Persuasive arguments against your point of view often entrench beliefs that were not examined critically in the first place.

If your beliefs are structured around oppositional, contrarian reactionary thinking to protect some aspect of your ego you are not considering other ideas that don’t reinforce you.

Yeah there absolutely plenty of Russians who never wanted this war, and some of those Russians died on the front line fighting a war they didn’t agree with. Unfortunately when Putin’s mafia is murdering foreign journalists and carefully controlling the messaging the rest of the world sees, it’s hard to see just how many of them there are. It’s the byproduct of a fascist dictator state pretending to be a democracy, something that some people from my nation (the United States) are all too happy to try and get into power

Agreed, plus it’s hard to stage a rebellion when so many of your young are already dead

I’m not intending to say any war crime, especially committed towards civilian victims, which any army at war has and will keep committing with varying scales, can be acceptable, but consider the average Russian soldier’s mental health at this point in this war.

Now that the saner, civilian population who lived their lives in comparable civic environments and acted mostly accordingly are conscripted into a known meat grinder, being dogged on higher-ups every day and waiting to be thrown into the next meat grinder in a few months at maximum, how can they keep their sanity?

This is not just one man’s doing, though. Such sinister governing organizations need a lot of similarly-thinking inhuman piece of shits to get together to have such influence on millions of lives and keep their heads, let alone positions of power. This includes all powers of legislation and justice departments, financial bodies, media, local instigators and more. The total number of these people would still amount to a fraction of the normally-peacefully-living population affected, but their power to manipulate the outspoken minds the latter is to big to overcome by the latter population that usually minds its own business and is naturally disorganized.

Most governments these are still run by criminal syndicates, or feudal lords that play tag-team with their seemingly-competitors, that give the population a facade of voting them in willingly. Of course except for a few select people that actually worked mostly in favour of the general population in most democracies’ histories. Not even gonna talk about failed “democracies’” like Russia or Turkey.

So yeah, I agree that this war is Russian government committing genocide on Russian people. Average Ukrainian civilians or soldiers at least know that the people of the world sympathize with them when they are at risk of losing everything. Average conscripted Russian is all alone in the mud and blood. Overall a war without any silver lining for either party, wagen on undeserving people of Ukraine and waged with unwilling people of Russia.

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