Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Why do people believe propaganda? (German ‘justification’ for invading Poland 1939)" video.

  1. I don't know as much as I should about Korean history, but in Japan that works because the Japanese had nearly exterminated and/or assimilated their ethnic minorities before the modern era. That's the case with most mono-ethnic states.
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  2. OTOH, humans do not and never have existed outside of communities. By our most basic nature we are social beings, not individuals. In fact over the long haul isolation from other humans is one of the worst tortures that can be inflicted. People literally go irretrievably insane in complete solitude.
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  3.  @Tokinjester  True. Also like he's describing the right in the west. Isn't it funny how people so often describe falling for the other side's propaganda as not thinking but then describe unquestioningly swallowing their own side's propaganda as thinking critically?
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  4.  @Tokinjester  100% nonsense. Read his silly book.
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  5. We're not insects with primitive territoriality instincts. We're mammals with primitive territoriality instincts. And to get rid of those instincts you'd have to change humans at a basic genetic level. Don't hold your breath waiting.
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  6. War Pigs is a fantastic song, but Ozzy knew as much about the real causes of war as he did about sobriety.
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  7. In some ways that made it easier. Newspapers, radio, and newsreels are much easier for the state to control than a decentralized system like the Internet.
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  8. Monoethnic states tend to be the result of genocide, or at least, massive ethnic cleansing.
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  9. Maybe, but in the West the government doesn't have a monopoly on information. If the government lies it is nearly impossible to prevent someone from uncovering and exposing the lie. Just look at, for example, the famous case of the Pentagon Papers. Try doing that in Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea and see what happens.
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  10.  @jaichind  They're much closer to it than any western country, though. The Biden administration can't shut down or jail the publishers of domestic newspapers or web sites that criticize it or question its narrative. Putin can and does.
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  11. I would dispute that either side is grounded in reality. Their departures from reality just occur in different spheres. The alt-right imagines that Donald Trump is a patriotic American and competent leader and the "you-know-Hews" are plotting to replace white people with brown people, and the alt-left imagines that Joe Biden is a competent leader, men are capable of bearing children, and socialism can possibly work. The right's fantasies are - for the moment - more dangerous, but the left's are equally absurd.
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  12. Hitler's propaganda intended to justify a German invasion of Poland in 1939 sounds almost exactly like Putin's propaganda trying to justify his invasion of Ukraine earlier this year. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Sadly, just as many people seem inclined to turn their brains off and swallow this nonsense today as Germans and their sympathizers were in 1939.
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  13.  @Tokinjester  "Hitler sent two emissaries to meet with British diplomats in a bid to stop the war from starting" Bullsh1t. Hitler sent emissaries to meet with British diplomats in an attempt to persuade Britain not to interfere in the war Hitler planned to start. That is not remotely the same thing, and you'd have to be exceptionally naive and/or stupid to think it is. (I don't think you're stupid, btw, I think you're naive, dishonest, and extremely biased.) Hitler wanted to divide his enemies in order to conquer each of them one at a time. But he knew from the start that a war with France, at least, was certainly inevitable given his expansionist aims, and he welcomed it - again, he just wanted to fight that war on terms favorable to Germany.
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  14.  @Tokinjester  I have. I read his silly book, or as much of it as I could stomach, anyway.
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  15.  @AMX8799  If I have a property dispute with my neighbor, the existence of some legitimate legal claim on my part does not justify my shooting the neighbor.
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  16.  @suzannakoizumi8605  I do not have ANY information that would lead to the arrest or indictment of Hi11ary C1inton!
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  17. One can say something similar about multiethnic states. In all the cases he mentioned, those states didn't collapse because they were multiethnic, they collapsed because the government was controlled by one ethnic group which used its power to advance the interests of its own group and repress all the others, or at least, because there was a widespread feeling that this was the case.
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