I am saying you are not.

Okay? That has nothing to do with what you said that I quoted. Your claim was and I quote:

Everyone believes brainwashing is real but somehow they are exempt.

Which I told you is not true via my own view of myself.

What magic did you use that is not freely available to everyone else? :)

I know what you’re doing here. It’s not the point you think it is because I’ve never claimed that circumstances are identical for everyone. I’m talking about system level generalities. Do you want me to go back through my history and try to explain how I got to the point I’m at? Because I can if you’d like, there’s nothing to hide, it’s just a fair bit of remembering and explaining to go over.

Propaganda are licenses to affirm the worldview one is seeking. They are not tools of control because it “brainwashes” people; they are tools of control because they allow licenses for a sizable enough of the western populations to discipline against those that want to usurp the current hegemony.

It’s better to think of these in concrete terms. Let’s use some stereotypical examples to drive the point home. I am going to assume you may know USAmerican socially conservative news outlet owned by Murdoch, Fox News. What would happen to the Fox News audience if Fox News started promote more progressive talking points such as the emanicpation of people of colour? Would the audience now become progressive? Or would they seek elsewhere claiming that “liberal media” has captured Fox News too?

Now there could be two answers to the above. One is decades of “brainwashing” cannot be undone quickly which then has the problem of unfalsifiablity and presumes the “duration of watching age to be brainwashed” of the population.

Or we could consider the material conditions of why the above is so. In doing the latter, one is then forced to consider which parts of the population has revolutionary potential and which do not (class analysis).

That’s not “the two answers” to the above. I can already think of more. 1) There are stories of people who got their parents off of Fox News and their parents started becoming less “reactionary” for lack of a better word. So already the evidence supports what I’m saying. 2) Your hypothetical example of a drastic change in what Fox News is saying should result in distrust the same as it would for any news station because a certain amount of trust goes into the dynamic and a sudden drastic shift in narrative would (reasonably) cause people to get suspicious. Any who didn’t notice and didn’t get suspicious may start changing what they’re thinking over time, given the evidence in point 1.

Let’s consider another example. Mao’s China and reeducation efforts, some of which were so successful they reformed “the last emperor”. It took time and some shaming of him with first person accounts from people he had wronged to get through, and I’m sure it helped immensely that he had no power at that point, but it stands out to me because it shows how far you can go when you have the power to do so and use it effectively.

We would not for example consider the bourgoisie “brainwashed”; we have to extend the same considerations to labour aristocrats and western labour who engage in class collaboration against the global south.

They are tangled up in narrative the same as anyone else. See former emperor example above. It’s just much easier for us to dismiss them as pointless to try to persuade (or just morally grating to try, perhaps feeling like they don’t deserve an out) if they are actually in the oppressor class. Or in some contexts, it’s literally a matter of life or death, and you don’t have time to be sitting around trying to move them via words (like in the case of the USSR fighting Nazi Germany).

I can tell you right now I definitely did not understand the imperial dynamic for most of my life. I have little to no recollection of understanding the rich and poor dynamic either, for most of my life. I’d say that I was essentially politically illiterate in many ways. I could reason through a political issue in isolation and come up with what seemed like a reasonable take on it, similar to how someone who can’t read might still be able to slowly sound out some words, but I could not properly put it in context and tended toward individualist thinking, like wondering how a rich person could want so much excess while others are starving. I was not getting then that it’s often more about power, which is why companies will spend lots of money to crush unions instead of simply paying a decent wage. Anyway, the point being that I was not secretly knowing the imperial dynamic and embracing it because it benefited me. I just did not know. I’m sure there are crypto-fascists who would fit that description, but that was not me. I thought for a while that the US was more or less “flawed but trying to do good”. Hell, I didn’t even know until after I found my way to ML what the US had done to Korea, for example. I just knew there was this thing called the Korean War and that it was considered justified from the USian perspective.