The Bad Guys Are Winning

[Algernon Moncrieff]

The Atlantic

Tsikhanouskaya says she and many others naively believed that under this pressure, the dictator would just give up. “We thought he would understand that we are against him,” she told me. “That people don’t want to live under his dictatorship, that he lost the elections.” They had no other plan.

At first, Lukashenko seemed to have no plan either. But his neighbors did. On August 18, a plane belonging to the FSB, the Russian security services, flew from Moscow to Minsk. Soon after that, Lukashenko’s tactics underwent a dramatic change. Stephen Biegun, who was the U.S. deputy secretary of state at the time, describes the change as a shift to “more sophisticated, more controlled ways to repress the population.” Belarus became a textbook example of what the journalist William J. Dobson has called “the dictator’s learning curve”: Techniques that had been used successfully in the past to repress crowds in Russia were seamlessly transferred to Belarus, along with personnel who understood how to deploy them. Russian television journalists arrived to replace the Belarusian journalists who had gone on strike, and immediately stepped up the campaign to portray the demonstrations as the work of Americans and other foreign “enemies.” Russian police appear to have supplemented their Belarusian colleagues, or at least given them advice, and a policy of selective arrests began. As Vladimir Putin figured out a long time ago, mass arrests are unnecessary if you can jail, torture, or possibly murder just a few key people. The rest will be frightened into staying home. Eventually they will become apathetic, because they believe nothing can change.

[woodsprite]

1. And the same could happen here if Trump were to have a 2nd term. nt

[Irish_Dem]

2. A version of this has already happened here.

A media which doesn't report reality.

Democrats demonized.

Apathetic public.

[uponit7771]

3. +1, the biggest issue with US M$M is the deference shown to FOX "News" as a legit outlet

... and not a text book extension of a political movement.

Even Obama incorrectly described CNN as the opposing side of FOX at one time but by the end of his admin he and his staff were directly pointing at FOX was a politically entrenched info outlet.

Someone in the Biden admin needs to make the hard choice to stop treating them as if they're not state propangda and kick them out of the places were impartial news sources belong.

[avebury]

5. It is happening here already on a state by state basis.

Just look at the Republican controlled states and the bills that they are enacting.

Rethugs have not been able to complete it on a national level - yet, so they are taking a state by state approach. If they get enough states, they may be able to complete the take over on a national level.

[Irish_Dem]

6. At first it was federal, the PutinGOP takeover is now state by state.

Putin installed many GOP officials in the US congress.

And a sitting US president who installed people throughout the federal government.

So the takeover has been federal to a large extent and now moving to the states.

[JHB]

4. It's been underway since the 70s...

...as our own billionaire and multimillionaire oligarchs established multiple means of getting their spin out and confounding or suppressing views opposed to it.

Funding think tanks to generate material for op-eds and for conservative politicians to cite authoritatively in sppeches and comments

Founding media to "get the real story out

Buying up existing media outlets

Grooming an entire generation of propagandists

Labeling any non-conservative outlet as "lying liberal media"

etc.