It's about knowing which buttons to push. To get Americans to go to war you tell them they are helping some innocent people. Ironically they will then kill a much greater number of other innocent people. Or even the same innocent people.
The first step is to tell a simple version of the story that is completely wrong, like Biden did on Feb 24th 2022. The next one is to make things really complificated. Then people just say 'oh it's all such a mess' and give up. Or even despair completely and say 'the world is such a mess'. ['Complificated' is to make an analysis overly complex when a simpler explanation exists]
and you give them false facts woven into a false narrative then even when they hear that some of the facts (all of them usually) are wrong, they've already bought the false narrative so they keep believing it usually for the rest of their lives yes, we know Germans eat their own children (commonly believed in England during and after WW1). The list is endless but despite believing lie after lie, they are always ready for the next.
Yes, politics is about propaganda. But that is because MOST EVERYTHING is about propaganda, or IS propaganda. The challenge is to learn to identify it and understand what it is intended to accomplish, as well as to know the truth. For example, the prevalent idea that communism has existed, and that communism was and can be imposed by force, are both pure propaganda and are both completely untrue. They depend for their acceptance on confusion that has been carefully sown mostly by government and RW anti-communists. Now, for the record, I’m an anti-communist too, but I understand these things correctly. Another item of propaganda is that a “great feature of capitalism that fairness and quality or goods and their prices depend on is competition”. All capitalists hate competition and work to eradicate it.
I think it's mostly about who invaded who. Many people were against the Iraq invasion as US was clearly the aggressor.
Yes, the relentless expansion of NATO all the way to the border of the Russian Federation was very unwise and contrary to the promise made by the United States three times on Feb 9 1990, and a record exists of the promise in the German embassy, and the diary of Eduard Shevardnadze, and in the notes of the US diplomats, a promise broken so many times it echos our promises to the Native Americans. A large number of senior diplomats protested when W Clinton decided to expand NATO eastward the first time.
What happened in Ukraine was pretty complicated, but one thing to remember through the ins and outs of it, was until Feb 24th 2022 that the US was always in the driving seat, and ensured V Putin was finally in a position where he had to break his promise to prevent expansion of NATO into Ukraine, or to take ever increasing steps to prevent it, each of which the US matched, and then raised Russia one each time.
