Everyone Lies

[Darah Kehnemuyi]

 Thanks, David.  Good read.  I  assumed Russians who were smart enough were just keeping their heads down and saying what safe even if they did not believe it themselves... maybe not so much ...     D.
    On Sunday, July 17, 2022 at 10:17:18 AM EDT, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 https://twitter.com/john_sipher/status/1548626774703181824?s=21&t=rr0FG3ce-lE3T9WkVYlXwg

“Even the Russians who do have access to outside information still dismiss
reports of Russian aggression. “Everyone lies,” they say. It’s one of the
most effective thought-stopping ideas…”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/07/15/i-once-supported-putin-now-i-know-the-truth-00031740

I Once Supported Putin. Now I Know the Truth.

Anastasiia Carrier believed Russian propaganda — until she moved to America
and became a journalist.


[…]

In Sept. 2011, when Putin announced he would run for the presidency again
in 2012, my friends and I understood that it meant a strong chance of
another 12 years of Putin.

This was certainly not the democratic direction my friends and I had hoped
Russia would take. In December that year, the biggest anti-government
protests since the 1990s broke out across the country in response to the
accusation that Putin and his United Russia party had rigged the
parliamentary elections. The visuals of a crowd chanting “Putin is a
thief!” and “Russia without Putin!” somehow found their way to me on
VKontakte, a Russian social network inspired by Facebook.


My friends and I had heard enough talk about Putin being corrupt to believe
it. We were finally old enough to vote, and we took it seriously — we
researched the candidates, debated their campaign promises. Most of us
liked Mikhail Prokhorov, an oligarch who promised to reverse the
constitutional amendments and crack down on state propaganda and
corruption. It felt like our generation, one that grew up under Putin,
could finally make a change. Even my grandmother’s confidence in Putin was
shaken, and my whole family considered other candidates.

[…] To my shame, it was the annexation of Crimea that placed me squarely
into the pro-Putin camp. The Euromaidan revolution of 2013-2014 in Ukraine
received a decent amount of airtime on Russian news. But instead of showing
Ukrainians protesting a corrupt government and successfully ousting
pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian narrative painted the
new Ukrainian government as a fascist gang and extolled Putin’s effort to
save Crimea and its ethnic-Russian population from fascist rule. The
process was democratic, the propaganda swore.[…]

It was easier to accept the Kremlin line as truth than to question each
confusing argument, one by one. I came to believe that Western attacks on
Putin’s actions were synonymous with attacks on my country. My concept of
patriotism twisted into blind support of Russia. This time, I didn’t
discuss it with my friends, but I was certain they felt the same way.
--
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