Most younger people are quite skeptic of mainstream media so they don’t trust the narrative CNN and Fox News are trying to sell them.With the elderly it’s the opposite.<p>Further, most of the elderly lived at a time when the USSR was the clear and obvious enemy of “freedom”, so it’s not hard to fathom Russia being back into its usual shenanigans.<p>Gen Z is also more diverse and broadly anti-American (or “anti-imperialist”) so they’re less willing to blindly support US foreign policy and feel less connected to European conflicts than previous generations.<p>Finally Russia has, in my opinion, waged a fairly successful social media campaign to muddy the waters. Those videos of Ukrainians discriminating against people or color were signal boosted everywhere on Twitter. Same with the Azov Batallion which some people believe are the entire Ukrainian army. You also have people bringing up Yemen, Syria, Palestine, etc to emphasize the “white-supremacist” support of Ukraine receiving overwhelming attention.<p>Gen Z has thus mostly understood this conflict through the propaganda wars that play out in social media and thus have conflicting and/or “both-sides” takes.
I appreciate the other threads here on this. My viewpoint may be a minority, but I fought in a war and live with the aftermath so I think my perspective might be of some value. I'm going to try to be careful with my wording but please realize this is a bit emotional even a decade later.<p>I fought in Afghanistan. Real authoritarians with a very real tyrannical streak that's comparable to cartels, with tactics to boot. I watched the Obama administration lie about how well the war was going. We were getting reports of Marines being shot in the back by their counterparts continually. We were finding posts abandoned. Our bases were getting attacked while understaffed, our patrols were minimized, and our ROE was changed such that we had to be shot at directly to return fire. I watched national rhetoric coalesce on "they signed up for these injuries" when veterans needed help the most, culminating in people comitting suicide outside of hospitals.<p>I will <i>never</i> for those reasons support sending another soul down range.
Wow I'm an old man.<p>With the youth I'd say this generation is more affected by any other by the sheer noise of modern media. It's also one of the first where there was less emphasis on indoctrinating people towards the government's view on the cold war, the first to grow up with a government that lied to them about a significant non-cold war war (Iraq), and the first that actually has the means to cheaply find other views on things.<p>So maybe it's not so strange that young people think this way.<p>I mostly blame the Iraq war. Yes, the west has done a lot of bad things in the past. But in recent memory Iraq stands out as where we blew any pretense of moral superiority. (It does happen now and again, but the Cold War is a really good excuse for a LOT of bad things). People would have seen this and seen that whatever our governments say, you gotta take it with a grain of salt.
Obviously I don't actually know whats going on over there, but I find it hard to believe that the Russian military as a whole is "deliberately targeting civilians".<p>From the first estimate I found searching the web:<p>On April 10:<p>> Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recorded 4,232 civilian casualties in the country: 1,793 killed and 2,439 injured.<p><2000 civilian deaths in a full-scale invasion of a country with ~44 million citizens seems FAR too low to declare that targeting civilians is a goal. Mariupol is currently fighting to the bitter end, despite being surrounded for weeks and even bisected by Russian forces. This is a city that had a population of >400k at the start of the war.<p>If the goal was really to kill everybody in sight, the Russians would've just carpet bombed their targets day 1 and killed hundreds of thousands. It seems like everyone has forgotten what war is. There's no "humanitarian" way to commit war. It's always awful and always creates unintended death.<p>Again, not an expert here nor do I believe any statistics to be 100% accurate.
The graphic is important I think. It's not a binary. While the younger generation showed more support for Russia, most of the difference between the generations was due to the younger generation giving an "unsure" answer.
18-29 is 1993 or younger.<p>They we born during the Bosnian and Kosovo wars. They were 7 years old or younger when they briefly experienced no war in 2000 and GWBush and 9/11 in 2001 they saw the Afghanistan war start and not end until only months ago. 20 years of war and a loss!<p>They only know war. Can you imagine their war exhaustion? Can you imagine how much they don't care about a war happening on the otherside of the world that the usa aren't officially involved in?<p>The USA is still officially involved in somali, yemen, and syria.<p>These young americans are probably more concerned with those 3 and you didn't even ask them? You don't need to ask. You know they'll universally say to stop being in all these wars.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_America:_World_Police" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_America:_World_Police</a>
Another possible explanation is that younger people tend to rely more on far right or far left media, which tends to be much more pro-Russia than mainstream media (sometimes organically, sometimes through paid sponsorship like <a href="https://twitter.com/bamnecessary/status/1499162014895296516" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/bamnecessary/status/1499162014895296516</a>).<p>Hasan Piker for example, the #1 politics streamer on Twitch, is quite far left and is much more pro-Russia than say CNN.
IIUC, the poll's questions used the term "Russia", which implicitly lumps together the following groups:<p>- the Russian government<p>- the Russian military leadership<p>- Russian career soldiers<p>- Russian conscripts<p>- regular Russian citizens<p>If I were taking the survey, my answer to all 3 questions would depend on those distinctions.
A lot has changed in the three weeks since they took their poll, I'd be very surprised if some of these numbers hold true today (for instance, this claims only 47% under 30 believe Russia has intentionally targeted civilians)
I am a pro Ukraine millennial. I also came of age during our middle east forever war and saw all the lies that went into supporting that boondoggle. The irony is not lost on me one bit. Goat herders yesterday, babuskas today. The great powers play their games and we pay.
Young person here: aren't you the dolts who lied to us about Afghanistan and Iraq, then just got chased out with your tails between your legs?<p>Why should we believe a single thing you have to say about going to war?
PDF of cited poll: <a href="https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/l8ynsbxwgl/econTabReport.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/l8ynsbxwgl/econTabReport.pdf</a><p>Cited figures from Table-14, on (PDF/printed)-page-55.<p>Looks like they polled 4 age-groups: 18-29; 30-44; 45-64; and 65+. The results for 30-44 were pretty close to those for 18-29, and the results for 45-64 were pretty close to those for 65+. In fact, if we combine the two younger groups and two older groups, such that it's 18-44 vs. 45+, then the reported-results really don't change much.<p>Tangentially, it's really weird for news-articles to not link their sources.
I think one of the big reasons is that this generation came of age during the Iraq War.<p>They saw how the whole media and US military and intelligence community could push a story that was designed to inflame people and push for war.<p>And we saw the huge cost of that.<p>Fool me once…
Younger people are so far removed from actual war that they have the luxury of being ambivalent about it. It's become easy to believe that war is simply a thing of the past and Americans won't ever experience it again. Ukraine is just pictures on a screen, nobody is going to drive tanks into America or fire missiles at our hospitals.
Spoke with a young person who had an interesting take: He says he sympathizes with Russians because he feels like they're also getting dragged into pointless wars by their government. (memories of Iraq and Afghanistan)
Young people are the Cheng Xin of this world. In the past, we did not know the lies that the mainstream media was attempting to broadcast as part of large scale population unification and pacification. Without control of that process, lots of these lies are now visible and faith has deteriorated in public sources of information.<p>It's like how everyone knows the NIAID is useless today. Unfortunately, another casualty of all this is truth. This is the problem with lying for what you think is the greater good. At some point, the fact that you lied ruins the future entirely and poisons the info well. If even the guys we chose to help us are going to bullshit us, we must live in a world of perpetual information mistrust.<p>This, plus, it's worth remembering that 16% of people have an IQ less than 85.
TBH I don't really know how to take this.<p>I am 31 so my age group is not represented at all by this graph. I am curious why they left out 30 to 64.<p>At least within my friend group (which I don't think any are younger than 29... not that I really talk about age often) we are universally against the invasion of Ukraine and want them to survive.<p>I don't feel like even at my age that I have experience or other events that are impacting my opinion. I also don't get most of my news from major news organizations.<p>So I am very curious why this is the case.
I picked up this comment from a HN user in another thread but it got no traction, seeing Germany drag it's feet on sending arms and Zelensky's recent comments about blood money I think it's especially relevant...
"seeing as we're heading into spring, seeing Germany has quite a wealthy economy and QOL, that many if not most workers get 5 weeks of holiday, the chip shortage is leading to slowdowns in the automotive industry etc... why doesn't the government just go cold turkey, give people a month or 2 free holidays while drastically reducing public lighting, telling businesses to stop heating their premises at night etc etc... I mean we had a dress rehearsal 2 years ago with the onset of Covid, this would be better ,for a good cause, probably give a boost to domestic spending and send a f...U to the rest of the world saying we too can think outside of the box :-)"<p>I know it may seem naive, but how so?
"If we just...."<p>Young Americans, in general, do not understand or internalize national security or great power competition; and instead project high ideals and generosity to countries whose _leadership_ does not share the same view of their nation or the world. With Russia, using OP example, there was & probably remains the very serious risk of food & energy dominance by Russia at the expense of democratic nations - none of whom can make the transition to so-called green tech in-time to avoid that outcome. There remains the risk of a Sino-Russian alliance that would result in a very different world from today's somewhat free & open societies. I could go on at length, but will sum it up by saying the world doesn't work the way we wish it would, and we have to face reality head-on and not wish it away.
Those seem an odd selection of questions, which made me immediately suspect they asked many other questions then skipped over them to generate a story.<p>Similar to how pharma companies have to pre-register research questions, do these polls have to publish their full methodology somewhere?
I was anti-military and anti-gun ownership, until I happened to be in Ukraine at the time of attack, and until I happened to be in Belarus at a time of dictatorship.<p>PS: although I think organization and coordination is thousands times more important than weapons.
Eh... without a breakout of their numbers it is hard to trust this poll.<p>That said, I think its fair to say half of 18-29 year olds have no interest in geopolitics and 65+ people have been around long enough to have some opinion on it.
The difference isn't that many more are supporting Russia. The difference is that many more don't have clear-cut sympathy for any side.<p>I personally are much more sympathetic to Ukraine on different principles than most, but I definitely understand why many are not willing to trust the main media line on this. We went from hearing about how Ukraine was a deeply corrupt country, barely a democracy, to immediately hearing about how they are only being attacked because of how democratic and amazing it is and that Putin is scared Russians will want to live like Ukrainians. Media started glossing over Nazi imagery on the very pictures of soldiers they spread, not even mentioning it. There were many more narrative flips that I won't get into as a matter of time.<p>Because of this, people that are less informed or that have a more traditional understanding of the morality of conflict will naturally get skeptical and decide that they don't want to sympathize with anyone.
I visit some fringe political forums once in a blue moon just to take a pulse. I was surprised to see a sizable pro-Putin sentiment which is basically a result of the whole “Russia Russia Russia” thing.<p>Boy who cried wolf is a real thing.
The headline is very revealing of the incredibly slanted way the Ukraine war has been covered in "Western" media.<p>When I read the headline, I immediately thought to myself, "which war?", until I saw the article was from the Economist and I knew they were referring to Ukraine. Just the use the term "the war" implicitly implies that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the only war (or at least the only war worth mentioning by "western media") raging. In fact, there are numerous wars raging right now. As a US citizen and close observer of our foreign policy and actions around the world, I have been floored by the hypocrisy and double standards in the coverage of the Ukraine war (despite hypocrisy and double standards being the norm). This is not an endorsement of Russia's illegal war of aggression against Ukraine but an indictment of "western media" and "western" governments in general.<p>For example, we (the United States), illegally invaded Syria a decade ago. A war of aggression just as illegal under international law as Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There were no indignant outcries on NBC or CNN or by any of the pundits who are today absurdly crying about the "disruption of the post world war 2 order". Our troops are illegally occupying Syria, today. Over 350,000 people have died there since the war started a decade ago. We bombed (and continue to bomb) civilian infrastructure with absolutely no military value in Syria. How can politicians and pundits (not to mention my fellow citizens) cry about the depravity and the crimes of Russians when our own country is engaged in the same crimes, right now, today? Many will exclaim this is "whataboutism" to explain away their cognitive dissonance. But it's about universal standards, credibility, and hypocrisy. If we condemn Russia for their illegal war while at the same time prosecuting illegal wars of our own, we expose ourselves at liars and hypocrites who don't oppose illegal war, just Russia. It is quite sickening when our so-called leaders stand up and give sanctimonious speeches about defending "democracy and human rights" while prosecuting our own illegal wars and propping up the most vicious dictatorships in the world, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, where democracy and human rights are completely absent.<p>Again, this is not a defense of Russia's illegal war, although it will be taken as such by people consumed by the blanket propaganda saturating our society. This is a defense of universal standards, truth, morality and objective reality. If we want to be able to credibly condemn the wrongdoing of others and claim the moral authority to mete out justice, then we need to lead by example and actually earn the moral authority that we falsely claim.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/us/airstrike-us-isis-dam.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/us/airstrike-us-isis-dam....</a>
Boomers were brainwashed with cold war propaganda all their lives and don't see Russians as people. Even millenials were exposed to the same propaganda as kids.<p>Younger Americans are more balanced so far... and newer propaganda is not as effective to anyone other than the laziest... because anyone interested can look for the information from other points of views just as easily because of democratization of media and information.