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.
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.
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!