Everyone's anti-war until the war propaganda starts. Nobody thinks of themselves as a warmonger, but then the spin machine gets going and before you know it they're spouting all the programmed slogans and waving the flags and consenting to whatever the imperial war machine wants.
Virtually everyone will tell you they love peace and hate war when asked, but when the rubber meets the road and it's time to oppose war and push for peace they're on the other side screaming for more weapons to be poured into a proxy war their government deliberately provoked.
This is because the theory of being anti-war is very different from the practice. In theory people are just opposed to the idea of exploding people for no good reason. In practice they're hit with an intense barrage of media messaging giving them what look like very good reasons.
Being truly anti-war isn't easy. It doesn't look like people picture in their imaginations. It looks like getting smashed with a deluge of information designed to manipulate and confuse and working through it while getting screamed at by those who've fallen for the brainwashing.
It's not cute. It's not fun. It's not the feel-good flower power time that people intuit it is when they look at the part of themselves that seeks peace. It's standing up against the most sophisticated propaganda machine that's ever existed while being given every reason not to.
Because selling the war to the public is a built-in component of all war strategy, the war will always look necessary from the mainstream perspective, and it won't look like those other wars which we now know in retrospect were mistakes. It's always designed to look appealing.
When people think of themselves as "anti-war" they're imagining themselves as anti- another Iraq war, or anti- some theoretical Hitler-like president starting a war because he likes killing people. They're not picturing the reality of what being anti-war actually is in practice.
Exactly. There's never not going to be atrocity propaganda. There's never not going to be reasons fed to you selling this military intervention as special and completely necessary. That will be the case every single time, because that's how wars are sold.
https://twitter.com/grain99806254/status/1519098735023869952
This is why you'll always see a number of self-described leftists and anti-imperialists cheering for the latest US war project. They are ideologically opposed to the idea of war in theory, but the way it actually shows up in practice is always different from what they pictured.
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