Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is dead, the prison service of the Yamalo-Nenets region where he had been serving his sentence said on Friday.
Western propaganda (mostly) doesn’t work via straight up lying or omitting the truth, it works by choosing what is amplified. And for the past 10 years the story around Navalny was that he was the liberal opposition leader, and once in power Russia would be a good™️country. I think given what we know of his actual activism and statements it would have been a lateral move at best.
That doesn’t mean political murder is a good thing, it just means (to my best estimation) it’s a power struggle between to highly questionable politicians and one of them won.
That may be true in your case, but it certainly wasn’t the case in my country.
I’ll grant you that most of the coverage about Navalny didn’t mention it in my country either. I always assumed it was because it was irrelevant, because coverage was about how the opposition in Russia is persecuted, it was never about judging whether any candidate was worthy of replacing Putin.
Chinees and Russian propaganda needs to resort to direct censoring more often because they are not culturally powerful enough to control the narrative so there are subtle differences.
But my point wasn’t about Russian or Chinese propaganda, it was about the fact that our image of Navalny is a construct of a western propaganda effort to create division in Russia.
I learnt his politics were shite by watching Western media
Western propaganda (mostly) doesn’t work via straight up lying or omitting the truth, it works by choosing what is amplified. And for the past 10 years the story around Navalny was that he was the liberal opposition leader, and once in power Russia would be a good™️country. I think given what we know of his actual activism and statements it would have been a lateral move at best.
That doesn’t mean political murder is a good thing, it just means (to my best estimation) it’s a power struggle between to highly questionable politicians and one of them won.
That may be true in your case, but it certainly wasn’t the case in my country.
I’ll grant you that most of the coverage about Navalny didn’t mention it in my country either. I always assumed it was because it was irrelevant, because coverage was about how the opposition in Russia is persecuted, it was never about judging whether any candidate was worthy of replacing Putin.
Since you’re singling western propaganda out, is that somehow different from how non-western propaganda, like Russian or Chinese, works?
Chinees and Russian propaganda needs to resort to direct censoring more often because they are not culturally powerful enough to control the narrative so there are subtle differences.
But my point wasn’t about Russian or Chinese propaganda, it was about the fact that our image of Navalny is a construct of a western propaganda effort to create division in Russia.
He was one of the most visible and charismatic opposition leaders in Russia. That’s not just western invention.