• @cfgaussian
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    1 year ago

    The vast majority are completely propagandized. The media situation is much worse in Germany than even in the US, there is virtually no opposition media whatsoever, every major tv channel peddles the exact same liberal Atlanticist propaganda, and the same goes for all the important radio programs that people listen to while driving. There are a minority of people who go against the grain but they tend to be of anti-vax conspiracy theory crowd and are derogatorily labeled “Querdenker” (lit. transl.: “oblique thinkers”). They are generally seen as equivalent to the Qanon crowd in the US. The sole voices in parliament against the mainstream narrative and against the war are a few dissidents of the Left (Die Linke) Party, which is a very small party to begin with, and otherwise all of the opposition comes from the AfD which is a xenophobic nationalist petty-bourgeois party with ties to neonazis. The rest are fully convinced that Putin is basically Hitler and if not stopped in Ukraine will march on Germany - that’s essentially what the media tells us 24/7.

    There may be a lot of people who suspect that it was probably the US that bombed the pipeline but they generally tend to stay silent and if pressed will say something like “yeah maybe they did it but what can we do, it would ruin our relations with the US to accuse them, and we need them to protect Europe from Russia”.

    There also is almost zero class consciousness, and Germans in general have a very parochial, petty-bourgeois mentality, where entrepreneurship and home ownership are almost as worshipped as in the US, and even the unions, despite being very large and widespread, have long since been co-opted or neutered. There is some worker participation on company boards but too many people think that workers’ representatives and management should co-operate for the greater good of the company. They lack any and all mentality of class antagonism and refuse to see that the interests of workers are diametrically opposed to those of the owners. The social welfare state (and the way they are educated and taught in school about it) has basically convinced them that class conciliation is how you build a good society. This is exactly the social fascism that Stalin referred to.