I live in Turkey and we have a similar state propaganda (though fortunately not war). The government successfully collapsed the economy but they control the mainstream media and their supporters still blame (and truly believe in what they say) the opposition for everything bad that the government does.
Controlling people's mindset is apparently easier than it seems when you control media.
So what about Syria? Kurds are another topic you might want to look into (both inside and outside the Turkey). Azerbaijan-Armenia proxy war? It's not as easy as you think.
Syria and refugees are part of a bigger plan. It's not like the government suddenly became philantrophic and wanted to help people running from war.
For decades Kurds and Turks lived happily together. Again, government's agenda is to divide and conquer so they made Kurds "enemy" to some (gullible) part of the population.
Surely it's not "easy" though my point stands: when you control mainstream media you can easily manipulate enough people. Current authoratorian government does this in Turkey, and even if there is also many enlightened people, we are just relatively minority.
Which decades were those?
Sure there are sometimes conflicts but most of them are government propaganda trying to divide otherwise perfectly happy people.
It's not even comparable to what's happening in Ukraine.
"Living in war", at least for me, implies being physically present in an active war zone that has been bombarded with military and explosions, not some conflict at the other end of the country which is mainly affecting another country.
(Just for clarity: I personally do NOT support war in any way, either the one affecting Ukraine nor Syria, regardless of the initiator)
The crackdown on non-state media, especially if it is not exactly in line with the state propaganda message, makes it harder to do that.
> Especially if they also start to see a deterioration in their quality of life...
A narrative that explains and places blame elsewhere for that is fairly easy with complete control of information, especially since it being due to economic warfare by the West is true (and how even some Western leaders have described it.)