Thank you for your insight on this, Erkka. At the first couple days of this conflict, I wasn't sure what to believe, since there was a lot of contradictory information, and especially, contradictory feelings. I don't like the USA's imperialism and how it's culture and language has been destroying and replacing smaller local cultures and replacing them with consumerist-oriented, mass-manufactured culture. This can be easily seen by the exponential number of small languages, dialects and accents that are becoming extinct, thanks to the internet and spread of mass culture (I could elaborate more on that, but it's not the main point I want to make, so, let's move forward). I don't like NATO because I don't like the idea of worldwide militarization, I despise war and think it is a huge waste of human effort. I don't like the growing trend of stockpiling nuclear weapons, something that I think should have died with the cold war. So, to me, that doesn't mean I support chinese or russian imperialism, no, I am critical of all of them on equal measures. I also don't like how all the major powers worldwide still do nothing about climate change, how they all equally try to push more consumerism and consumption, which just make things worse.

I think I must have said on another message, my main source of news is Wikipedia. However, for the past one or two months, my partner had been really keen about looking at a certain forum on the internet full of pro-chinese and pro-russian government sentiment. Even though I don't agree with most of what people say on that forum, it's still really harmful; from what I see, modern propaganda doesn't seek to convert people to their ideology, just making the people confused and unsure of what to believe in is enough, so they feel powerless and give up on trying to find the truth amidst a sea of unverifiable information. And I can say that had its effect on me. My partner told me he had read on that forum that there were nazis in a some sort of paramilitary group in Ukraine, and upon looking it up, it was true, so I felt more inclined to believe the anti-Ukraine propaganda. However, I'm ethnically ukrainian, so it really hurt to see a place I care about being so "bad", so I didn't want to believe anything about anything. However, I did not want to fall prey to that powerlessness, so I was quick to go and check whatever I could. Most posts on that forum follow a meme format, or are screen-captures of twitter posts and other information which is hard to source and verify. There was one saying something like "Ukraine blames Russia for the invasion, but they have been bombing their own people in Donetsk and Luhansk for the past eight years". I quickly found on Wikipedia that that was not true, so that lowered my trust for that forum. I also found this article linked on Wikipedia, it contradicted almost every post from the forum, and an official EU website seems way more trustworthy to me than a random internet forum that posts memes and screenshots of unverifiable sources, so again the forum lost more credibility for me.

I think the final help and the end of the powerlessness feeling came when I saw a finnish demoscene artist sharing a post by another finnish leftist person which explained the situation better. I read it and made my partner read it, then I found a more in-depth version on said person's website. At that post there was this paragraph that stood out to me:

"Just consider this: yielding to the Kremlin means that parties and politicians who like the Kremlin gain in power. Which politicians would those be? Right now, the nationalistic-conservative far right is the favorite of the Kremlin. More European countries would end up like Hungary, dominated by the far right who proceed to sell off the country’s assets, like public health services, to their cronies. If this development is familiar to you, check what those selling off your national assets are saying about Ukraine now."

because we had been seeing the far-right movement in Brazil being pro-Russia since the war began, which looked to me almost like some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Then, on the next day, I saw your picture of the day for the 27th of february, and you seemed to agree with the main points of that blog post, such as that Russian media is state-controlled propaganda. So, for me, if an artist whose opinions I tend to share agrees with that, if Erkka agree with that, and overall trustworthy sources such as Wikipedia an official EU website agree, that is good enough for me to not feel alone and powerless and lost amidst disinformation anymore.

After that, my partner and I came to the conclusion that the forum is most likely a (not-so-)covert propaganda outlet for either the Russian or Chinese government, or both, since it tends to follow current propaganda tactics, gives out contradicting information and so on, and it seems other people at other forums agree with that viewpoint. We also agreed that it is a really toxic place to look at, and we're not going to read that place anymore, because even if we read it just do disagree with it, it is both a waste of time and poison for the mind.

So, yes, I agree with your statement and can see exactly where you're coming from, illiteracy kills.

Thank you for the music, too. Lately I've been listening a lot to Yat-kha, which you shared long ago. I guess I have new music to explore now =) If that's okay, here's a folk song about the slavic god of spring, Jarilo, by Percival. They play lots of nice slavic folk songs which I really like.