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This message was crafted to stoke anti-war sentiment and progressive distrust of the status quo Democrats into pro-Russian sentiment that also inflames internal opposition to Biden. The “left” in the US has never been particularly cohesive to begin with, and it’s quite easy to invoke anti-war noisemaking to create conflict among us. Start throwing around exaggerated and baseless but emotionally appealing claims and you’re certain to ensnare those whose egos far outpace their intellect.
This, assembled guests, is just one example from the millions and millions of social media messages sent out every day with deliberately manipultive and malicious intent. The Russian government does a great deal of it to garner support for Putin’s imperalist aspirations; the plutocracy does it to herd us back to work in a pandemic; various and sundry interest who profit from confusion and strife are filling us constantly with well-designed nonsense – usually based on appealing to our egos in some way because that’s where we’re weakest – in order to weaken the entire concept of “democracy” because they believe that, being ruthless and having some access to resources, they believe they will benefit from the fall of democracy just like the Nazis benefitted from the persecution of Jews in the sudden availability to “good Germans” of fully furnished homes and fully stocked stores that had been appropriated by that persecution.
Of course the great truth of hard-right ideology is that the monsters these people are feeding will be perfectly happy eating them for lunch when they run out of “others.” You can always create more “others,” just pick a new group to scapegoat – Jews, leftists, people of color, religious minorities, women, the LGBTQ community, the mentally ill – as long as you can maintain that us vs. them pretense and con enough people into believing they’ll always be an “us” and never a “them,” you’ll not lack for targets for persecution until there’s nobody left to persecute at all and we’re reduced to a state of social development that makes feudalism look like egregious liberty.
They always believe they’re driving the machine until it runs them over.
Those of us with the perception to understand this is a losing strategy for everyone must ensure we are well armed and with eyes wide open. A startling percentage of leftists have been sucked in by this narrative.
Now (writing in October 2023) we’re seeing a whole new set of social disruption and argument in the wake of the recently escalated conflict between the Israeli government and the Palestinian people – an argument with no possible “clean” resolution that’s been going on in one form or another literally since pre-historic times. We’ll be encouraged to pick one point or another in the past when things were “right,” then blame the “other” for making a mess of it.
Of course the only solution there ever was is for people to learn how to live peacefully and cooperatively together, but instead we’ll be continuously baited into these pointless arguments, we’ll become ever more radicalized against each other, and in the end the real objective – creating further factiousness and dissent among the free nations of the world, particularly those on the left working toward every more refined and effective democracy – will be gained unless we start taking the problem of disinformation seriously, right now.
