> His son will soon feel a taste of state fascist indoctrination, it starts in kindergarten now in Russia.
While I certainly don't know any specifics about what things are like in Russia, I suspect this is not so different from most other countries in the world. Here in America, children are made to pledge their allegiance to the flag of the US every morning with a hand over their heart. This is before they have any concept of what the words "pledge" and "allegiance" even mean.
Can you remind me when was the last time US waged a conquest war under the pretext that neighbor state has no sovereignty right because people there are not a real nation? And to strengthen that point killed tens of thousands of civilians?
Maybe not that exact pretext, but I can certainly point towards similar things done by the US military and intelligence agencies. Look at Iraq and "enhanced interrogation" in Guantanamo Bay. Go back a few more years, and we can observe cases where unethical experimentation was done on America's own citizens (e.g., MKUltra, the Tuskegee experiments, etc).
I would like you to do two things for me, please. First, find some materials describing mandatory out-of-curriculum patriotic classes, introduced September 2022 in schools in Russia. They call it something like "Important conversation" or "Talk about important things". It would be better if you get to it yourself, also I read about it in Russian and not sure which English sources to recommend.
Second, make sure that you are not engaged in a textbook case of whataboutism[0]. Then please tell me what you think of our conversation, concerning these two topics. Thank you!
My point here was that patriotic indoctrination of children is not out of the norm in any country. You may be right that Russia is exceptional in that regard, but you haven't shared any information in what way.
As an aside, I personally consider dismissing points as whataboutism to be an overly and unjustly used deflection in discussions. It's an easy word to throw around when meaningful hypocrisy is called out, for example. Or in the case when the argument itself specifically is about the non-exceptional nature of something, as in the current case. I would also remind you that it was you who had specifically requested examples of similar behaviors in the US. Dismissing the response as whataboutism when you specifically asked for it is a bit unfair.
In the end, I don't have strong opinions or insights to share on this subject. I just wanted to voice my issue with the characterization of my reply as whataboutism, but that itself is a tangential topic on a tangential topic of a tangential topic, so the discussion isn't really worth furthering here.
While I certainly don't know any specifics about what things are like in Russia, I suspect this is not so different from most other countries in the world. Here in America, children are made to pledge their allegiance to the flag of the US every morning with a hand over their heart. This is before they have any concept of what the words "pledge" and "allegiance" even mean.