Russia desperately needs another revolution.
I don't know how you are proficient in russian history, but we have a thing called гонка на лафетах. At some point soviet administration grew that old they all died off in a decade, without coming up with a next gen of rulers. I feel like in a coming decade there would be a lot of funerals and the new chaotic 90s for Russia, Iran, that would be very painful for these nations, but it'd be another chance to start it right, at least as a lib democracy. People say I'm too dumb and optimistic, but there's still no successor to Putin and he's born in 1952, and the clocks are ticking. He and his friends are just to afraid to lose their place so they don't bother with that, meaning it would be a complete hell when they'd die one by one.
This framing sounds like great man theory, which is popular with liberals but not with historical materialists.
that's interesting to hear from your perspective, thanks for the insight. When I read these headlines I always wonder what real Russians think
Not another neoliberal shock therapy revolution, like Atlantic Council / New American Century stans want, it doesn’t.
I'm just now making the connection that the overtly fascist "shock doctrine" is directly tied to the neoliberal "shock therapy" (kind of like how "third way liberalism" and "third position fascism" have the same definition)
When you look at what happened to Chile, you come to realize that neoclassical / neoliberal / Chicago School economics and neocolonialism are very closely related.
IMO, neoclassical economics is a wildly successful psyop, such that it has become hegemonic in all capitalist countries. It’s an absolute garbage theory and yet is canon at every university, outside of perhaps China and the few other socialist states. Marxist economist Michael Hudson has helped me unlearn a lot of junk economics.
I unlearned junk economics through youtube and memes 😂
Radhika Desai & Michael Hudson’s Geopolitical Economy Hour YouTube series is excellent.
Correct. Bad revolution is bad but good revolution would be good.
Definitely not one which Alexei "Caucasians are cockroaches" Navalny would have anything to do with.
Weird how western media is all over Navalny when Assange is being tortured in solitary as we speak. I guess the reason is shared values https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yba-LJ8clgc
also some mainstream western media reporting on Navalny
In 2021, a BBC article reported even Amnesty International was forced to strip Navalny's "prisoner of conscience" status for the violence and hate he unremorsefully promoted https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56181084
That same month, US government-funded Radio Free Europe likewise was forced to concede Navalny's extremist background https://www.rferl.org/a/navalny-failure-to-renounce-nationalist-past-support/31122014.html
What was Navalny's alleged crime and what is Assange's alleged crime?
Navalny is a far right nationalist and white supremacist and was charged with establishing an extremist community. The RFA and BBC articles I linked in the comment you're replying to provide the details. Assange's crime was reporting on US military murdering civilians in cold blood.
I've already written a long comment about him and his significance to Russia as I see it living here, with all his failings. You can check it in my post history.
He had a lot of shitstains on his white clothes, but what's important - is that he shut up about any of his politics and acted as a clever manager who took everyone in opposition to establishment together, for once they didn't fight each other and acted as a one. It wasn't enough as we see now, and they started to fight each other once again after he was incarcerated, but he tried. And I respect him for that. His death in captivity isn't right.
I didn't have time to research what Assange got at that moment, so I'd not comment on that.
Navalny is a shit stain of a human being and anybody who defends him or tries to white wash him is utterly morally bankrupt. He has never been an actual opposition to Putin, nor has he gained any popularity. And that's a very good thing because his views are absolutely heinous. The fact that you respect a fascist should make you do a bit of self reflection.
I love when all my racist fascists unify into a single opposition party. Surely they won't do anything untoward like, say, forcing Reichstag members to vote for the Enabling Act in 1933 to give them "temporary" powers, right?
Is not "shared values," the main reason is that Navalny pushes the current USA narrative/propaganda of "Putin bad." Not defending or saying Putin is a saint, sometimes, the best way to push Propaganda messaging is to use convient truths when applicable or when they align. This is not new, like at all. Russia, China, the UK, et al do it.
Assange does not push that narrative, quite the opposite that the USA Goverment can be highly hypocritical and that it can also commit war crimes and that it spies on its citizens, like what Snowden revealed, too. This is why the USA has tried to made Assange's life a total living hell and the main stream media barely touches on it.
Remember when the NYT, among others sold lies from the Feds to push the war on Iraq? I 'member.
Not the best bit this touches on it.
https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its-iraq-war-shame/
What were his politics?
Take it with a grain of salt as I'm from here and I can't be objective about him or local politics.
At the start of his political career before 2011 it was all over the place, including nationalistic marshes, pro-gun rhetoric and basic agitation against funding national republics of Caucasus (they have negative balance and are helped by dotations from the center). Not to the levels of actual fascist like NOD or Dugin fans, but still very shitty. It's still argued if he was opportunistic or genuinelly supported all of that, and it's pointless imho. I can see most average persons from some Volgograd or Tambov saying the same or worse. Yet - he was caught on camera and it's forever archived.
After co-triggering Bolotnaya and other demonstrations he dropped that pov and got onto the platform of fighting corruption, to get honest, legit elections and tried to elect himself and other oppositioners into power. Since that, he came to be pro-European and anti-Putin politician. His program was basically that — let's retire these old friends and partners, who in his opinion are a middle between a mafia and a late soviet nomenclature. and see if a peaceful transfer to some more liberal Russia is possible. He wasn't all that savvy about making an original program, but he was a talented organizer and public speaker that put a lot of orgs and people together for numerous protest actions, he became a face of a brand for all public anti-establishment talks, a man and a vehicle if you will.
The other bad thing many remember was in 2014, where he was asked about the faith of Crimea and he said 'it's not a sandwich for it to casually change hands' for what he had backlash for years to come, even though he tried to walk it back and explain many times after that. It too was a stain on his reputation, but imho after seeing how failing ratings of Putin jumped over Crimea's capture and how regular people celebrated it (and forgot that Luhansk and Donetsk were on fire at the same time), he could've thought he'd shoot himself in the foot by vouching against it – although Nemtsov, the soon-to-be-dead oppositioner I liked more, did just that.
I'd say he doesn't really have any politics, so he's probably a liberal europe-centric politician. If he could become the next pres, he wouldn't probably change anything but introducing democratisation and transparency of the government. His value for me and other angry russians is that he collected a lot of other oppositional persons who usually waste all their time arguing with each other and nitpicking each other's words. He's not the best, like mentioned Nemtsov or Novodvorskaya, but he was alive and he did something when most were passive.
I hope I answered your curiosity. If you held some vision of him asking that (I think you do, since you are from lemmy.ml) lay it there. This person was very complicated and there were many different opinions about him from a kremlin agent, to a fascist, to a savior, to a rubber duck. Whatever, I feel like he didn't deserve dying in prison like that, thus I was very displeased hearing he's dead.
Nice answer, thank you.
Let's be honest, Navalny was a nationalist right wing scumbag who thought 90s reforms were a good thing. There was zero chance of him ever becoming a prominent political figure in Russia because liberalism is a discredited ideology for most Russians today.
You put so much of your own views into your vision of russian history so I'd like to do the same.
In the 80s USSR was a dying corpse striving for a change. It's dead was pronounced in many ways, from european republics trying to get independence to самиздат and the Leningrad's rock club gaining popularity.
Russian politics in the 90s were all wrong, but not for the reasons you think. There was a wave of privatisation of factories, that could be okay on the paper, but it all ended up by respectable partners buying all of the stonks. That oligarchic rule is what we are struggling with right now. That's the foundation of Putin's Russia.
Yeah, privatization was the problem, and having lived through it personally, I know what things were like before Putin took over. Calling USSR a dying corpse striving for change is frankly absurd. USSR had problems to be sure, but liberalization was not the solution, and that's precisely what led to privatization and Putin's Russia today. USSR could've taken the route that China took and stayed communist. Liberalism is the actual cancer in Russia today.
Kek. Russia isn't cursed because it chosed the liberal course. It's cursed because it's deeply corrupted, just like China rn.
Muslims are cockroaches, Crimea deserved it, deep nationalism.
Basically, fascism with a 21st century coat of paint.
There's an awesome doc: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/navalny
If you find Five Eyes hagiographic propaganda to be awesome, then sure.
Heartbreaking: Elon Musk is right: Bellingcat's a psy-op
How Bellingcat Launders National Security State Talking Points into the Press
Loads of reading to do. TY
was pronounced dead
Must have gotten a surprise visit from the Juche necromancer
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