It's easy to be skeptical of propaganda from the outside looking in, but once your immersed in it then it can be difficult to parse out reality from fiction.

Case in point look at shockingly large percentage of americans, many even from the north, who will argue the civil war was a matter of states rights. Hell the US went to war against Iraq and it initially had strong support because we were still reeling from 9/11.

It's important to always keep in mind that NOBODY is immune to propoganda or group think, nobody is above the narrative, and the people who think they are tend to be particularly vulnerable.

Propaganda is pretty effective no matter where you are in the world. It's why many soldiers can do horrible shit to civilians in occupied territory and only later realize that they did something terrible. Here's hoping we start hearing about Russian mutinies from more soldiers with similar realizations.

History has been teaching us painfully often how quick people give up their individual believes for the sake of a centralised propaganda machine. It'd be very dangerous to think we are immune to it imho.

I legit started studying social psychology to understand this and similar phenomena. It's going slow but I hope to have a working understanding in a few years.

I mean, propaganda doesn't need to be 100% effective to be damaging.

Look at the world's oldest propaganda medium, religion.