Автократы всего мира, начиная с Лукашенко, уже начали использовать штурм здания Конгресса в Вашингтоне как оправдание для собственных преступлений против человечества. Этот перевод стрелок — пропагандистская ложь. Единственное, что есть общего между протестами в Беларуси и попыткой переворота в США — то, что и там, и тут мы имеем дело с автократом, пытающимся предотвратить мирную передачу власти после поражения на выборах.

Сила и надежда на успех продолжающихся в Беларуси протестов происходят из одного источника: единства между беларусами разных городов и деревень, разных профессий и социальных слоёв, разных политических убеждений. Это единство стало возможным благодаря тому, что цели, заявленные объединённым штабом, просты и очевидны, а методы протеста, предлагаемые каналом NEXTA — ненасильственные и не вызывают разногласий об их допустимости.

On August 19, Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies organized a seminar on the potential democratic breakthrough in Belarus, featuring Michael McFaul, Francis Fukuyama, Anna Grzymala-Busse, and Kathryn Stoner. These are my notes for what I see as the key takeaways.

Like every political surprise, the snowballing protest in Belarus now seems to have been inevitable. It wasn’t. Like every dictatorship before it, Lukashenka’s regime still appears invincible. It isn’t. Now of all times it is essential for Americans to understand the nuance and the context of what’s happening in Belarus. This could be America. This can still happen in America.

У меня вопрос к ветеранам титульной оппозиции, которые сами никак не решатся взять тапок в руки и присоединиться к революции надежды, да ещё и других отговаривают. Вам что, особое приглашение надо?

As of this writing, daily new cases of COVID-19 in Germany, the most populous country in Europe with 83 million people, hover around 500. The entire European Union — population 447 million, a third larger than United States — reports stable 4,000 new cases per day. United States has now crossed 50,000 new cases per day and it keeps getting worse. Why? Because of fascists and lies.

United States is in the middle of its first existential crisis since the Civil War. US response to COVID-19 has become one of the worst in the world because of the mistakes we made in 2016. We can’t afford to keep making them, not when failure to restore democracy means that US, EU, and the rest of the world all fall to fascism, religious totalitarianism, and economics of slavery and serfdom. Where on this bottomless spectrum of disaster is your acceptable cost of “burn it down because the candidate I wanted didn’t win the primary?”

In short, we can’t. Voting for policies rather than for politicians is called direct democracy, and there are currently no functioning direct democracies in the world. They are all, including the political system of the United States of America, representative.

I was born in USSR. There were no votes in USSR. I remember Perestroika. When I was just a teen, my parents were seriously discussing going off the grid to sit out the civil war if the 1991 KGB putsch against Gorbachev succeeded. Everybody was surprised when it failed. What followed was very confusing time, people had no idea how democracy is supposed to work, including the people who somehow made it work anyway, for a few years.

I recently stumbled upon something I didn’t know existed: the very first novel by Robert A. Heinlein that was written in 1938 and remained unpublished until 2003, long after his death. It is clear from the very first page why he couldn’t sell it to publishers in 1938: it challenges the contemporary social taboos as mercilessly as his late work, and it took becoming the most popular sci-fi writer in the world for Heinlein to be able to get back to this kind of writing.