shmobot
Joined 7 years ago
Joined 7 years ago
[0] https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/a-well-funded-moscow...
The country could have continued like this for years, if not decades, were it not for a few men and coincidental events.
For those of us who are old enough and were born in the USSR, it feels like we've seen how a similar scenario with too much state intervention has played out before. On one hand, we were so proud of putting a man in space before anyone else; on the other hand, we used to hoard a year's supply of toilet paper and other basic necessities.
More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39889517
In certain instances, they opt for psychological warfare techniques, similar to those employed by the Stasi in East Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung
Guess where Putin was stationed in the '80s during his tenure as a KGB officer?
Watching closely Russian politics for the last 20 years, the one thing they do perfectly is use this kindness and tolerance of the West against them. Once in house the authorities repress everything that is democratic, decent, free and different, they demand the outside world to stick to their values to the letter, ousting every little deviation from it as the West hypocrisy. And then using it to further convince his own people that the West is rotten.
You can't win the fight if the other side always plays dirty. I believe this is more than just Ukraine-Russia conflict, this is the Cold war that actually never ended.
There are few scandals from his past that draw at least a controversial picture of Durov's morals (throwing paper money from the top of the building in the center of the city, working quietly with the FSB during the protest, deleting messages from the Telegram account of his opponent who accused his brother in firing him over a girl, and so on). He persistently keeps throwing out loosely supported accusations towards the rival messengers like Signal, Whatsapp and so on.
There was a great article in The Wired lately and following discussion on Hacker News [0]