaydah judgments “are striking for their frank and clear declaration that the CIA operated black sites in Lithuania and Romania at which torture took place, with the knowing acquiescence of the host governments,” notes Just Security’s Oona Hathaway. “The Court, relying in significant part on the 2014 US Senate Committee Report, dismissed Romania’s and Lithuania’s claims that, among other things, (a) the applicants lacked credible sources of evidence; (b) the black sites did not exist in their countries, and (c) if the sites did exist in their countries, the government did not agree to them and did not know that torture was taking place at them,” Hathaway said.
> The first of those existing rules came from Department of Justice, which in 2002 wrote a series of memos that gave a new, very narrow definition of torture. (The next year, lawyers at the DOD wrote a report that reiterated these rules.) To qualify as physical torture, the memo said that an act of interrogation would have to cause serious physical injury, "such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death."
> A May 11 article in the Los Angeles Times exposed other methods of torture used by US forces: deliberately inflicting massive and severe burns, the use of electric shocks, and threatening detainees’ female relatives with rape. The Times article also revealed that the ICRC considers that between 70 and 90 percent of Iraqis seized and held by US forces are wrongly detained.
[...]
> After the bombing ended, US Special Forces and Dostum’s troops herded 3,000 surviving prisoners into sealed metal containers and drove them for 20 hours to Sheberghan prison. Most of the prisoners suffocated along the way. When the convoy arrived at its destination, the containers were emptied and the prisoners who had survived the journey were shot. Their remains were buried in a mass grave.
> Eleven soldiers were convicted of various charges relating to the incidents, with all of the convictions including the charge of dereliction of duty. Most soldiers only received minor sentences. Three other soldiers were either cleared of charges or were not charged. No one was convicted for the murders of the detainees.
---
And with all of these things, two full decades after that and with the full "freedom" of access to the internet that one has in Europe or North America, a lot of people still say with a straight face that those situations don't compare?
Talk about successful propaganda. I'm sure Russia is dreaming to continue achieving similarly too.
> After the bombing ended, US Special Forces and Dostum’s troops herded 3,000 surviving prisoners into sealed metal containers and drove them for 20 hours to Sheberghan prison. Most of the prisoners suffocated along the way. When the convoy arrived at its destination, the containers were emptied and the prisoners who had survived the journey were shot. Their remains were buried in a mass grave.
You’re really understating the case. Your post is missing dozens to hundreds or even thousands of human rights violations. That’s also the power of propaganda, it is hard to know and then also present the full breadth of the picture even in a general sense. A comprehensive analysis is almost impossible due to extreme secrecy.
All of this doesn’t change that it is wrong when Russia or anyone else does these things. America could arrest Bush and his entire band of illegal imperial war buddies to show Russia what happens afterwards, but we both know that there will never be accountability. Similarly when Obama said “we tortured some folks” but did not punish the folks responsible for torture, international law says he should be held accountable. This will never happen either - America set rules for everyone else and does not even require public servants to follow them. It is a reflection of the will and the general desire of the American people. They want blood, they want revenge, they do not care for justice for some enemies. Justice for 9/11 would have been to put OBL on trial like we did for the Nazis, but Americans I spoke with said it clearly: why should we risk one more American life? Why should we treat OBL fairly? He didn’t play by the rules after all! Those who hold these views could not see that the reason has almost nothing to do with OBL and everything to do with ourselves. That we even have to explain why a trial is important is a kind of moral decay that sets a terrible example for the rest of the world.
Putin appears to be banking on this moral rot being the default case for the world now. There is a fog of war, so we cannot know for absolute certainty but it seems pretty clear from decades of analysis. It seems from the Russian perspective, the West showed Putin and key Russians the way to perpetuate these crimes and walk free afterwards. It’s depressing and terrible, and so predictable.
We set the tone after the Second World War of a moral upper hand with trials for some of the worst Nazis. We, after 9/11 and the assassination wars by drone strikes, no longer maintain even the pretense of this moral superiority through law. This sets a new example for a new world, and the next seventy five years probably won’t be much like the last seventy five years in terms of general (but not absolute) peace.
It should not be like this. It is incredibly sad, impossibly short sighted, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Imagine an America that could find the energy for justice rather than brute force. We have to imagine it, if we can even do so, because the last twenty years have shown us a very different picture in the wider world. There were always exceptions, but now there is simply a new rule.
Providing some additional context. There is no statistics to back up the numbers and it's impossible to make one at the moment. It's rather how informed people in Russia feel plus some anecdata.
> As I understand it, a ton of Russians, especially older ones, just rely on TV and print media for news, and those are much more tightly controlled by the Kremlin.
All the news sources that are still not blocked either have a hand in their asses or are about to get blocked. They are completely controled by the Kremlin. Much more tightly is an understatement here. Unfortunately, so is 'a ton'. I'll try to elaborate.
Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the cities around them, have relatively high percentage of well-educated people with sufficient technical competency and mindfulness to avoid the censorship. I'd say that would be at least a good half of the population of these cities, which amounts (very roughly) to 10M. These people would try to find some facts, and form something resembling a picture of what's really happening.
Not too bad, really, but the thing is, I'd be surprised if there is another 20M across the rest of the country (the population is approx. 145M as of 2022). The farther you go from the big cities the faster the freethinkers' (tongue-in-cheek term) percentage declines. When the government says that 90% of the population 'supports' the war, I'm afraid it's not that far from truth.
What 'supports' means, though? As it seems, in reality, it means that the people aren't really bothered by the war all that much because they don't consider the country to be (much of?) an agressor. In small cities, people live in poverty and the only thing that's used to hold them together is the TV which gives the hope that some day life is going to get better. But there, of course, are a few hurdles to overcome. The current hurdle is to 'win against Ukraine'. Based on numerous interviews and personal interactions, that's what common folks really think.
I believe that they (most of them anyway) are not bad people, but merely simple and gullible. And when the president says that zombie-nazis were about to attack motherland, well, of course they praise the guy who sent the rockets their way thus saving the day. That's the gist of the propaganda, by the way.
As for the older people (even well-educated ones), can confirm. First of all, they are stubborn and know better. And they just can't believe that TV isn't a good source of information on the matter. My older relatives are like that and I don't really know how to convince them to think otherwise. As far as I'm concerned, no one has figured that out yet. For every bit of evidence TV has a piece of counter-evidence. You try counter that. I've taught them how to read independent news, but they don't trust them.
edit: brainfart with understatement/overstatement in the beginning of the post
I'm not as sure about the 2nd Iraq war, but there's no question that the 1rst one (and the embargo) was even more destructive than what is happening now in Ukraine. (Or maybe not any more, the Russians have been "catching up" fast..?)
OTOH there's that infamous quote about half a million dead children (slightly less in practice ?) having been "worth it", while Putin's regime prefers to deny/lie in those cases ?
I have a bunch of friends and relatives there. 99% of your average citizen's internet time is spent on ok.ru and vk.ru, which work very hard at putting you in a tight information bubble, just as any other social media platform. I think it's pretty much the same in every country, only the domains differ, not their substance.
> view any region free video on youtube
Only if you specifically look for it, and for the same reason.
btw, I have to help my non-technical friends with VPNs/proxies/reading news through sites like archive.ph/some other tricks. They definitely cannot read or watch anything they want without some technical expertise or someone willing to help.
It should be noted that there is no shortage of anti-war content on VK, either - it's taken down when reported, but whether it's reported is another question. It all depends on one's circles.
Telegram channels are big deal in Russia. They are the best source of information about war, from first hands, Russian and Ukrainian.
Don't forget that Ukraine and Russia are very tihtly related, with tons of friends and relatives on each side of a border. You don't need some Western media to get news about rumble on your backyard.
It turns out that friends and even relatives often stop listening if you repeatedly tell them something they don't like to hear, as many Ukrainians have found out.
This works perfectly in two ways. Donetsk is shelled for 8 years bu Ukrainian Army, nobody was interested enough to stop it. "naah those separs are shooting themselves"
The "8 years of shelling" talking point is one of the dumbest, I have trouble imaging who would believe it. We both know that Russia doesn't care even about its own people, let alone anyone else, with the sinking of Kursk and sieges of Nord-Ost and Beslan being shining examples of that. The indiscriminate destruction of large cities in Eastern Ukraine full of ethnic Russians is just another datapoint.
According to the UN, civilian deaths in Russian war on Donbas were 25 in 2021, lowest since the war began in 2014. How many have died in 2022?
If Russia wanted to stop needless bloodshed, all it had to do was to pull its armed forces out of Ukraine and leave rest of the world alone. Nobody wants to be a part of your pathethic "Russian world" of poverty and hopelessness, and now that everyone's seen the true "might" of Russian army, you've become a laughing stock of the world. Nobody even pays attention to the threats you make in regard to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.
You don't even need to go to the UN. According to DNR government itself, Ukraine was ostensibly responsible for 77 deaths in 2021 - and only 7 of them civilians (which kinda gives you the indication of what they were aiming at).
And yes, you're absolutely correct: again, according to their own official claims, by May, they have already lost about 50 times more civilians since the beginning of the war than they did in the year before. So if the point of the war was to protect the civilian population of Donetsk, it's already objectively a failure of truly epic proportions.
And this is all before accounting for mass forced mobilization and the resulting mass casualties, because untrained office workers are sent to assault fortified enemy positions with Mosin bolt-action rifles. It got bad enough that several prominent public figures on the Donbas separatist side called it "genocide of the male population of Donbas by Russia".
That said, it is true that civilian casualties in Donbas were much more significant in 2014-2015 - over a thousand per year - and many of those were undeniably due to the actions of the Ukrainian military. It's also true that some people in Ukraine denied that any of that was happening when it did. I'd be surprised if there's any war in which this doesn't happen to some extent, though - what's unusual in the current situation in Russia is the sheer scale of it.
(There's a similar issue within Russia across generational rather than national lines, by the way - a family might not have any relatives in Ukraine, but the millennial kids are anti-war and generally pro-West, while their elderly parents call them Nazi sympathizers and cheer Putin.)
It's just the majority of Russians dont want to know anything. Just like US citizens during the invasion of Iraq, most of them barely knew what was happening and simply didnt care to know. They were just comfortable in their assurance that USA was #1.