One captured Russian soldier says he worries about what will happen if he is returned to Russia in a prisoner swap. “If I have the opportunity, I’ll refuse to be exchanged." Another fighter reported that a doctor declared him unfit for combat after he was wounded in March, but his commander ordered him back to the front.
Now they think it? Nice, how about back when they invaded a country who was sitting there peacefully for no f’ing reason?
I mean… the US does that…
@bear_delune A lot of countries have done that, and it’s always been a crime.
Who do you think gets captured and tossed into POW camps? This guy’s just some rank & file grunt who was either stupid enough to volunteer or unlucky enough to get drafted. In either case, I find it hard to blame him for being disillusioned after getting shipped off into a meatgrinder and realizing that reality didn’t measure up to the state propaganda.
Hopefully these sadsacks manage to take something home from the experience that can stop the next war from happening before it wastes more young lives.
I can remember a couple decades ago I was talking to my grandmother and she said that for the most part people trusted the gov’t. Until my dad’s friends started coming back from Vietnam and spitting truth. I hope enough Russians go back and spread the word, but I worry that not enough will be alive to even go back.
How can they just barely begin to understand this. I know the propaganda machine goes hard but not that hard
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.
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.