That’s the thing about today: People don’t remember that all through the 1990s, America meddled in Russia’s politics in just about every way you can imagine: it helped fix elections, flooded the country with untraceable money, secured international aid to help “our guys” stay in power, funded opposition activists, whitewashed horrible human rights abuses...you name it, America did it. Hell, Clinton’s Treasury Department even wrote presidential decrees. They also helped design Russia’s government apparatus and capital markets structures.This is why I've always laughed at the hilarious russiagate accusations. The Russians themselves find these accusations incredibly insulting -- while they have ample justification to do so to avoid a return to their prior position, they would prefer to see themselves as the "better men". And the part that makes it worst is that Americans are totally unaware of how bad the Russians got screwed by the US; this has lead to a sort of national inferiority complex which enables some of the worst abuses of the Putin regime.
It’s hard to imagine a more direct control over a foreign country’s political system — short of a straight-up physical occupation.
...Millions died premature deaths. The Lancet estimated that 4 million people died [excess deaths] just in the first half of the 1990s
America — at a moment when it could have done pretty much anything in Russia — went with the scummiest, most barbaric option possible. It callously oversaw mass murder and theft and plunder only seen in times of war. And forget taking responsibility for it, no one in power has even acknowledged that it happened.
It sure seems like, and it is heavily implied (because they’ll never just come out and state this) here, these charlatans have finally acknowledged how they’ve been misleading themselves, and you, for more than a decade about the real state of the labor market therefore the overall economy.As always, the FED flunks. Dumbest guys in the room. The caption on the above chart makes it clear that they've blinded themselves in their propaganda re-definitions of inflation and unemployment. This is why they can do nothing but fail.
...for example, the popular initiative which called for a reduction in military spending and the use of the money for social purposes, was canceled. The government's argument was that the financing of the army and the financing of social affairs are two independent issues that cannot be conflated in one referendum.As always, rules for thee, not the gubbmint.
The argument sounds reasonable. But then one notices that some of the constitutional changes initiated by parliament are cheerfully mixing changes in various parts of the constitution. The system is unbalanced in this respect and the problem has not been solved yet.
In Eastern Europe and, I guess, in many other places, reporting to authorities is seen as morally wrong. There is a kind of stubborn popular solidarity in resistance to power. We may have inherited that attitude from the times when ratting on someone meant that men in leather trench coats arrived early next morning and dragged the victim to Gulag. (I've even heard a story about a small Slovak town where, shortly after World War II, people began reporting their personal enemies to the Russians, claiming that they were Nazi collaborators. Russians had no clue and incarcerated every reported person. The feud spiraled out of control and several hundred people ended up in jail.)The Swiss will be eaten alive when they get run over by the next Napoleon.
Swiss, on the other hand, don't perceive authorities as necessarily hostile. If a neighbor violates a rule (and people have quite likely voted for that rule or at least haven't objected when it was introduced) he should be warned first, and if that doesn't help, reporting him to the authorities is seen as fully justified. Nothing terrible is going to happen anyway. Most likely, the authorities are just going to ask the person in question to behave.
The Belarusian military is dramatically different from the Ukrainian military which had practically lost its combat readiness decades ago, which was then purged from all real patriots, and which was fantastically corrupt. In contrast, the comparatively small Belarusian military is, by all accounts, very well-trained, decently equipped and commanded by very competent officers.Given Luka's Severan response so far (feed the soldiers, live in peace), I doubt seriously the color revolution has a chance.
