Every time I see westerns post some 
shit the usual response is “well propaganda is a hell of a drug”.
But if western propaganda is really that effective, how the fuck did we get here? I’d think if it was really this good at melting people’s brain’s it’d be effective enough to prevent communities like this from even existing. So like are we special or something?
Also raises the question, if we’re able to get over this BS, wtf is everyone else’s excuse for falling hook-line-and-sinker for it?
I can only answer for myself, but deprogramming from it did require real effort to try and understand the world outside the hegemony. I believe that certain lived experience also had to happen that put my skin in the game.
Losing everything in a recession wasn’t enough, being poor for 20 years wasn’t enough. Covid and climate breakdown had to happen too. It has been a long road for a middle aged person who has grown up in a socdem bubble. Only now I get how little real information ever made it into my brain/eyes. Things that one sort of needs to know to not be braimwormed are nowhere to be found unless you seek them out. Our entire reality is framed from the neoliberal capitalist pov, from personal care to politics.
And I was always “progressive”. Always frustrated with how our parliamentary democracy seems pointless. I preached abouy voting, did all that.
The hegemony is so embedded in absolutely everything that one needs to kind of snap out of it. The first time you ask in your social sciences classes why are all these academics writing so much about inequality or even neoliberalism, the climate issue and the rise of the far right, yet there is never a mention of the system that holds it all together is where the tide starts to turn. Once you get the whole lack of material analysis and how obvious it is, you kind of see the paper straw for what it is.
Covid and the you do you-pandemic revealed so well how all states, as they are now, are not for the people.
I believe that arguments like “well why hasn’t the climate issue been solved if capitalism is so effective” are good openers to deprogram others. So is telling people what actually happened when the Soviet fell (neoliberalism), what the Greece crisis was actually about, what the EU does on its borders, how the EU is an economic (capitalist) alliance, what happened in Iraq with privatization, what is happening in Ukraine and drawing parallels to the way all our own care providers are now owned by hedge funds that nobody can hold accountable. Nobody I know agrees or likes any of it, they just can’t imagine an alternative to it as none is ever given.