I actually haven’t considered that perspective before but that could also very well be an angle!

That yes, politically that’s all skewed, but I’d sooner be looking at things like: (off the top of my head)

It’s not much, but it doesn’t feel like it paints the West in a squeaky clean light like games usually tend to; a game where they wouldn’t do that nowadays would probably be amazing (but sadly not sell very well or even be allowed to launch I’d imagine).

I personally found that Modern Warfare (2019) took some inspiration from the “guts” they had back when World at War came out. Sure, it’s still adapted to a Western audience and primarily sucks up to the generic narrative, but it came across as being extremely gritty and realistic in some aspects, especially with regard to who’s “fighting the good fight”.

I felt it really set out a scene for players to think “hey, maybe we aren’t really the inherently good guys after all here in the West” over various cues and I was fairly content with that perception, even though your average player would miss the point completely (which is ironic) and keep on parroting their “oh yeah, spec ops, badass, U.S. Marines take the lead! hoorah!” shenanigans.

Also, even though Modern Warfare 2 (2022) was by comparison a bit worse, the raid scene where the containers (and their origins) are discovered? That also felt pretty impactful, even though, again, most would sadly not bat an eye or be able to figure it out.

It’s pretty self-explanatory that spineless Western media outlets are in dire need of content and public support to get their clicks and image boost. Even if someone were to bring up the point that the shelling is in fact not done by Russians, it’ll go down the typical propaganda blur process, either:

• getting outright ignored, and on social platforms, the posts are seen as “pro-Putin” and are automatically disliked, censored, etc; or
• getting sent farther down the rabbit hole under the accusation that it’s “pro-Putin propaganda” and then a narrative is slowly built up about how they’re in fact the ones to be correct.

For the last point: look up the Karl-Marx-Allee and see its history with regard to being “Stalin’s bathroom”. In short, about a decade ago, a person thought it’d be funny to claim this boulevard in Berlin was called “Stalin’s bathroom” (due to some marble decoration) during the DDR times.

In the similar, repetitive fashion of anti-communist perspectives that the West takes on, an editor found it to be “credible enough”. It was then rooted into the Wikipedia page and as a result led to a lot of media exposure, cementing the fact it was “Stalin’s bathroom”.

The same person tried to edit their joke out years later and the request got declined by a Wikipedia administrator. They later came out to be a journalist who detailed the situation in full, and that is the only reason it got enough awareness to be fixed. At the same time, it could have been highly possible the journalist would have been called a liar and not been trusted, meaning we’d still think this joke was real to this day.

Media ethics and digital competence are imperative to have for this exact reason. Too many people however simply refuse to or cannot acknowledge these things, either by own choice or not. It is really sad.

I think getting !redditactionfront@lemmygrad.ml in as well (although their activity is hard to gauge) could be a good idea, or at least it seems like that’s what that community is designed to do.

The mentality I’d personally go with would be to very subtly and skirt along the rules, since I’d assume they are very keen to delete and ban any users that even remotely question their perspectives. I don’t see bigoted anti-communists being very willing to debate matters that are too complex beyond their understanding to begin with, hence bans and censorship is the way to go for them.

Organizing something over Discord could potentially also be cool, i.e. among a large and trusted group, make just-barely-fitting posts and comments on the subreddit and have them pinged in order to get them upvoted quickly, which could award them more legitimacy or vision than a regular post. Would definitely be tedious but possibly effective/worth considering.