More evidence of the effect of information control and propaganda

The New York Times writes:

Many Ukrainians are encountering a confounding and frustrating backlash from family members in Russia who have bought into the official Kremlin messaging.

LVIV, Ukraine — Four days after Russia began dropping artillery shells on Kyiv, Misha Katsurin, a Ukrainian restaurateur, was wondering why his father, a church custodian living in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, hadn’t called to check on him.

“There is a war, I’m his son, and he just doesn’t call,” Mr. Katsurin, who is 33, said in an interview. So, Mr. Katsurin picked up the phone and let his father know that Ukraine was under attack by Russia.

“I’m trying to evacuate my children and my wife — everything is extremely scary,” Mr. Katsurin told him.

Mr. Katsurin, who converted his restaurants into volunteer centers and is temporarily staying near the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil. “He started to yell at me and told me, ‘Look, everything is going like this. They are Nazis.’”

As Ukrainians deal with the devastation of the Russian attacks in their homeland, many are also encountering a confounding and almost surreal backlash from family members in Russia, who refuse to believe that Russian soldiers could bomb innocent people, or even that a war is taking place at all.

These relatives have essentially bought into the official Kremlin position: that President Vladimir V. Putin’s army is conducting a limited “special military operation” with the honorable mission of “de-Nazifying” Ukraine. Mr. Putin has referred to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a native Russian speaker with a Jewish background, as a “drug-addled Nazi” in his attempts to justify the invasion.
He did not get the response he expected. His father, Andrei, didn’t believe him.

“No, no, no, no stop,” Mr. Katsurin said of his father’s initial response.  

Russian television channels do not show the bombardment of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and its suburbs, or the devastating attacks on Kharkiv, Mariupol, Chernihiv and other Ukrainian cities. They also do not show the peaceful resistance evident in places like Kherson, a major city in the south that Russian troops captured several days ago, and certainly not the protests against the war that have cropped up across Russia.

Does that sound familiar? To me, it sounds just like Republicans in America constantly repeating that there was no significant vote fraud in the 2020 elections and repeating their other lies. Republican rhetoric is almost pure fantasy and lies. But facts and truths do not matter if people never hear them or are unwilling to listen.

In Russia, truth has been silenced as best that Putin and his thugs can. In America, deceived and manipulated people are trapped in echo chambers that do not allow them to hear inconvenient facts or truths. They stay willingly ignorant and disinformed.

One can feel sorry for the Russian people. They cannot help believing in lies and being irrationally manipulated. They live in a brutal dictatorship that has shut down honest information sources and passed laws to punish people for speaking truth in public. 

What is the American's excuse. Is it inexcusable? Or as Republicans like to say, are problems, whatever they might be (real or imagined), are Hillary's and the Democrat's fault?