For me, it did.
I signed up on lemmy.ml 2 months before the Russo-Ukraine war and learnt about lemmygrad.ml. When the Russo-Ukraine war started, the Lemmygrad posts about Ukraine motivated me to dig more into the conflict. I was already pretty open to ideas, so I didn’t see any risk in it.
The result is that I learned about the scum reality of the United States. I saw a video that showed some atrocities of the Azov Battalion, and another video of Russian troops caring for the Ukrainian civilians. I didn’t get much of an emotional reaction; but I now had a general ideas of the (war) crimes Nazis commit. I also saw a disparity in views on Lemmygrad from Reddit; reddit has (heavily biased) support for U.S forces, while Lemmygrad has general support of Russian forces.
Is it cheating if I’m Russian? Well in 2019 I joined an American multinational in hopes of perhaps getting work trips abroad, if not outright migration somewhere in the vague future.
Today I sit blocked from all workplace resources and stand to get fired within the month, because said multinational is pulling out. There’s also a good chance I won’t be able to find an equally paying job in my field, because while there’s plenty of IT companies in the city, a decent chunk of them work for foreign clients - clients that are now unwilling to continue.
Additionally, I had to learn a number of unpleasant things about people I called friends online. Seeing live just how uncritically they digest every source-less story about “Russian atrocities” and how much glee they have for my countrymen dying to weapons their countries sell. Eye opening and disturbing to the core. The very same people I used to mock Nazis with.
Oh yes, it’s been quite “fun” these past months. I am not really looking forward to the future either.
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Good luck, man. Not all of us Americans suck. Just a whole lot of us. I really feel that the truth about this conflict will drop on us sometime soon. Then every Ukraine supporter will have an existential crisis or pretend they never supported Ukraine.
I try not to make sweeping accusations like this. You don’t have a choice where you are born. But thanks.
You’re mostly right though. I’m in a small town and some of the shit I hear in peripheral conversations is reactionary as fuck.