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Nope. It does not



Real letters to wives don't include patriotic and political phrases about children being raised in a new paradise to come, except those written by cult members and those (in this case) written under duress.


Yeah right never heard of spontaneous patriotism from the average not-under-gunpoint-american


Like in 2023, post-post-modernist or meta-modernist era, or universally whenever, including Gagarin's modernist age?


A farmboy going to space praising communism makes a whole lot of sense.

Just compare to the average nonsense you hear even impoverished American peasants say about "freedom."


So your argument is he was a brainwashed peasant?


I think "brainwashing" is a nonsense, racist concept invented by the CIA in the 1950s, by agent Edward Hunter passing himself off as a "journalist," in order to superciliously rationalize away the powerful appeal of communism to working class people.

So, depending on how you look at it, yes and no.

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/


Surely brainwashing as used now can describe any type of system. Weren't the nazis brainwashed? Aren't you implying that the American peasants are brainwashed? How could it be that the only people who were truly free and doing what they wanted were the ones living in a dictatorship featuring show trials and a gulag system?


Absolutely not. The Nazi project was extremely logical, and had massive conscious support from Germany, especially from its elites.

Germany explicitly argued they wanted to replicate the American expansion into the "Far West" but against the Eastern European "Far East" instead, and explicitly made positive reference to the genocide of indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans, and the "greatness" of America.

Hitler: "The struggle we are waging [in Crimea] against the Partisans resembles very much the struggle in North America against the Red Indians. Victory will go to the strong, and strength is on our side. At all costs we will establish law and order there. […] Saxony, for example, will enjoy an unprecedented trade boom, and we shall create for her a most profitable export market, which it will be the task of Saxon inventive genius to develop."

The Germans felt themselves as Americans. They weren't "brainwashed," they were just racist.

The Soviet Union built itself up through hard work and they had every right to be proud of what they accomplished, especially the defeat of Nazi (and more generally Western) efforts to enslave them, and especially since, unlike their Western counterparts, they accomplished it through hard work rather than through pillaging and looting the rest of the planet.

"Brainwashing" doesn't exist. It's a way for liberals—American liberals especially—to falsify history and to refuse to accept what people are saying, discarding it as nonsense in favour of more palatable and self-exculpatory narratives.


The "brainwashing" I refer to in nazi germany would be the initial racist belief in "aryans" and their supposed superiority. Sure, once someone had been indoctrinated with such state sponsored quasi-religious propaganda, one could say that the looting and pillaging followed logically. But it followed logically from an unprovable belief in a racist utopian future, which was only falsified by their defeat (at the hands of not just the USSR, but the western liberal democracies you seem bent on demonizing).

Likewise, the looting and starvation of Ukraine and the conquest of the Baltics under Stalin, and the subjugation of Central and Eastern Europe, the mass murder of Poles, the invasions to put down popular democratic movements in Czechoslovakia and Hungary were forms of expansionist pillaging, just as the looting of Ukraine is today, which follow "logically" from a total ideology once a population is properly indoctrinated. Of course not to "open markets" but to spread the communism which apparently everyone loves so much it must be enforced at gunpoint. If you object so strenuously to the term "brainwashing" then "propagandizing" and/or failing that instilling terror in the populace would work equally well. But let's not be ahistorical and pretend that the collectivization and industrialization of the USSR didn't come at the cost of tens of millions of lives and as a result of an expansionist, imperialist series of conquests.


You definitely have no clue about what happens in real life. You could easily find similar praises among the average Americans. I've encountered the same things in Canada as well.


> You definitely have no clue

Please edit out swipes like that from your HN posts. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Your comment would be fine without that sentence.




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