Normal people would, but there are libs out there who genuinely believe downvoting or trolling communists on Lemmy is some brave stand against totalitarianism. I don't think we need to assume any of them are getting paid. The West produces a surplus of terminally online people who want to attack communists without feds having to lift a finger (other than to dismantle education, ensuring more "patriots" attacking communists online).
If they'd forced him to use Starlink for Ukraine and they still lost, however, the illusion of "we could have won if..." is broken. This way, depending on the public, they have a sage peacekeeper who avoided nuclear war, or a selfish traitor they can use as a scapegoat. Gotta keep the libs and fascists dreaming.
I could only get about 30 minutes into the film because I was annoyed by that. It's the only film I can remember that isn't intentionally political (satire, etc.) but makes the same political joke ad nauseum every chance it can. If the political comment had been progressive in any way, you can bet more people would have been complaining about it. Because it's anticommunist, your post is the only thing I can find where someone sees it at all.
On the Old World coming back, I've got two wishes that probably won't be fulfilled:
I think part of that stems from Westerners (at least where I live) struggling to comprehend how large, populous, and diverse China is as a country. It's presented and taught as a monolith, unless the media/government is trying to push a secessionist movement, then all of a sudden everyone thinks they're an expert on an ethnic group they only thought of as "Chinese" until influencers told them they're oppressed.
This isn't the first time I've heard some alleged former citizen of an Eastern Bloc country bring up the lack of imported fruits, and I always found it odd that they choose to blame the communist government instead of, idk, the fact banana republics were controlled by imperialists and probably insanely hard to come by? Regardless, it also feels like a petty caveat to throw onto a weak argument about why I should feel bad for them having grown up in a country with free housing, low unemployment, free education, and free healthcare (or damn near free, anyway). Because they didn't get Star Wars or oranges often?
Yeah, I've burned more than a few accounts for going a little too far in a heated discussion... Lemmygrad is a lot better for my mental health. They may call us an echo chamber, but honestly it's the one place we aren't bombarded with hate for thinking critically.
I wish I had been a Maoist. Until 2020, I was an amorphous self-proclaimed communist that hadn't read anything beyond the Manifesto, and couldn't decide if China and Stalin were bad or not. At least you held a position with literature and theory behind it before becoming a ML.
That's a fair assessment, yeah. I don't think a pipeline needs to be deliberately created, though. I honestly think a lot of the propaganda in this country develops as a byproduct of other stuff, and anticommunists just try to nurture and reinforce it when it happens. Seems like the practical thing to do. Why waste time, money, and energy trying to create a propaganda apparatus from scratch when you can just use a fraction of the resources to give people who already believe the propaganda a platform? Over time it feeds itself.
It probably started earlier, but when the Ukraine business began, that's when I saw the full-mobilization of anti-communist efforts and crackdowns, the attempts to throw MLs (or at least any MLs who didn't demonize Russia) under the bus. And over time, as they banned and censored and ostracized those that spoke out, the "socialist" subs became more and more liberal. I was relatively new to Reddit and I'm pretty sure it's not the first time, but it was the first time for me.
Mine was the miniature hobby sub, Sigmarxism. Honestly, I wouldn't doubt if similar shenanigans have happened on every leftist subreddit that wasn't explicitly Marxist-Leninist.
@CicadaSpectre
@lemmygrad.ml