It’s not the quality of the propaganda or the pundits that I care about. It’s the messages they’re sending.
For all its faults American news isn’t making an active pitch to nuke Russia, or incite famines to force Russia to the negotiating table, or erase all traces of Russian history and culture, or exterminate 5-20% of the Russian population to keep the rest in line.
These are all things that Russian television DOES discuss - as legitimate war tactics - and the goal that they’re setting out goes far beyond sorting out a civil war between separatists and Nazis in Ukraine, or dealing with biolabs that they’ve known about for 20 years amd offered hardly anything more than mild diplomatic rebukes over.
If one supposes that Russian MSM is far more honest than its western counterparts are, then it suggests we’re all missing the bigger picture.
Russia is effectively telling its own people, all these things are peripheral elements of a Great Patriotic War that it’s been waging ever since Chechnya stood up to Russia, and that war would’ve been waged regardless.
In effect, the REAL Causus Belli is, the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain came down, people like Putin saw that as an intolerable humiliation, and the reconquest of those ornery separatist states is their way of restoring Russia to greatness.
Can we really afford to ignore that?
The good news is that Ukraine’s toughness is changing everything, it is bleeding Russia, strengthening NATO, waking up the US and Western nations that Ukraine has given them a chance to get back into the self defense model and start reinvigorating their defense manufacturing because long, material/manpower devouring wars are not over.
I hope that awareness takes hold so that we will be better prepared when China makes it’s move.
Ukraine has shown us that we need more bench depth in both weaponry and the toughness and endurance of our manpower.