Relatives of the soldiers gathered to lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, outside the Kremlin walls in the Alexander Garden. The demonstration marked 500 days since President Vladimir Putin in September 2022 ordered the “partial mobilisation” of up to 300,000 military reservists in the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine.
The call-up prompted more than 260,000 men to flee the nation, with Moscow reportedly setting up drafting offices at borders to intercept fleeing reservists.
That is true. Over time we also got our new untreated depressions as nations too. But here I said it. I stated that we have that and we could/should talk about. And act upon it. That is not possible in Russia, North-Korea and China and some other autocratic nations. I would be in jail or my post deleted. Renting a Podium with 5 speakers to talk about this topic in a public talk is impossible. Printing a book or documentation about the Events is not possible. A russian or a chinese citizen can come to europe and public a book named “Why democracy failed!”. I can not publish a book like that about china or todays russia on why their system failed. My point is: I would argue, that we in the west do activly have discourses about many things. Including history, the past, Society, Roles, Emancipation, Gender, Power, Rights, Social, Health, Religion, Massacres, Local Politics and National- and Foreign Politics and many more. We are not doing the best job to totally reflect every aspect of our doing, misdoing and unnoticed misdoing, but we are very vocal and leave people the right to write and document about many topics from the past and the present (without jail!) and allow also a demand for certain rights in the future to give society a trajectory on where it wants to develop into.
Russia does not.
I agree that the possibility to voice contrary opinions is lacking in those countries and that is a big difference to the West. Of course it is a vital necessity for democarcy, that people can voice different views and demand a new look at history.
I am deeply worried though, that in the western countries the pathologies are equally dangerous as they are more subversive and efficiently denied as pathologies, even in the face of contrary opinion. We see it in the casualness in which the US is toppling governments, or invading countries. We see it in the British crackdown on climate protests and similiar actions in other countries, like Germany. We see it in the prevalence of racism and antisemitism and the normality of denying human rights, like in Germanys far right deportation plans and the new deportation laws.
It is all to easy for democracies to develop and maintain pathologies as the system is easily considered immune to them. When and how gravely those pathologies express is often just a matter of fragile stability on the political and economic level, that can change quickly, as we saw with Trump, Johnson, Macron and all the other vile leaders the western nations have elected in the past few years.
That is why i think we shouldn’t focus on Russias actions in terms of pathologies. The pathologies play a role, but they are easy to create the image of the pathological others and the healthy us. This makes us all the more blind to when we (western nations) commit similiar acts.
Absolutely agree. But I would mention, that the climate crackdown in the UK would had created tensions while still inside the EU. People could call a EU instance to talk about these events and the disintegration of protest rights to ask for commissions and maybe even sanctions. But they are not anymore in the Union. It is an island in the Atlantic that next higher power is now the sky above them. People wanted the power (or were told by russia to “claim back your land”) and are now feeling the authoritarian changes that a EU can only comment on, but not act. And in Russia someone is delighted that this worked as fine as his work on the US.
My point is: If a big and strong country like russia is not distracted because it is working on its own topics and prosperity, but turning his whole attention on everyone other but his own people, it has a enormous scale to make others fail or at least stumble. If the guy in the Bike-Race decides that he has not to win the race by finishing first, but by throwing sticks in the wheel of the others, we have to acknowledge that our bruises are not because our bike is bad designed and unstable, but maybe that spokes are really weak compared to sticks.