You said that western europe is pro democracy and eastern europe is pro Russia, which is an idea that I thought missed out on the historical context.

Criminals should still be shown compassion. Eye for an eye makes the world blind.

Western Europe does not have a monopoly on democracy and did not invent it, nor is Eastern Europe destined to restart 300 more years of Russian empire. Human rights and political progress does not care about geography.

Western countries like Spain and Germany were dictatorships for the majority of the 20th century and countries like Poland and Finland were democratic republics for large parts of the 20th century.

I think it’s closed-minded to think of democracy as a western thing, and Russian imperialism as an Eastern thing, and it contributes to the political divide between the EU and its neighbors RU, BY, UA, MD, and GE.

I mean that the term refers to regions that were formerly USSR/Warsaw Pact/communist for up to 50-80 years in the 20th century. What does Estonia have in common with Slovenia? What does Poland have in common with Georgia? The Baltics, Central Europe, Balkans, Caucuses, Black Sea, Karelia, Dnieper/Kiev region, Volga/Moscow region, and the Urals are all distinct regions with distinct history and culture that shouldn’t be lumped together as “Eastern Europe”

Western Europe has commonalities like germanic/romance languages, feudalism, lasting French/German/British empires, and the origins of the EU, which can’t be said for Eastern. It may even be more accurate to describe Western Europe as Scandinavian, West Germanic, French, Mediterranean, and British Islands. Either way, dividing Europe into an arbitrary East/West is just chauvinist neo-colonialism by Western Europe, where the countries of the EU project are treating the eastern frontier as a poorer, less developed “other”. The EU project is meant to unite all Europeans as equals in democracy, and alienating former communist countries undermines that.

Video essay on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVXgqZIsViI

Eastern Europe just means formerly Russian, It does not have a geographic or cultural meaning.

Sweden up until recently had freedom of organization protected in the constitution. This was changed in a recent constitutional amendment at the request of Turkey, as a prerequisite to join NATO. Turkey demanded that Sweden arrest “PKK members” (aka journalists that Erdogan doesn’t like), and to show support, both the Andersson and Kristersson administrations revived a constitutional amendment from 2021 and pushed it through, making it illegal to be a member of a terrorist organization.

https://www.regeringen.se/rattsliga-dokument/statens-offentliga-utredningar/2021/03/sou-202115/

https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2022/6/pdf/220628-trilat-memo.pdf

https://lagen.nu/2022:666

It’s really an unfortunate development, since the terms “terrorist organization” and “support to terrorism” is so poorly defined, and it’s clearly intended to punish political opposition in dictatorships, like Turkish and Kurdish opposition in Turkey. Very much a chilling effect on political discussion when foreign political oppositions are banned from speaking in Sweden, even when racist hate groups are still allowed to speak.

It does seem that the current law is still quite limited, at least. The Terrorist crime law of 2022 (Terroristbrottslagen) outlaws support, propagandizing, and recruiting for terrorist organizations, but this seems to be limited to only material support, organized propaganda and organization leadership. Simply going around waving a PKK flag still is legal, for now.

https://www.ui.se/utrikesmagasinet/analyser/2023/juli/terrorlagar-domstolar-far-bedoma-flaggviftning/

So luckily, I don’t think it’s possible to be deported simply for expressing expressing pro-Kurdish or pro-Palestinian independence ideas, or even expressing support for the violent people in PKK or Hamas.

Johan Forssell has also expressed a wish for a new law making it illegal to be in a criminal gang, but this has not passed yet. His view on the ongoing wars with Israel seems to be that Israel “has a right to defend itself”, but that civilians must be protected and receive aid.

Saying AIPAC is the deep state isn’t a good look. Campaign finance is a problem, but AIPAC is tiny compared to some of the Super PACs out there.

I don’t think state dept/DoD employees are that political. I could understand the CIA having more influence there, but this article just said that CIA employees blocked Trump from couping Venezuela.

Both the US and EU have sanctioned Venezuela after they arrested opposition leaders on political charges and disqualified Machado from running in this year’s election. This was signed by Bradley T. Smith, who I believe was appointed by Janet Yellen last year. Doesn’t sound like a deep state to me. Do dictator shit, get dictator sanctions.

January 6th will be fun

lmao no, Biden isn’t going to block the National Guard from arresting everyone if people try to attempt a coup again. Enjoy your night in military jail waiting to be handed to the feds.

that fox News video “win every swing state” is from July

Worth noting that AOC is the youngest a president can be. Harris is 3 years younger than Obama.

Age also does not determine if someone is progressive, liberal, or conservative.

rough way to tell parents that their child is as dumb as a doorknob

The democratic government of Ukraine is not an insurgency, and the US did not give them weapons until after their neighbor 10x bigger than them, invaded them in an act of pure imperialism in 2014. Are you saying the US should not fund anti-imperalism?

What the fuck is a deep state? What is this mysterious “evil” you say Blinken is supporting?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_intervention_in_the_Syrian_civil_war

Obama did not do anything until the airstrikes against daesh, and even then it was very controversial for Obama in the US News. Less than 10000 us special forces have been in Syria, and Assad is still the dictator of Syria. Compare to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc. where the US was in direct conflict with another state.

12 years of administrations don’t count because they’re not Biden, the current president. What the US does right now has nothing to do what it did in 2003. The US foreign policy cannot be 80 years of regime change in South America, because the current US regime didn’t exist before 2021.

Its not brainwashing to defend peaceful democratic opposition to dictators. Who are you going to complain to about imperialism if the US and EU give up on democracy and everybody lives as serfs under the thumb of some warlord?

The imperialists in the bush administrations were the exceptions. There was a clear difference in American foreign policy between Bush Jr. and Obama.

It is important to recognize that countries do not have a foreign policy, presidents do. We can only describe trends that the presidents tend to follow. Iraq was not some shadowy CIA cabal, it was George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who had power at the time. If you want to characterize US foreign policy by public polling for support in the war, it is very clear that public support for the Iraq war has evaporated since 2003, which is why the US didn’t intervene in Syria and let Russia and the Kurds duke it out. Fatigue from the Iraq War has also been used by Trump and his supporters to limit military support to Ukraine, NATO, and Taiwan.

Also, the Gulf War is not a good comparison. The Gulf war was a UN-directed intervention in response to the invasion of Kuwait. It was not a invasion coup like 2003.

Relevant video essays regarding American foreign policy post Cold War and the Russian propaganda depicting the US as “coup happy imperialists”:

https://youtu.be/FVmmASrAL-Q?t=1916

https://youtu.be/7OFyn_KSy80

The nuance is that American policy since the end of the cold war has been to use soft power to promote democracy. Offer pro-democracy propaganda to oppressed people, and sanction human rights violators. There is no evidence of the US funding insurgents in South America, Ukraine, Russia, or the PRC post-Cold War.

In contrast, Trump ordered the CIA to return to cold-war era coups and just straight-up invade Venezuela.

The first one is admirable and how foreign policy should be conducted, the second one is dangerous and is how America is portrayed in Russian propaganda.

The USSR blurred the line. There was decentralized industry and multiculturalism, but also Russian supremacy, genocide, and military conquest.

There was very much the threat of violence in 1990 and 1991, even if the original USSR framework was very liberal. Not to mention the USSR-led coups in Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

It’s also important to note that the Russian SFSR itself was an empire ruled from Moscow before the revolution. That did not change much after the revolution.

https://youtu.be/tVRUBs3T4ic

Yeah most Americans think that democracy/liberalism is just the natural state of the world and doesn’t need any effort to maintain. That is very much not the case in Russia.

What is an election skeptic? Is that like a climate skeptic? The term is fascist thug.

The goths had half of Rome in the sack