War propaganda often says more about the accuser than the adversary it’s aimed at. For many years western media spun a grim and extremely specific fairy tale of Soviet warfighting; the evil communist regime rounds up its own population into padlocked cattle cars and sends them into pointless human wave attacks against the stoic “I was just doing my job” German soldiers. As implausible as this scenario might sound, it’s fervently believed across the western world. Like the “Iraqi soldiers throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators” and “Libyan viagra rape squads” stories, it’s only believable to a person who, consciously …