Yes, they absolutely do, and the threat of either state or political violence keeps most people in line.
> that's far too expensive to be total and widespread.
That's true for all criminal acts, everywhere. The US doesn't even clear the majority of its violent crime. Law enforcement of all types and in all cases works via deterrence rather than perfect enforcement.
They do, but that's not the primary enforcement mechanism.
This is demonstrably false.
More recent examples: In Russia, they jailed a lawmaker for being anti-war. They jailed many thousands of protesters for the same thing. In China, almost any criticism of the government comes with the threat of being jailed. (More recently, they've jailed many pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong.) In Myanmar they recently executed pro-democracy activists.
I'm sure you can easily find similar examples throughout every totalitarian regime -- assuming that people are not too afraid to make them public. Violence/jail, it turns out, is an effective deterrence.
> They jailed many thousands of protesters for the same thing.
The same thing being "being anti-war". Well, this one is veritably incorrect, in fact, the opposite is true -- I haven't heard of a single person being jailed for being anti-war. There was a woman who showed an anti-war banner on national television during prime-time, she was fined about $500, Marina Ovsyannikova. So, what's your source?
> In Russia, they jailed a lawmaker for being anti-war.
Care to share the source here as well? What's his name?
> https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ovsyannikova-yashin-ukraine/3...
The politician jailed for opposing the war:
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/25/vladimir-...
Many thousands of protesters have been detained:
> https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/world/europe/police-russi...
> https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/7/15/what-happened-to-ru...
If you have any doubts, go ahead and protest for a week straight. Just invoice me for the $500 fine. Nothing to worry about, right?
As for the thousands of protesters being jailed -- you make the same (deliberate?) mistake again -- they are detained, not jailed. And then released with a fine. And again -- they are detained not because they are anti-war but because their protests are illegitimate -- they are not properly registered with the authorities. And guess what? It works the same way in the USA!
Makes your comment look in a totally different light now, doesn't it?
Oh, and if you didn't know, RFERL is directly sponsored by the US government while WaPo and NYT are covert fronts for the Democratic Party so anything you post from them should be taken with a truckload of salt.
The situation in Russia right now in regards of Ukraine war is very simple -- everybody has rallied around Putin and against the West, everybody knows that this war is a proxy war against USA ands Ukraine is just an unlucky puppet. If you see some media telling you otherwise, you should know outright that it lies.
But the whole conundrum started much earlier, in my understanding, when western elites realized that Putin is not going to dance to their tune as readily as Eltsin did and wants Russia to be truly sovereign. The timeline of proxy warfare would start with 2003 Rose revolution in Georgia, then 2004 Orange revolution in Ukraine, then Putin's Munich speech in 2007, then Ukraine coup in 2014 and subsequent retaliation of Russia by taking Crimea and then today. In the interim Russia also meddled with Syria but that's far enough from Russian border to disregard as irrelevant to the Ukraine situation where Ukraine is right on the border of Russia. It's the second Cuban crisis basically. USA created a puppet state on Russian border and Russia obviously doesn't want that. Ideas that Russia wants to conquer Europe or restore USSR are idiotic and paranoid. What Russia wants is for US/NATO to get the heck away from its borders -- as was promised when USSR dissolved.
https://www.vox.com/22900113/nato-ukraine-russia-crisis-clin...
You mean when the pro Russian puppet was ousted for going back on joining the EU and ran away to his masters in Russia?.
> Ideas that Russia wants to conquer Europe or restore USSR are idiotic and paranoid.
Then the Russians are idiotic and paranoid because it’s pretty much the exact rhetoric that they are putting out.
They keep saying they can take Poland if they want to and that Poland is next, if that’s not about the USSR what is it about?.
> What Russia wants is for US/NATO to get the heck away from its borders -- as was promised when USSR dissolved.
This was a promise that was never made.
Oh, and Ovsyannikova was fined again this week for ~$800, that's the extent of "anti-war oppression" in Russia.
I find it rather suspicious that you did not mention the lecture in your reply -- have you watched the video? Any thoughts?
This isn’t a war against the west, it’s a war of aggression waged by Russia that is killing, torturing and raping civilians. This is a war of survival for Ukraine, if they lose they cease to exist.
The Russians have repeatedly said that Ukraine isn’t a real country.
The only way that this is a war against the west is that the west is supplying Ukraine against the genocidal Russian army.
Most "totalitarian" countries don't function by literally throwing people in prison or beating them for saying Bad Things: that's far too expensive to be total and widespread. It functions by removing people from positions of media exposure; by denying them access to physical or network media; by ascribing implicit or explicit social credit scores that governs access to resources. None of those things are violent and rarely even explicitly ordered by the State. In fact, "no one has the right to a platform to hurt society/the nation" is how those totalitarian regimes typically justify their repression. And they're still every bit as much a restriction on freedom of speech.