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Dehumanization is a very old and popular practice among homo sapiens sapiens. It is closely connected with tribalism, with the division into ingroup and ougroup. These concepts can quite reasonably be considered part of human nature, or rather neurology(Dunbar number). To think about the number of people exceeding the Dunbar number by several orders of magnitude, stereotypes, generalizations and such abstract concepts as "nation" or "people" used, which is why many racists can have friends of another race, communists may not have problems with a businessman they know personally, and Hitler respected his Jewish doctor.
The current situation around the "special operation" is therefore not at all unique, but rather normal for any conflicts in history. Just as state propaganda in the participating countries in World War I presented their enemies as monsters on posters, today's propaganda shows opponent`s soldiers as orcs and pigs. Propaganda, like advertising, works for most people, and while avoiding its harmful effects can be easy for some, the problem is that few people try. Now a large part or maybe even most of Ukrainians and Russians hate each other, along with this, real Russophobia is widespread in many Western countries - this is an inevitable consequence of unleashing "special operations" and nothing can be done about it yet. I think it is wrong to dehumanize people in return for theirs dehumanization of ourselves. Of course, after reading hundreds of comments by Ukrainians about stupid orcs without culture, who need to be forced to pay tribute and decolonize their "Рашка"(disparaging nickname for Russia coincidentally having the same name as medieval Serbian principality), average Russian can be filled with desire to write about stupid grunting piggies and their Khokhlostan, but this desire is worth overcoming in oneself. He should think about how the "Khokhols" came to such a life: are they themselves do not consider that the "Rusnya" was the first to start? Almost everyone is sure that their hatred is just and reciprocal in its own way, this is perfectly cultivated by propaganda that specifically chooses what to show to its target audience. For this to stop working, people need to stop thinking that the answer to hatred should be the same blind hatred.
It should be clarified that here I am talking about specific xenophobia of a general nature, of course, strongly disliking army of the country that destroyed your house is completely different. But to transfer these emotions from the army, from politicians, from specific criminals to gigantic groups of people consisting of millions of individuals is stupidity. At the same time, one must understand that average commentators and couch experts who succumb to propaganda are not doomed to maintain their opinions for the rest of their lives. Germanophobia in Europe after the First and Second World War did not last so long, as well as Anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. As in the past, propaganda will shift its focus to other things, and the majority of people will gradually lose their radical positions. Of course, some parts will not be forgotten for centuries but it will not be the full-fledged xenophobia of today. I think Orwell written about it brilliantly in relation to his own time`s big war here - https://orwell.ru/library/articles/revenge/english/e_revso
No it isn't, if the gigantic group of people is either willfully blind to the atrocities being committed by the army and the politicians, or are willingly supporting and encouraging them.
But you can't expect much from the majority of people, they are easily mislead and believe all sorts of stuff. Are Americans as a group to blame for war in Iraq and should be hated for it because majority of them once supported it? I don`t think so. And I don't think that majority of Russians will support SMO in the next 10 years.
Hated by whom? By Saddam Hussein? Probably. But why would I care what Saddam Hussein would think, if he wasn't hanged and dead?
So all we need is to wait 10 more years or terror, murders, war crimes and atrocities, and then it all be ok. Or at least some guy on the internet says so. That really makes one confident, thanks.
I assume by the rest of the world. This was said in the context of the effects of war propaganda, most people "hating" Russia over the invasion aren't Ukrainian and aren't directly affected by the war in any way.
Even people not being Ukrainians can condemn war crimes and atrocities committed by Russians. Just as you don't have to be a Jew to condemn the Holocaust, or Armenian to condemn the Armenian genocide, or a Tutsi to condemn Rwandan genocide. Recoiling before the sights of inumane atrocity is not "war propaganda", it is a natural effect of learning about the atrocity and being horrified by it.
Yes, that was precisely my point. Even people not being Iraqis can condemn war crimes and atrocities committed by Americans. Not only Saddam.
Edit: the propaganda side of this is that you learn about certain atrocities and not about others. Effective war propaganda is indeed based in natural effects and natural human compassion. Propaganda doesn't necessarily mean lies. For example, it seems that you couldn't conceive that anyone but Saddam (and I charitably assume you mean Iraqis in general) could have aversion against the US invasion of Iraq, the lies it was based in and the war crimes committed (plus the many we likely don't know about). Saddam being a tyrant doesn't change that.
The war crimes that were committed by Americans - like Abu Ghraib incident - were also condemned, including by Americans.
We know about American atrocities and we call them that. But when it comes to Russian atrocities, somehow there's always somebody explaining that it's still America's fault because if only we gave them more people to enslave they'd finally stop. Somehow there's always justification for any foreign atrocity, as if America being imperfect justifies that.
It kinda does. Not about the atrocities, but about the war. War against a brutal dictator, ruthlessly oppressing local population, openly supporting international terrorists, developing and deploying weapons of mass destruction (even though not exactly in a way the ironically named "intelligence" services presented) and invading foreign countries - yes, it is morally different from a war against a democratic country which poses no threat to anybody but just looks too inviting not to invade. I'm not saying US should intervene into any case of brutal dictatorship - I am saying the moral calculus does differ, and Saddam being a tyrant does change it.
Not me.
Disagree. They were already suffering under Saddam, they didn't need what the US brought to them: death and more wars, way beyond the war with the US lasted. Him being a tyrant has zero to do with the reasons for the war, the US has toppled democracies and supported (and still supports, daily) all kinds of brutal dictatorships. Which brings us back to propaganda in the form of selected truths.
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I think honestly the public needs to be much more skeptical of government propaganda in general. And I think given the fact that public support can and does help the war effort, the public is responsible. We shouldn’t just blindly accept the government narrative about war, in fact the default is better off being negative.
Europeans should be more scepticals but at least only small minority is failing for much lower quality Russian claims. So it is not a complete failure at least.
Yes, but IMO only because they are falling for the (better) propaganda of "the other side". So the merit is not of the European public but either a success of European and American propagandists or (more likely) a huge failure by Russian propagandists.
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How is Western public "helping the war effort" (assuming you are talking about Western countries)?
NAFO style direct fundraising is minuscule part of whole war effort. Western support for Ukraine consists of sending old weapons and material out of storage and new freshly printed money, none of it requires public cooperation or approval.
By cheering on the war to keep going despite its side effects on their lives (i.e. inflation, energy prices). Tolerating the side effects as "necessary" and "a sacrifice for Ukraine" does require public cooperation and approval.
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To go further, I doubt that to the extent Americans say that they no longer think the Iraq war was a good idea, they do it because they realise that they lied to everyone, caused upwards of 200k civilian deaths and ran torture prisons. Rather, they'll say something vague about wasting lots of money, failing to build democracy and not having clear objectives. In 10 years, any Russian non-support for the SMO will probably look like this too.
Blaming every civilian death on the US isn't really reasonable to me (nor would I blame every civilian death in Ukraine on Russia). Yes, it's true that they probably wouldn't have happened without an invasion, but that kind of logic also makes it okay to execute prisoners of war- after all, so the logic goes, they wouldn't be here if their country hadn't decided to invade, therefore it is the fault of their country when we shoot a bound, complicit prisoner in the back.
It is very unfairly shifting the entire blame upon one party, when I can assure you it was not only the US that got its hands dirty, and I reckon if you took a look at who actually directly caused those 200k deaths, it would be a lot muddier. Really look at that chart. I love it because it really does paint the American occupation in such a good light. Look at how much those deaths decreased after the US established greater control around 2008-2011 and spiked in the years following, due to the withdrawal of US forces. This paints a picture where a higher American commitment leads to fewer deaths, not more, which is just one factor that leads me to believe that America was not anywhere near the primary source of these civilian deaths.
All the data in that table (which I assume you are talking about, as I don't see a chart) is still after the US initially invaded and plunged the country into chaos. "We invaded and caused lots of civilians to die, then after a while for three years we briefly tried to do a better job and had somewhat fewer civilians die, and then got tired of doing a better job and had lots of civilians die again" hardly paints the occupation in a good light, any more than a domestically violent spouse being nice to their spouse for a while and taking them to Disneyland paints their marriage in a good light. In terms of a comparison to the hypothetical where the US did not invade, the 1 million excess deaths figure from the introductory paragraph seems more indicative, since those presumably would have been calculated relative to demographic trends identified before the invasion.
I mean, I agree, but how many do you blame on the US and Russia respectively? I'm suspicious of reasoning that amounts to "the situation is not so clear-cut, so by gut feeling and some non-quantitative reasoning, the ingroup is probably not as guilty as the outgroup is".
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