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maybe now’s a good time to share that Reddit has always had rampant Russophobia. Back in 2016 when the Enough Trump Spam subreddit was made, they added “no xenophobia” to their rules. but every other post was xenophobic towards either Russia, China, or the DPRK. Hell, I got like a thousand downvotes on a comment where I corrected the OP on the reach of DPRK’s missiles (it was one of those “oh no, the north koreans are going to nuke us next week” posts), and nearly all of the thousands of comments were calling me a Russian bot, or using slurs to insult me.
Russophobia was a big part of the Democrat’s strategy against Trump in that election, claiming that Russia helped Trump win and whatnot. Russophobia is at this point, perhaps, the oldest propagandist tool used by the American state. Ever since the revolution in Russia, and honestly even before it, they scaremongered supporters into supporting whatever it was the politicians or the media wanted them to support, using Russia, the Soviet Union, or Communism (which was tied to the Soviets for them) as the leverage. Black people want rights? can’t do that, that’s communism, and look at what’s going on in the evil USSR. Workers want rights? can’t do that, the evil USSR. so on, so forth. It’s very disheartening that they still use this tactic today, but it’s even more disheartening that in the information age, where anyone can simply look the information up and disprove the propaganda, people still eat the tactic up like day-old fries.
The simplest explanation is that the American “left” is rightwing, because they’ve been told that actual leftism is bad.
We’re only told about leftist ideology or politics in the context of “these bad people in the past did bad things”, and many Americans refuse to actually tackle those lies. because of this, no one in the American “left” is willing to be anti-capitalist in any way that actually matters. Nor are they willing to use materialism in their dialectics, because their political education comes from Liberalism, so they’re more willing to listen to right-wing talking points and integrate them into their views.
This is why you’ll see Americans who’ll call themselves “leftists” pair a statement for working rights with a statement against immigration. Or you’ll see them decry the horrors of fascism, then support whatever new war NATO has wrought.