I don’t recall saying anything about all Russians supporting Putin.
In any case, Putin is more of a symptom than the cause of Russia’s problems. They seem to be completely unable to produce systems of government that aren’t psychopathic and incredibly brutal; this has been going on for centuries now, Putin is not some sort of one-off anomaly.
Whether the majority of the populace has been brainwashed or not is in some ways irrelevant. It’s the same as with “western” conservatives: many of them have been brainwashed, but when they literally want to murder me for who I am it’s inconsequential to me how they arrived at their ideology. Compare them to eg. the Nazis; many were brainwashed but feeling empathy towards your concentration camp guards wasn’t going to get you out of the camp
Not all Russians support the terrorists in the Kremlin, and many who do have been brainwashed.
I don’t recall saying anything about all Russians supporting Putin.
In any case, Putin is more of a symptom than the cause of Russia’s problems. They seem to be completely unable to produce systems of government that aren’t psychopathic and incredibly brutal; this has been going on for centuries now, Putin is not some sort of one-off anomaly.
Whether the majority of the populace has been brainwashed or not is in some ways irrelevant. It’s the same as with “western” conservatives: many of them have been brainwashed, but when they literally want to murder me for who I am it’s inconsequential to me how they arrived at their ideology. Compare them to eg. the Nazis; many were brainwashed but feeling empathy towards your concentration camp guards wasn’t going to get you out of the camp