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I mean at the end of the day, Navalny is almost certainly never going to rule Russia or meaningfully direct its politics, if he puts his energy towards pissing off Putin and making him look bad that's at least somethign which isn't actively bad he might have done otherwise given what his views and politics seem to be.
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Jan 21, 2021 18:36
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thekeeshman posted:Yeah he's basically riding the tiger, if he gets off the tiger will eat him. The tiger in this case being whichever the next strongman is, though as far as I know there's no obvious successor. So he'll be super rich until he isn't, and at that point I guess the best he can hope for is that his kids are overseas with a lot of stolen money in cayman islands bank accounts. I think Diocletian cracked the code on autocratic regimes, you need to strip away all the pretenses of republicanism, accountability and popular sovereingty and instead present a nakedly despotic regime wrapped up in ceremony and divinity. Then you can retire to grow cabbages.
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Jan 21, 2021 21:41
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TheTrend posted:you should maybe look up the end of Diocletian's life. Sure the system fell apart around him as he retired and people pestered him to return to the throne and he probably killed himself. At least got a few years of cabbages. Sucrose posted:edit: How did we even resist the ideological influence of the Nazis? I mean, it's not like the United States was a shining beacon of equality at the time. Not that I'm claiming your average Joe American would have been ok with the Holocaust or anything, but that wasn't revealed until much later. When the Nazis were first gaining power in Germany, what was it that made the American government and public go "Yo, gently caress that." (I'm aware there were some Nazi-sympathetic factions in the US, but they lost the battle for control, badly) It's not as if Nazi Germany actually put alot of effort into practicing soft power and actively trying to export its ideology in any case. They were almost solely devoted to the idea of military conquqest and the propaganda they produced was more or less exclusively intended for domestic consumption where they controlled the branches of government and the flow of information. Like there were many far right extremist movements in Europe and much of the rest of the world in 20s and 30s, and after the success of the fascist movements in Italy and Germany (though the degree to which you can actually talk about a unified fascism in a way that makes it coherent is very much up for debate) and in Central and Eastern Europe, inspired and gave impetus and legitimacy to similar movements (who would often model themselves on the Italians and Germans) in other countries, though these movements by and large were still homegrown, when Germany or Italy attempted to direct, fund or aid such movements it was often incompetently and clumsily handled and most of all underfunded (the exception comes when the aid was directly military in nature). It's worth noting that Nazi Germany did not possess an impressive intelligence apparatus, lack of funding, training and recruitment of agents is the big thing here. They were almost incapable of operating abroad, especially when the war started and even domestically for all their brutality the Gestapo and other domestic security agencies did not have an intelligence structure even remotely comparable to that of the Soviet Union or Britain, both of which employed agents at the top of German industry, politics and military. What these security services were somewhat good at, repression, was driven and aided almost solely by civilian denunciation and the agencies did not have the manpower or resources and equipment to do this actively except by mass indiscriminate arrests on the basis of factors such as ethnic background or place of residence. The United States ending up fighting against Nazi Germany more or less comes down to, I think, the US's relationsip with Britain developed before and during WW1 and how alot of influential people in the United States continued to see Britain as America's close ally and most important trading partner. As for the UK fighting Germany, that comes down, more than anything else to basically just a realpolitik commitment to upholding the balance of power in Europe that British imperialists had emrbaced for hundreds of years, where it was thought that any one power gaining hegemonic power would present a serious, possibly insurmountable threat to British economic and strategic interests. Alot of people in Britian did have a certain disdain for the Nazis's open brutality and disregard for the rules of "civilized society" both domestically and in foreign policy, but they pretty much viewed the Soviet Union and its authoritarianism in a similar manner (and in terms of ideological influence and the abiltiy to recruit sympathetic agents abroad, people were already aware then that the Soviet Union was far more formidable than Germany). The difference, as they would have seen it, was that German military buildup and ridiculusly transparent ambitions of military conquest and disregard for diplomatic norms meant that they were threatening to disrupt the entire European balance of powers, especially after 1938. Arch-imperialists and anti-bolsheviks like Churchill were among the first to argue in favor of seeking an alliance with Stalin against Hitler, and that was not because their ideological outlook had changed. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Jan 22, 2021 |
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Jan 22, 2021 07:04
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1redflag posted:Also the house is, like, comically gigantic How does it compare to like Tsarskoe Selo? Though that place didn't have an underground ice rink, though I doubt Putin's palace has a room made out of amber or a huge-rear end chess made out of solid pure silver.
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Jan 22, 2021 07:35
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