The age old joke;
A Russian and an American are drinking at a bar
The Russian says "I'm impressed by american propaganda. It's so subtle but effective."
The american responds "What are you talking about, we don't do propaganda."
A Russian and an American get on a plane in Moscow and get to talking. The Russian says he works for the Kremlin and he's on his way to go learn American propaganda techniques.
"What American propaganda techniques?" asks the American.
"Exactly," the Russian replies.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/covert_propaganda
To be clear, I'm happy to grant that:
* The Pentagon won't provide jets for your war movie if your war movie portrays the US military in a bad light
* The US engages in information operations in foreign countries, e.g. discouraging people in the Philippines from getting the Chinese COVID vaccine
* Voice of America and similar US-government sponsored outlets are, in fact, sponsored by the US government
But the notion that covert, English-language US government propaganda is ubiquitous and effective seems like a half-baked, un-falsifiable conspiracy theory with little supporting evidence.
The internet is full of false or misleading claims about the US which go un-refuted. There's just way too much low-hanging fruit going un-picked here to believe that the USG is running massive English-language covert propaganda ops.
A specific example of a false anti-American claim which is extremely widespread: Many Europeans believe that the US promised to protect Ukraine in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. This is false. We only promised to go to the UN Security Council, which we did. You can verify for yourself with a quick trip to the UN website, the memorandum is not very long: https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/P...
If the American government possessed the propaganda wizardry that people ascribe to it, I expect the entire internet would be well-acquainted with the actual contents of this memorandum. Instead, you have randos like me trying to fight a tsunami of misinformation (likely Ukrainian-origin) related to this memorandum, using only a shovel.
European here, following the Ukraine situation closely. I absolutely never heard that one. The main issue in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that has been mentioned in the media in recent years is that Russia would respect the independence, sovereignty, and existing borders of Ukraine, which is clearly there in article 1. Thanks for the link though, it is quite enlightening.
> ... misinformation (likely Ukrainian-origin) ...
Your post is also "a half-baked, un-falsifiable conspiracy theory with little supporting evidence" ;)
If the US was attacked the way Ukraine was attacked, and foreign intervention was key to our survival as a nation, I expect the Pentagon would deploy foreign info ops in that situation. That doesn't seem like a heavy lift to me.
Occam's Razor: If something is a core/essential national interest, it's reasonable to expect a government to pull out all the stops. But governments are fairly ineffectual for the most part. Everyone saw how the USG mishandled e.g. COVID, mishandled the war with Iran, yet we expect the USG to be wizards at covert propaganda? It doesn't really track. I'm sure we are doing covert propaganda here and there, and we would ramp it up in an emergency.
Anyways, if you want to point to specific content you suspect as USG propaganda, be my guest. My point is, the fact that people rarely do this seems evidence against widespread USG propaganda. "They don't point it out because the propaganda is too good" has a suspicious un-falsifiable quality to it.
A few years prior to the Budapest Memorandum, the UN Security Council had authorized military action to liberate Kuwait. 42 countries participated in the coalition that drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_Gulf_War
The expectation at the time was clearly more than just "we'll bring it up at the UN for dicussion". The current weaseling over the exact wording looks weak and pathetic, and has a certain flavor of propaganda that tries to convince everyone of something that's not quite true. The fact remains that the US strong-armed Ukraine out of nuclear weapons, and when Ukraine was eventually invaded, tried to strong-arm Ukraine into surrender. This reflects very poorly on the US.
...
"A ‘no’ vote from any one of the five permanent members of the Council stops action on any measure put before it. The body’s permanent members are: China, France, Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States."
https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/02/1112802
(emphasis mine)
This is 101-level UN stuff. If Ukrainian diplomats were unaware that Russia can veto Security Council resolutions, that means they were totally incompetent.
It's also misleading to say the US "strong-armed" Ukraine out of its nukes... it was originally Ukraine's idea to abandon nukes, and they didn't have the control codes for the nukes on their territory anyways. The US attempted influence via carrots (financial assistance), not sticks ("strong-arming").
In any case, we did far more than just bring it up at the UN for discussion. See this map from a year or two ago: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HKNCFWPbEAA7p5g?format=jpg&name=...
Mostly, in response to US generosity, Europeans just complained that the US should give even more. Your comment illustrates this perfectly--you speak as though the US only responded via UN diplomacy, completely neglecting over one hundred billion dollars the US sent in Ukraine aid, to a country which is not even a treaty ally of ours. When Biden was president, right after he saved Ukraine's butt in the initial invasion, public opinion of the US in Europe was barely even net-positive.
The real question is why Europeans spend so much time harassing the US for Ukraine funds, and so little time harassing tight-fisted countries which are actually in Europe like Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, etc. The answer: Europe has a transatlantic philosophy that the US brings the guns and the Europeans bring the scolding. As long as Ireland/Switzerland/Austria/Spain nod along with the scolding, they are doing their part, as far as Europe is concerned.
> This is 101-level UN stuff. If Ukrainian diplomats were unaware that Russia can veto Security Council resolutions, that means they were totally incompetent.
It is safe to say that the present lack of leadership from the US was not foreseen at the time. It was unimaginable that Russia would launch a major ground war in Europe and that the American president would blame the victim of the aggression and try to coerce them into surrender while sucking up to the aggressor. This is not how things were conducted back then. It was the era of Schwarzkopfs showing strength and resolve by giving presentations on how coalition tanks had pummeled the enemy in the past few weeks, not of Sullivans showing weakness and indecisiveness by endlessly yapping about "escalation".
The core problem is that the US has spent almost a century embedding itself in all kinds of relationships (cultural, political, economic, military), but has lost the ability to carry out that central role. Biden did not save Ukraine. The limited but valuable military support fostered an unhealthy relationship that gave the US a veto over Ukraine's (and other allies') actions, but the US leaders do not have the statemanship to use that power responsibly. Biden's legacy is the shortsighted micromanagement that turned the fast and effective Ukrainian counteroffensives of 2022 into slow and costly trench warfare of 2026, all while emboldening enemies like Iran to launch assaults like October 7th.
It really amazes me how much misinformation is out there about this thing. It only has six points, each one a single paragraph long. It's very quick and easy to read, yet people apparently can't be bothered to look up the actual text of the thing they're discussing.
That's only one consequence of Trump's de-facto betrayal of Ukraine in support of his daddy figure in the Kremlin.
I completely agree about no countries giving up their nukes in the future, but that's a consequence of the weak agreement, plus other actions like knocking over Iraq and Libya but not North Korea, tearing up the JCPOA with Iran, and... well, it seems like non-proliferation is mostly lip service in general.
okay....
>People who reference supposed US government propaganda rarely provide much in the way of concrete examples.
YOU'VE ALREADY SAID THAT
This seems tautological because Europe is pretty weak on the values that people in the US might care about (freedom of speech, limited govt, etc).
What values specifically are you optimizing for here?
The US federal government forced Paramount to take Colbert off the air. Seems that people in the US don’t actually value these things.
> What values specifically are you optimizing for here?
Probably not being fascist.
Not really; the Ellisons are quite close to Trump. Nobody was forced to do anything. Had the FCC actually revoked their license, and had Paramount actually been willing to fight, they could have sued. It's not easy to force anyone that rich to do anything; the state works on behalf of capital. It seems like europe is more aware of the meaningless bluster than the actual crimes being committed
There are much better things to point to to illustrate the deterioration of the rule of law, like blatantly illegal deportation of citizens without due process. Or raping children in concentration camps under the guise of cracking down on crime. We may never even know who was seized and what happened to them and there's little incentive for our very pro-corporate media to report on it.
But sure, paramount is the real victim here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merger_of_Skydance_Media_and_P...
Read that timeline and then see if you're still convinced that they didn't at least seem to have done a thing or 2 to appease the federal government
There’s just no comparison really. You must really be inhaling some nonsense X propaganda if you think government overreach is worse in Western Europe.
https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=13879460433775...
„ deployed the military in cities they don’t like for no other reason than intimidation of political rivals” That’s one perspective on simply trying to enforce laws.
Moreover, let’s not forget about how Biden government tried to silence Rogan.
And that's a good thing.
Edit: c'mon people, if you're going to use such ambiguous phrases at least have the spine to clue the reader in to what you want them to refer to in this context.
Of course there were also absolutism, colonialism, the jacobines, nazism & facism, to name just a few. Part of western values, from my perspective at least, is an implicit promise, that what happened in the 20th century with facism was the darkest hour, so to speak-> never again
Then you haven't been paying attention. The constitution prevents citizens from being convicted, but that doesn't stop arrests or being turned away at the border (even for permanent residents who've lived in the US for decades), and US citizens don't seem to care, so it's cold comfort for many of us.
I think maybe you haven't been paying attention.
Most of us do care. Trump's approval rating is pretty low at 36%, and his disapproval rating is high. Just because he's still causing chaos doesn't mean the majority of us don't care about it. There's just no legal way to remove him, and his cronies simply won't do it - there's not enough votes in congress or he would have been gone after his first or second impeachment.
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/20/nx-s1-5861764/trumps-job-appr...
Don’t get me wrong, I know the thousands reasons why you won’t join a protest, I’m „guilty“ myself. I just want to argue against your argument that I quoted because this puts all of us in an unhelpful victim mentality.
Hah. When was the last time a non-violent protest yielded some kind of result by itself? Certainly never in american history.
Anyway, there are daily protests. They just aren't covered by the media. Hell, the protests for palestine never stopped... the media just never wanted to cover them.
Terrorist attacks, kidnappings, etc made that change take longer. What made MLK Jr so unique was that he carried a message of peace, not a message of war.
The militant factions never had any real power and would have never been close to powerful enough to overthrow the government, and if they’d been more successful, would have swayed the masses’ opinions in the wrong direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_and_demonstra...
Trump's highest rating was ~47% when he came into office, but he was pretty stably in the low 40s until the new war. The actual drop is somewhere from ~40-42 to ~36-38 - about 10% of his base. Significant, but probably not enough to actually matter unless it drops further.
But the turnout at the periodic nationwide "No Kings" protests has been very good, and they have fortunately stayed peaceful.
checks notes what's this? The protests were organized by oligarchic lackeys? Hmm
By contrast, Biden at the same point in his term was hovering around 39%, for the heinous crime of... rebuilding the US economy? Including some woke riders in his infrastructure bill?
At this point, a fair assessment of US citizens is that on average, they seem to consider that being a right-wing autocrat wannabe, threatening to invade allied countries "as a negotiating tactic", being a climate change denier, starting a humiliating failed war, trying to blackmail the press into compliance, etc, are about 3% worse than being a cringe center-left bureaucrat.
"US citizens don't seem to care" is an apt hyperbole.
When the parties are both fucking stupid when it comes to issues that matter, the entire right/left spectrum goes out the window.
https://www.fox4news.com/news/woman-arrested-facebook-post-c...
X seems to work great. Inciting men in with gambling, porn, crypto, ai and other broistan staples, then feeding them far-right nonsense info points.
The numbers commonly being reporting include stalkers, criminals, etc.
You don't get arrested for being politically incorrect in the UK. You get arrested for posting something threatening, harassing, inciteful, or grossly indecent. Also, being arrested and being charged are two completely separate things.
https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/the-situation-for-free-sp...
In any case, practically speaking, censorship helped the rise of the Nazis: https://www.fire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/would...
You can see far-right parties surging across Europe. Speech restriction isn't just authoritarian, it's also counterproductive.
As an American I am actually quite worried about Europe's far right. Those guys are very scary, and it's creepy the way they have been able to influence the right here in the US. The MAGA movement was far more multicultural back in the 2010s, before Europe's far right was able to influence it with their ethnic cleansing and pogrom fantasies.
If you're in a hole, maybe stop digging?