Noocratic Callipolis wrote:Does patriotic propaganda from a young age (primary school) make those kids better soldiers who they get older and enlist?
no
making them racist will increase the volunteer number a lot though t. PLAGF
multi million man ostensibly has a draft, never used it
USA would need a giga draft just to round out a million man army today
propaganda and "patriotism" don't function without racism because racism focuses inner anger on external threats instead of on fellow countrymen
this is why the US's propaganda is so much weaker than the PRC's domestically and why the PLAGF is able to meet its recruiting quota while the US Army is forever struggling
generally speaking communist countries are typically quite good at internal domestic propaganda though since control of mass media is a raison d'etre of democratic centralism
the only way to make them "better soldiers"(???) is to have them practice killing though
"racism" in this case means more general xenophobia leveraged with a constructed or pre-existing national or supra-national identity tbh
it's a bit more complex than that in reality since nations tend to exist a lot more commonly than polities so the interactions will be locally minded, but the gist is that people who hate things outside hate themselves less