Hey, just made an account after lurking here for like a year or so. Anyway, I just got out of a rather exhausting conversation with some friends where the topic of Ukraine came up and I tried my best to give a reasonable overview of why people in Crimea/DPR/LPR would support joining Russia, complete with several sources on the brutality of the Ukrainian government in the years since Maidan. Almost immidiately I got hit with “Well I have Ukrainian friends who say that Russia is the problem.” I’ve noticed very often that people will trust what they’ve heard personally from people they know over any evidence you give them. My question is, has anyone found an effective way to get through to people who entirely base their stance on an issue on what the people they know personally have to say? How do you show someone that they need to look beyond what their token friend has to say and actually study the topic themselves?
“You know some Ukranians who say Russia is the problem? I know some Americans who say communist jews are the problem. Proximity alone doesn’t equal clarity; sometimes the opposite.”
- Stop accusing the masses of being “brainwashed.” Stop treating them as cattle, stop attempting to rouse them into action by scolding them with exposure to “unpleasant truths.”
- Accept instead that they have been avoiding those truths for a reason. You were able to break through the propaganda barrier, and so could they if they really wanted to. Many of these people see you as the fool, and in many cases not without reason.
- Understanding people as intelligent beings, craft a political strategy that convincingly makes the case for why they and their lot are very likely to benefit from joining your political project. Not in some utopian infinite timescale, but soon.
- If you cannot make this case, then forget about convincing the person in question. Focus instead on finding other people to whom such a case can be made. This will lead you directly to class analysis.
Save your energy for the most useful ways and you have a lifetime to hone them. And read broadly. Really understand and practise dialectical materialism; western cultures are so backwards because of liberalism it will feel like a superpower.
Just plow through and say anecdotes do not matter if you are using sources and actual facts to illustrate your point. If you’re sharing anecdotes, that matters; otherwise it doesn’t matter how their “Ukrainian Friend” feels when there is literal extermination campaign pre-war in Donbas.
Russia hosts the most Ukrainian refugees out of any other country. If Ukrainians wholly viewed Russia as the problem would they really move into Russia? The reality is that there’s 2 types of Ukrainians: those who see Ukraine as a continuation of the Ukrainian SSR, and a brotherly people to the Russians, and those who see Ukraine as a new nation that has been liberated from the clutches of the evil Russians, and can now forge ahead, pure and independent, as Bandera envisioned. Your friend’s Ukrainian friends are likely of the second type.
The problem with your friend, like many other people, doesn’t really understand the complexity of the issues and doesn’t know much about what’s going on, besides what they are being told by mainstream media. And it’s very likely they instictively trust mainstream media. By nature, humans are open to adapting the first opinion they hear about something, and then they become really defensive when other contradictory opinions come in.
Trying to convince people of something is a very slow process, and it doesn’t happen while you are around. All you can do is present them with the evidence, give them an easy-to-follow rundown of the nuances, and explain why their opinion is uninformed. Patience and calm is actually more helpful in getting them to open up and listen to you. If you get angry, they get angry, and nobody can be convinced of anything while angry. During your discussion, they are still very unlikely they’ll actually turn around their opinion. If you did a good job presenting your view, then there’s a chance they’ll keep thinking about it. Eventually, they might do their own research. And then they might decide they agree with you, or not.
A nice way to induce this self-assessment of opinions held, is to ask questions. When they tell you something that’s blatantly false, ask them questions about it. This helps to lower their defensiveness, and helps them realize they probably shouldn’t be so certain about what they heard.
That’s the only advice I can give. Don’t start these discussions expecting to convince anybody else. Start them because you want to discuss what’s going on. Don’t hang up on things you disagree. Just use it as a jumping point to discuss the situation further. If you are lucky, then maybe you’ll turn them around. But that’s not something you should worry about while holding the discussion. It just makes things frustrating.
Honestly I think this is the thing I needed to hear. Thank you.
Appriacte the responses so far, they all seem pretty sound to me. Unfortunately I think that I had vastly underestimated how deep in the muck of western propaganda this particular group is (I just got sent a very long message about the terror of the soviet union and how everyone is still afraid of Russia because of it), so I think I’m not going to put any more energy into this discussion right now.
It’s difficult to be sure. As others pointed out, we are predisposed to trust people we personally know more. You can point out things like selection biases and so on, but it only goes so far.
I find I’ve had better luck discussing the outcomes. Now that the war is lost, it’s clear that Ukraine finds itself in a worse position than they would’ve been if they accepted the deal Russia offered two weeks into the war. And that deal was worse than Ukraine implementing Minsk agreements. So, regardless of what people think of Russia, we have to look at the tangible outcomes for Ukraine which are horrific.
If we accept the liberal premise that Putin is an existential evil bent on dominating Ukraine, their strategy has backfired catastrophically. By pushing Ukraine into a ruinous proxy war instead of accepting negotiated neutrality that was nearly achieved in Istanbul, the West created a demonstrably worse situation for Ukraine.
Ukraine lost over 20% of its population and around 40% of GDP. It is likely to remain a failed state going forward which will make it easier for Russia to dominate politically. On the other hand, liberals can be pointed to Warsaw Pact states like Poland, which transitioned to the West after the fall of USSR precisely because they retained intact institutions and populations.
So, if you are a liberal who thinks Ukraine is better off under western sphere of influence, then destruction of Ukraine through war is directly at odds with your stated goals. A functional Ukraine under Russian influence could have pivoted westward over time. Instead, NATO’s maximalism turned Ukraine into a radioactive buffer zone where no EU/NATO membership is possible.
Liberals also claim to prioritize Ukrainian lives, yet their policy has caused at least half a million deaths, over 10 million refugees, and a demographic collapse unseen since WW2. Meanwhile, Russia now controls more Ukrainian land than in 2014, with no peace in sight. How does this help the people of Ukraine?
Most of the time Ukraine is going to be a tough sell. If the rest of the group is not into the discussion its better to leave it alone and hope that your historical materialism trumps his story of having a ukrainian friend.
If you want to push back, point out their lack of information on the issue and his readiness to accept a biased view by turning it on its head.
“Don’t you think it’s likely your Ukrainian friend is biased? Is it wise to base your opinion on a single personal opinion from someone who is so obviously biased? An average israeli would say the genocide in gaza is Hamas’ fault. Would you just accept that?”
If the group is into the discussion you can counter a dive into “anecdotal lived experience” by pulling the focus back to the grand scale. Ask about their opinions the usa’s wars on Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq? Ask them why they would believe there are no nazis in ukraine when they were told that by the same people who said there were WMDs in Iraq. Those same people also screamed about 40 decapitated babies on october 7th.
What about when the usa sold crack cocaine to americans to support the fascist contras in Nicaragua? or when they assisted the coup in Indonesia that lead to the mass slaughter of over a million people. What about when usa invaded Libya and turned it into a perpetual warzone with open air slave markets? What about all the african warlords that america trained that went on to commit mass murder?
Why would the people responsible for supporting every perpetrator of violent deaths in the last 80 years choose to be on the right side this one time? If usa ever cared about international justice, territorial integrity, and peace why are they funding a genocide in gaza?This is always tricky. I don’t think this is an exclusively liberal phenomemon, people are just biologically more inclined to trust people we know.
That’s true. I think broadly speaking it’s harder to overcome with liberals though, because they’re often less self-aware about having that bias, and not very used to thinking critically about their own perspective.
Since you say you are friends with them, you could try putting it to them like, “So you trust your Ukrainian friends on this but you don’t trust me? Do you not take me seriously, as someone who puts thought and research into things?”
(The point is not that they should trust you blindly, but to put it to them indirectly why it is they are seemingly trusting their Ukrainian friends on this blindly, but not taking your views on it seriously.)
Truth is truth. People are gonna lie to you either way.
