Watch this…
Radio Free Asia: "did you know in North Korea they eat babies?"
Me: "I don't believe that."
Radio Free Asia: "WHAT?!?!? How did you do that???"
See. And I'm just a dumbass who does nothing but smoke weed and watch pirated b-horror movies. Whats everyone else's fucking excuse?
People fall for this shit because they want to, not because the state department has magical brainwashing powers. Propaganda doesn't mean people don't have fucking agency.
This is a silly post. This really is a very silly post and it really shouldn't be upvoted.
The essence of the OP, "people fall for propaganda because they want to", is literally a classic "personal responsibility" argument with the underlying effort of deflecting blame from the system and environmental conditions (the all-encompassing propaganda apparatus influencing peoples' opinions) and attributing it to an individual's vague inherent qualities instead.
"You fall for propaganda because you want to" is frankly idiotic victim-blaming. Propaganda is highly manipulative and often appeals to people's empathy. You conveniently picked an absurd example of course, but Hamas killing Israeli civilians because of religious extremism and antisemitism, for example, is a much more believable narrative that would require active research to dispel, active research that many people literally don't have the online literacy or critical thinking skills to do. Because of their material conditions and the environments they live in.
People fall for propaganda because their environment has primed them to believe it. It wasn't Radio Free Asia that told me propaganda about China and North Korea, it was my parents and my teachers, people I trusted growing up. It was never as simple as saying "I don't believe it". I grew up thinking China and North Korea were bad and it took years of slow deprogramming until I was able to properly change my mind.
What is everyone else's excuse in your opinion? With how the sentence is phrased as a rhetorical question, do you think there isn't one at all, do you just ascribe other people's failure to reject propaganda as a personal, moral failing? In that case, are they lost causes, are they just inherently less virtuous than you are?
This post is completely reactionary in nature and everyone who upvoted it should question how uncritically they're consuming posts from a platform they trust. It attempts to take the current frustration we all feel from our environments believing propaganda narratives, and uses it to spread complete nonsense about how our ability to reject state propaganda somehow means we're somehow innately better than others. It is, ironically, a great example of how one's trusted environment can make one susceptible to dumbass, reactionary narratives.
It's the same kind of self-deceiving smugness that eventually lead so many of Reddit's self-styled New Atheists down a reactionary path, where feeling superior to the masses made them believe they were immune to being manipulated, which made many of them easy to manipulate by right-wing cults of personality. 
Such self-deceiving smugness is poison against class solidarity, is hostile toward the people in general because of the bootstrappy attitude built right into it, and leaves the "I'm too smart to be fooled" believer more susceptible to manipulation over time.
I didn't feel it was worth it locking horns with the OP because of prior experience, but I'm glad you put it in your own words better than I would have.
Yeah, it's intimidating and uncomfortable to go against something that your in-group believes. Which, funnily enough, is another reason why propaganda works as well as it does. When a post like this is upvoted heavily, many people are likely to just ignore it or go along with it even if, in a vacuum, they would disagree. Because the threat of being shunned by a community you care about is a powerful deterrent. "You believe propaganda because you want to" is truly such an ignorant statement, it genuinely shocks me that this was upvoted so much.
I think it's more comfortable to buy into because it also covers over even slight hints of discomfort about propaganda that has already been absorbed (especially in entertainment) under pretenses of "this can't possibly have an effect on me, no matter how subtle, because I am too smart for that."
Westerners aren’t helpless innocents whose minds are injected with atrocity propaganda, science fiction-style; they’re generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on. This is because it fundamentally makes them feel better about who they are and how they live. The psychic and material costs are rationally worth the benefits.
Why are you able to reject propaganda?
Edit:
In this alternative account people aren’t “brainwashed” insofar as they don’t actually believe the lies, not in the way that we generally understand belief. It’s more correct to say that they go along with them, whether enthusiastically or apprehensively, because it’s actually their optimal survival strategy. When we concede that the time horizon and scope of responsibility within which we all make our decisions varies, it becomes much easier to see how their choice could be smart and intelligent. The enlightened critic can plead that if we all agreed to denounce the status quo in unison we’d be immensely rewarded, but the average worker in the first world cannot be accused of naiveté for preferring to keep a low profile, particularly after being subject — very often by that same critic — to so many grim stories of murder and of punishment and of how any attempt at radical change always goes awry.
This is called coercion. This article directly opposes your position.
OP's being a bit bombastic, but his point is fundamentally correct. Yes, the most pervasive propaganda system in history gives everyone raised in it brainworms, but they can still escape them, they do have a choice that they're just not taking. It's not an easy choice, because the propaganda builds up layers of defensive brainworm fortifications that reject any attempt to undo them and because their material interests align with the status quo narrative, but it is still a choice that they have.
I think one could compare it to how historical apologia so often hinges on the fallacy of "oh well we can't be too hard on them for [absolutely heinous thing some historical figure did and/or said], after all they were a product of their time so we can't exactly hold them to modern standards can we?" Because yes, people are a product of their environment and that environment is so often actively toxic and full of brainworm spores that it seems inevitable that it will only create monsters, but everywhere and throughout time people have still overcome that poison and become better than it. I feel confident in saying that even where we have no extant records of it there were people opposing horror and injustice and being silenced for it, not even allowed to become a footnote in the historical record.
If they could do it, what is anyone's excuse today?
Its not victim blaming to say westerners dont have an excuse to fall for propaganda
Did you read literally anything I wrote?
Did you just completely forget "You are not immune to propaganda?" What do you think that means?
When you say "Westerners don't have an excuse to fall for propaganda", what is the conclusion you're drawing from that? They have no excuse but they're falling for it anyways, is it truly just an individual moral failing? How come you don't fall for propaganda but everyone else does, what sets you apart from them?
Edit: Also, yes it fucking is. If I lie to you and you believe me, it's my fault for lying to you. This is literally the same "personal responsibility" argument that people bring up when talking about gambling addicts. Propaganda plays on emotion, it plays on our weaknesses, when you show someone pictures of crying children in destroyed buildings their first thought will not be "Hmm, what is the source on that?" for crying out loud.
it's a joke, chill
Propaganda doesn't mean people don't have fucking agency.
Agency just means that the mechanisms that determine behavior in response to stimulus occurs within us. It doesn't mean we have control over it. People swimming in propaganda all their lives are going to behave using that propaganda they've epxerienced to judge other propaganda. You might as well pick a fish up out of water and say, "just breathe air, bro."
This is no different from "you have agency, you can just not commit crimes" personal responsibility rhetoric we see from the right. Either we believe people's material conditions influence their behavior in a way that at least lessens their responsibility or we don't.
I am immune to propaganda actually im just built different
To steal from another commenter here
You are not ever immune to propaganda but acting like everyone is equally credulous and willing to simply blindly follow reactionary propaganda is silly IMO.
You can become immune to propaganda if you subscribe to my paid newsletter.
There's a difference between attempting to be immune to propaganda (OP) and willfully obfuscating the truth/celebrating cruelty (most people)
Why don't you believe it, though? Have you always made that choice? Did you always notice it was Radio Free Asia? What about the New York Times quoting Radio Free Asia? How about a teacher or your classmates remembering something they read somewhere (the NYT quoting Radio Free Asia)? Did you always refuse all capitalist propaganda in all its forms? Do you do so right now?
Hell, we literally can't escape some of it because the most pernicious form is in controlling our focus and that's forced on us by the media and every other human following media narratives.
There is, of course, a point where people deserve blame for acceptance of propaganda narratives, but most of the time it is unconscious and shaped by the ideology of capitalism in which they are steeped and have had little chance to escape due to the left being a small presence or incompetent.
Why don't you believe it, though?
By being online (like most people under 40 in the west) and having a curiosity about the world.
I'm more sympathetic when we're talking shit that actually does require some research, like all the false narratives about the USSR does require doing some actual research, like from books and stuff. But there's shit out there that really you have no excuse for not knowing about at all. Like all the Israeli-Palestine stuff, there's fairly mainstream sources telling it like it is with that, you don't have to be that "woke" to encounter them, yet most people who do ignore it cuz they like settler colonialism.
I agree that it's pretty easy to learn about but killing off curiosity and any comfort with researching things is also part of the education system and culture.
Can't tell you how hard it is to get supposed leftists to just read some Marx sometimes. I don't think that's very difficult either, it's like a few hours per week for a couple months and you're ready to go without needing someone (usually with a particular partisan bent) to tell you what it means. I then proceed to watch leftists not read Marx at all for 3 years while justifying almost everything they do in his name lol. It takes a program and hassling people and making it an inherent part of a campaign to get people to overcome these barriers. We have the luxury of hindsight and of having adopted better practices. Now we have to help others gain the same consciousness!
The problem is its easier/harder depending on your upbringing and country. Like for example as Teenager I was taught the Soviets were the main guys who defeated the Nazis. While there was some talk about them being authoritarian, stuff like the industrialization under Stalin made them seem like "just" another really cool Empire in History (plus they kicked the Nazis) ass. So I had a pretty positive view of the Soviets. Same with Communism I was never taught it was evil or bad. Just another system to organize society/economy. Having a pretty neutral starting point made IT MUCH easier for me to slowly fall out with mainstream liberal narratives and to question things. Obviously im not Amerikkkan.
I grew up in a rural CHUD family, as did half the people here now. No excuses.
Im not making excuses. It just seems to me that if the starting conditions were better it would be more likely for someone to break out of the liberal/chud zone and challenge the status quo. Like if there was no red scare in the USA …Communism would be less of a taboo for many people.
To turn this around im not sure I can take much credit for arriving at the conclusion that the USA is the great Satan. Im not American. Now if I was an American and I lived a good life in the USA ? Then maybe ?..it must be incredibly easy to buy into the American myth if you are white and live a good (wealthy) life.
In a way the people that arrive on Hexbear to me seem like people that beat the odds to arrive at the conclusions they arrived at. Since the site does skew towards Americans and it seems the Left is pretty fucked in the USA. So being someone who is cool with Marxist Leninism is kind of like being a Unicorn. (At least in the heart of the beast)
But if you had grown up in a lib family perhaps you would have been super pro Ukraine and Israel? Perhaps something else could have happened in your life course that made you follow your family's CHUD views. You never know how you could have turned out. I mean how did any of us get here? There are a wide variety of factors. There are many that grew up in CHUD families but never got past the whole John Stewart/John Oliver level of liberalism and are now pro Ukraine and all that shit. So yeah, you never know…
I get what you're saying but isn't the conclusion of this line or logic that nobody can be held accountable for anything? Like are we just embracing hard determinism? Is every Nazi innocent of their crimes because the only reason they turned out that way cuz their mom made them ham and Swiss instead of Turkey and provolone for lunch one day?
YES that in the only conclusion of this line of logic, ACTUAL SERIAL KILLERS SAY THIS. im losing my mind.
Explaining something isn't the same as condoning it. That's how Zionists are trying to paint people who try to explain the history Palestine (i.e. "so you condone TERRORISM!!!")
Maybe we should both touch some grass
deleted by creator
Well nobody's beating you right now. Perhaps log off for a few days. Heck I'll do it too if you do.
If you directly ask if something is propaganda they're legally required to tell you the truth.
We are at the point they don't seem to really be hiding it anymore. Libs who know that Radio Free Asia is literally funded by the State Department will go ahead and treat it as reputable anyway. If it came out that Vaush was actually CIA, I doubt he'd lose a single fan. They just shrug it off these days and go on believing what they want to.
v*ush could come out as a self-described fascist and not lose a single fan
Apparently learning doesn't exist to hexbear lmao. You can 100% do due diligence, find reliable information, educate yourself, and try to form a principled and informed worldview. You are not ever immune to propaganda but acting like everyone is equally credulous and willing to simply blindly follow reactionary propaganda is silly IMO. This doesn't have anything to do with inherent differences or vulnerabilities, but material conditions which can allow for this, and there are people who despite upbringings steeped in this propaganda manage to shake it and investigate, be critical.
Maybe I'm off base but I didn't even jump to the "everyone is dumb but OP and the smarties who are propaganda immune" interpretation of this post at all. I think the best way to look at vulnerability to propaganda is not with a sense of superiority but as an opportunity to educate oneself and others to help recognize the signs of this reactionary propaganda. And no, I don't think both sidesing this is fair at all - aren't leftists supposed to have the basis of our political ideology founded in theory and analysis of history? That's certainly a more rigorous interrogation of preconceived notions than what any lib absorbs to form their worldview.
Exactly Ironically claiming that the propaganda hard too see through is more arrogant
I'm sure there was a time when you were completely wrong about something.
Oh obsoletely. Nobody being perfect doesn't mean everyone is equally scrupulous though. We can still judge people who repeatedly refuse to learn from their mistakes.
You have to believe something, and you can't experience everything first hand. So to some extent we are beholden to media to tell us what's going on in the world. I've never gone to the white house and checked if joe biden is actually the US president, nor has anyone I know, but I see it in the media…
The key is outside of commie circles and some corners of the internet, a lot of the counter narratives are effectively banned, and simply going "nah, don't believe it" is an instinct that has to be honed with life experience, and one that will eventually get it wrong, so you still need alternative media sources.
But yeah, a lot of stuff is obviously self serving and outlandish if you have any frame of reference besides US liberal mainstream media. or sometimes even if you don't tbh.
So to some extent we are beholden to media to tell us what's going on in the world.
I get what your saying, but in the modern digital world you really don't need to be that online to encounter counter narratives. You see this on , any time there's a thread about the DPRK there's usually several diligent fellow travelers posting about how a lot of the info you hear about North Korea is just blatant propaganda, often with citations. People tell them to fuck off regardless. They  sub had a post about how the whole "Hamas beheading babies" story is likely Bull and everyone was saying "well I believe it's probably true anyway".
At this point I think anyone literate with an internet connection and even a mild interest in politics and history doesn't have much of an excuse for being THIS poorly informed. The ignorance is willful. The reason we haven't had much luck reaching these people isn't due to any lack of effort of charisma on our part, there's plenty of great, entertaining propaganda outlets for us now, it's cuz the audience is not available to be reached.
A lot of them don't even have a mild interest in politics. They have an interest in The News and in voteball, but that's it. So they put in zero effort or critical thought in to whatever The News says or what their voteball team says.
voteball
 that's brilliant!
oh god it is voteball
supreme court justices are just refs
voteball
Alright, I'll bite. What is and isn't propaganda about the DPRK?
Because, from what I can tell, you can't both be a backwater and a hellhole while having the capability to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Some of their technology is astonishingly advanced and shouldn't be possible in a country where millions are starving and everyone is uneducated.
You can't just pick one guy and have them be a nuclear scientist through sheer willpower and propaganda. You need to have a robust education system that happens to produce those kinds of people.
For what it's worth, that's been true for the US, the Soviet Union, China, France, the UK, India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa, and Iran. They had inequality, sure, but a good chunk of each population was very educated and very advanced.
A better read person on the topic could probably make a better effort post than me, but to give a few bullet points.
There is a bit of a weird cult of personality around the Kim family, but it is grossly exaggerated by the western press.
They do dedicate a lot of their economic capacity to military development, but that's kinda understandable what with an empire that once bombed them nearly back to the Stone Age having air bases just south of their border.
They do struggle economically, but the idea they're in a perpetual famine is bullshit and a lot of these struggles are do to US sanctions.
The really crazy stories you hear about people believing in unicorns and Kim personally feeding his concubines to dogs are almost entirely bullshit coming from weird right wing South Korean news papers that almost always get debunked within a week.
simply going "nah, don't believe it" is an instinct that has to be honed with life experience, and one that will eventually get it wrong, so you still need alternative media sources.
You also need a background understanding of how the world works (ie, theory) to replace the propaganda with anything useful. If you don't, you might distrust the propaganda on instinct, but get drawn into a completely bogus explanation for whatever the propaganda is trying to cover up. Which is where I think a lit of reactionary conspiracy thinking comes from.
Lordy. Some people dont have the time. Or someone in there life to teach them about politics. It is not want or not. We as leftists should take this upon ourselves to understand this and help bring people to truth.
You literally summed up https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/#fn15 a la Liberalism…
OP believes that they are just smarter and more built differenter than other people because theyre so cool and smart and superior
No I am very stupid. I accidentally peed in my bathroom wastebasket last night.
Wow maybe you should of known better than to do that
Yes but I materially benefit from pissing in my waste basket cuz it means I don't have to take the time to turn on the bathroom lights, so I'm going to buy into Radio Free Bathroom propaganda about how my toilet is filled with piss eating goblins to justify continuing to piss in my wastebasket.
im sorry ur just built different
I do have a magnum dong
Lmao everyone get a load of this guy he has a dong
Unfortunately…
You are not immune to propaganda. 
Yeah but I think my immune system is a wee bit stronger than the average er
No, there are just disparities in what you write off due to the differences in what you believe.
How do you know that? Most people on this site aren’t just Redditors in reverse in that they’ll believe any outlandish claim about the U.S, for example, the way Redditors will believe anything about its enemies. A lot of people actually are better than that at verifying information as accurate before incorporating it into their belief system.
Most people on this site aren’t just Redditors in reverse in that they’ll believe any outlandish claim about the U.S, for example, the way Redditors will believe anything about its enemies.
My experience has been that most hexbears will just accept whatever China says about itself at face value.
A lot of people actually are better than that at verifying information as accurate before incorporating it into their belief system.
I don't know, one example I can think of immediately is when people here immediately assumed Andrew Tate had cancer because of some news article that mentioned that his lawyer wanted to have the court free him for medical reasons. People here were immediately like "OMG HE HAS CANCER AHAHAHAHA!!!" without even critically thinking that it was a ploy by his lawyer to get him out of custody. If it's bad news about someone they don't like or good news about people they do like, most people (even hexbears) are quick to believe it. Hexbears aren't immune to that either.
Yeah, I think we think that, because we consider our opinions on politics to be carefully considered, that we forget there’s worlds of other topics that are tangentially related but that we don’t really give a shit about putting in the effort to be correct about.
I didn't say they are like an anti-NATO campist or whatever (campism is a stupid concept anyway), but more generically that they have different biases. This is because everyone does and everyone's ideology is ultimately downstream of their material position. The difference here is that it flatters a Redditor's view of the world to believe that the DPRK has feces quotas it collects from each citizen, it does not flatter our comrade's view that the US does the same because that information is incompatible with their beliefs (they are socially much closer to the US than any Redditor is to the DPRK). They are looking straight ahead and declaring that they have no blindspots because they can see perfectly well, when "straight ahead" is rarely where someone's blindspots actually are.
If you knew what to say and how to say it, you could get most of the people on this site to agree with very outlandish things (not because they are stupid, but because they are people), you just can't take an identical tact because their position is not actually the mirror of a Redditor's position.
I think I understand the gist of what you’re saying; still I feel like you can have different biases and also a different level of skepticism in general. If I hear that like the U.S. or Israel commit some new atrocity, that information is in line with what I already believe about those governments, but I’m still going to do a certain amount of looking into the claim and what the evidence for it is before believing it and repeating it.
but I’m still going to do a certain amount of looking into the claim and what the evidence for it is before believing it and repeating it.
You don't need to do this
The west owns a hugely disproportionate amount of wealth, and you're also an english-speaker, so by default 99% of anything crossing your ears is going to either have a pro-western and pro-white and pro-capital bias, or be neutral
I wouldn't consider hexbear to have an anti-western bias either, it's just closer to neutral. An anti-western bias would have to be something like "each and every anglo saxon is unironically spawned from the loins of esau and has corrupt DNA" or something like that. Basically, due to the sheer scale of actual bad things the west is doing (and has done) it's hard to actually make untrue propaganda about it.
I would say it's impossible to make propaganda about the west that's anywhere near as false and unfair as the propaganda they make about others, simply because of the atrociously huge material wealth gap in both the past and present
Sure, but we must consider why you do such things. I can hazard a guess: Because we are a minority opinion, the socially-designated burden of proof is on us irrespective of the kind of claim being made. We can point to the CIA literally stating in an official capacity that they did X and it's still a crapshoot whether the person we are talking to will consider us a conspiracy theorist for pointing it out. With some crowds, it is much worse talking about Israel (though with some it is better).
Redditors can just accept MSNBC slop because MSNBC is thought of as reputable. We and many of our sources are regarded as disreputable, which is why I can tell you offhand about like a dozen different liberal journalist or governmental reports on Tienanmen Square, it's effectively a type of opinion laundering, whatever we tell ourselves it is. It takes some effort for us to "clean" the case we want to make, while Redditors receive claims that are already "clean," but fundamentally it doesn't indicate as much of an internal difference in our attitudes as OP wants to believe. We have basically the same desire: To be making claims that will be regarded as reputable by the kind of people we are likely to be speaking with. It takes more work in our case, but that too is part of our social position, just like our ideology itself.
Mind you, I'm not even criticizing our practice. You know what I just said about laundering my opinions about Tienanmen Square through the liberal press? I'm going to keep doing it! I barely even engage with overtly communist (or even more generally anti-west) news sources because it just adds in extra steps. Just look hard enough at neoliberal slop, especially from the more "useful idiot" types who watched too much West Wing, and you'll see them tip their hands left and right.
I don't think it's as dishonest as my wording might imply. I view many political arguments as centering on stipulated premises, so it's really just a matter of picking and choosing what premises I want to stipulate. Even if some liberal saying "Yeah, I was sipping tea under the Mao statue on the morning of June 5th" wasn't the origin point of my stance, I'm not saying it was! I'm just presenting that claim (which, incidentally, I do also believe) because I view it as more useful to stipulate than something that is more central to my beliefs but more likely to be dismissed out of hand.
As an aside, here's one where we're in the same boat as Redditors: Have you ever looked up the Gonzalite boiling babies story? I tried to find a basis for it but couldn't.
That’s a good point. I haven’t seen hard evidence for those stories, so I resign myself to not knowing for sure whether or to what extent it is true. In other instances where there is actually clear evidence of self described communists committing atrocities (eg Pol Pot) I do accept it as the truth.
Thanks for elaborating on your point, I see where you are coming from.
You are too confident in your ability to recognize propaganda… you don’t get to choose what you believe anymore than anyone else.
https://hmachine1949.substack.com/p/conspiracy-as-proletarian-truth
Most people continue to speak a certain way about President Kennedy, Oklahoma, 9/11, COVID-19, Election 2020, or vaccines not because evidence convinces them one way or the other, but because their class position skews their understanding of what evidence and truth are.
For a middle-class rewarded with minor gains and token recognition within a class hierarchy, the truth necessarily emanates from those who control the productive forces of society. Those who buy into these fake narratives do not themselves choose to cheer on these forces; they hardly know these forces exist at all. Instead, they too believe they earned their identity by wresting their thoughts from the void via their own individual choice and willed acts of transcendence, as much as Kant or any other short-sighted academic scholar
