[btilly]

No, it can be both the government, and the people.

The government for all of the reasons you say.

The people because they have fallen for and accepted propaganda. Thereby leading them to support the government and its toxic narratives.

I base this opinion mostly on seeing how Russian propaganda has poisoned my mother-in-law's mind. Many media reports and various other sources have verified that she is not an isolated example, most Russians accept the same propaganda narratives.

[TFYS]

There's plenty of propaganda on our side as well. Let's, for the sake of argument, say that the west was orchestrating regime change in Ukraine with the end goal of regime change in Russia, knowing it would lead to war. We would never know about it. The organizations in the west that handle geopolitical issues are not that different from those of Russia. They're not transparent or democratic, yet we rely on them for our information. They can probably steer us the way they want as easily as they do in Russia. The free media does not have access to the information it would need to truly inform the public.

[benterix]

> Let's, for the sake of argument, say that the west was orchestrating regime change in Ukraine with the end goal of regime change in Russia, knowing it would lead to war.

OK, let's play this game. The logical fallacy here is the relationship between regime change in Ukraine and Russia. These are two distinct countries. It's like saying someone wanted to influence the outcome of the election in the USA to cause regime change in Canada. (I use this example because we know Russians were influencing the elections in the USA.)

A simply more unsettling conclusion from this narrative is that if there is a causal link indeed, and Ukraine taking a pro-EU direction can cause a regime change in Russia, it means that the basis of the latter is very weak - so weak it has to start the war to prevent its fall.

[jltsiren]

"The West" is not a unified entity, and the interests of Western countries almost never align.

Remember how mainstream media was reporting in 2003 that Powell is obviously lying? How the whole debacle about Iraqi WMDs was little more than a thinly veiled excuse to finish the war Bush Sr had started? Maybe that didn't happen in your country, but it was the reality in many Western countries.

Consider the business as usual in the EU. Whatever the EU is trying to do, there are always some countries that oppose it. Then there are negotiations, and some kind of compromise is ultimately reached, but nobody is truly happy about it. That's what decentralization does to you.

Or maybe consider Russia just before the invasion of Ukraine. Some countries and factions in the West considered Russia an important trading partners, while others saw it as an adversary and wanted to cut ties with it. There was no unified Western policy on anything related to Russia.

[timeon]

What is the point of making this all up?