The current dictator has a lot of supporters, and I mean real supporters, not people “supporting” him at gun point.
It is similar I think to the situation in the US where poor people will sometimes vote against their financial interests to support an identity.
While Lukashenko had some support prior to Aug 2020 election, it dropped to <5% at very best following his ruthless attack and torture of citizens and peaceful protestors.
The only people supporting him now are siloviki, i.e. military and police heads who directly benefit from him remaining in power. Although many within the police elites wish him out as well.
State TV was not very popular even when I lived there some 20ish years ago, and now everyone and their grandma gets their news from Telegram. Telegram usage dropped a bit because many are afraid of having it on their devices, but it is still by far the most popular way of getting news.
It's really hard to estimate the number of those who continue watching state TV. The least educated and people with disabilities watch easy-to-reach Russian propaganda channels as much if not more. Those are at least captivating ;-).
I heard this narrative before, and it strikes me as odd that you would find enough people to bully its own nation into submission - physically in the streets.
But of course that happened in Poland too, where Russian was never a widely spoken language, so clearly it’s possible.
Coup would've already happened if it could, there is very little chance for it now. Lukashenko has spent decades surrounding himself with loyalist.
With silence and little pressure from Europe and the US towards both Belarus and Russia (apart from symbolic "concerns"), things are unlikely to change.
As long as Putin is in power, Lukashenko will remain in power.
There are many political points for Putin to gain within Russia by annexing Belarus, so that's something that could very well happen in the next few months.
Putin and Lukashenko have had several meetings in regards to Belarus integration over the last few months, with Lukashenko getting $1.5B in donations to support his regime after these meetings. So this seems like the likely scenario. And the time frame is much shorter <12mo.
But it won't happen until Lukashenko thinks there is benefit for Lukashenko. On the bottom line, he doesn't care if it benefits Putin or not.
When everyone realises their mistake there is no turning back for several years to come.
The US calls Maduro a "dictator" despite being elected. The reason the US does is simple: money (which uses US ideological politics as a means-to-an-end), since he specifically stated his purpose after the death of Chávez: "Compatriots, I am not here out of personal ambition, out of vanity, or because my surname Maduro is a part of the rancid oligarchy of this country. I am not here because I represent financial groups, neither of the oligarchy nor of American imperialism ... I am not here to protect mafias nor groups nor factions. IOW, because he wouldn't sell-out his own people or his own country, so he's been marked for death/removal, his people marked for sanctions, and Fox News leads the charge smearing the man and the country to make some vampiric rich Americans more money.
Venezuela is a dictatorship whether or not Guaido won the last election. It's a dictatorship because the government took enough steps that it was impossible for anyone but Maduro to win.
I stated that Venzuala was another example where "It is similar I think to the situation in the US where poor people will sometimes vote against their financial interests to support an identity."
In Venezuala's case: poor people would rather support unsustainable state subsidies and industries, at the long term cost of running their economy and currency into the ground.
Masses of gullible idiots take much longer to realize (if ever because of ego protection) it was a bad idea after-the-fact, while students of history saw it coming. This is why direct "democracy" is a terrible idea. Governance by popularity is stupid. Ask Socrates.
I’ll just leave that thought hanging there.
NSDAP goose-stepped into office without winning a plurality of votes, almost like what happens in other countries with Electoral Colleges.
He knew that of course, otherwise why did he jailed all the opposition candidates right before elections?
I would like you to pause there for a moment and suspend what you already know to be true and factual. Just consider that this analysis does not explain the popularity of Republicans among the rural poor, but it does allow Democrats to explain this inconvenient fact away.
The sad reality is that neither party actually cares for the poor and working class, but at least the Republicans are honest about it. The rural poor generally know this, and this is why Clinton lost. They did not feel her to be an honest person.
> And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Apropos to nothing, but it feels like mainstream Western media shut up pretty quick about Myanmar when it became evident that peaceful protest wasn't a viable strategy.
Australian citizens generally cannot leave their country either, for over a year.
Given that Belarus had no COVID lockdowns or restrictions, people there have enjoyed comparatively more freedom over the past year compared to the average Western citizen.
The West also takes down airliners in attempts to apprehend journalists. If you have the wrong political opinions, you can lose your job, and be unpersoned by corporate groups with ties to the Government.
The West no longer has the moral high ground and we should be aware of the propaganda levels of the world we are now living in.
I'm not defending Russia or Belarus. They are mafia states. They are just less sophisticated operators without the global media on their side.
Travel restrictions in the west enjoy wide support and are in response to a global health emergency, not spurious political reasons put in place by someone who appears to be an illegitimate leader.
Your ‘unpersoned’ comment is laughable.
What has changed in the last year to prompt these protests against him anyway?
The obvious answer is nothing, that the agitation is stirred up by the West, perhaps since he didn't bend the knee and agree to COVID lockdowns despite being offered $940 million:
https://eng.belta.by/president/view/belarus-president-unwill...
Meanwhile, lockdown in the West has clearly failed - Sweden and Ukraine, with weak or no lockdowns, have a lower per-capita deathtoll than countries that did lockdown: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
And deaths are only up 6% YoY in Sweden and Ukraine, basically in line with the aging of the population and the effects of a once-a-decade flu variant (similar in mortality to Swine Flu wave in 2009).
The West is trying to start another color revolution in Belarus, as they did in Ukraine, where the US Government officials were on the street handing out sandwiches to protestors.
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2013/1213/Russia-crie...
Is Ukraine better off since their revolution? Yes, I think so (I live here). Would Belarus be better off without Lukashenko? Possibly. However, since 2014, several million Ukrainians have fled the country to work in the EU, and a large chunk of territory has been lost.
I'm suggest that there are layers of deception and propaganda at work here that we, as intelligent IT personnel, should be aware of if we want to comment on these articles.
If you see travel restrictions during a pandemic as tyranny, I'm not sure I can help you.
Scroll through the timeline of these Belarusians, who are literally risking their lives by exposing and combating these situations. Really take some time to grasp the situation there.
https://twitter.com/HannaLiubakova https://twitter.com/franakviacorka https://mobile.twitter.com/Tsihanouskaya
Individual liberty is truly a precious thing.