The fact is though, war is war. All sides did terrible things, be it death camps for people with “wrong” religion, massacres of officiers of own army, bombing civilians with proto-napalm, you name it. Don’t argue over who tried the hardest to hide it, because all of them did, and not very successfully. I mean, if they did succeeded, we still wouldn’t know sh*t about it now would we.

But the biggest issue here is, Russians have learned this. To them, either Stalin is Jesus, or he’s “Really not that bad after all”. They know their history, the one they were taught. On the other hand, most of us westerners don’t really know any history. We aren’t taught much, and what we are taught sometimes contradicts itself. Maybe because the west never had a big conglomerate of countries just like the Soviet Union (Past the Spanish and British Empires, but those collapsed much earlier than this era). We are taught more about how each country beat the other, but we didn’t really have a common struggle that unites many races and nations, to the extent that the Soviet Union had. We don’t have a “Western identity” behind which to rally. Russians and Eastern Europeans kind of have, they have the Soviet identity, that for many is more important than their own national identity. They were Soviet for longer than they were Romanian, Polish or Ukranian.

NA, actually.

Some programming and news stories are obviously ridiculous and fake, making a person who watches that crap think that he’s smart enough to see through the bullshit, but that’s usually what gets them. Because the flow of information is so huge, it’s next to impossible to separate truth from lies as it is next to impossible to construct the whole truth from filtered half-truths that are shown.

The government manipulates public opinion with great success using mass media, as the portion of population who speak foreign (western) languages and hence are able to get an alternative view is small. The recent hyper-patriotism, feelings of discrimination by other countries and even homophobia are government-manufactured ways of moving the people’s attention away from people in power.

In fact, I don’t even believe that the Ukrainian separatists are really people or any special forces sent by Russia, I think they’ve just been watching too much Russian TV.

fanatical nationalism and patriotism on the other hand means a government has its own problems and wants to focuse attention else where, and/ or has a hidden agenda.
neither if for the good of the people or the nation, but might be for the top 1% (the ruling class)

So be carful what you buy into and why.