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Worth noting the incident in 2013 where the US and EU collaborated to ground a plane to target a whistleblower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_groun
by agd 5y ago
Worth noting the incident in 2013 where the US and EU collaborated to ground a plane to target a whistleblower:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident
- jiofih 5y agoNot the time for what-about. Why is it worth noting?
- agd 5y agoI don’t see this as a whatabout. It’s a similar case that I’m sure Belarus and Russia will point to. It exposes the hypocrisy in the statements coming from our governments right now.
- paganel 5y agoBecause in that case nothing happened, even though we expect better from established democracies compared to the dictatorship from Belarus. And most of us live in those established democracies and not in Belarus, hence what happened back then was even more f/cked up.
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y agoWe expect "better" from democracies largely because they have more sophisticated and effective ways to defang troubling journalists. You don't really need to murder or imprison them when you can just make it so no one trusts them or they can't find an audience. That said I do think Belarus fucked up here evaluating by their own best interests. Having an open dictatorship in Europe has always made a lot of people uncomfortable but was tolerated as long as they didn't draw too much attention to it or do any scary shit to outsiders. Here they kinda did both. Would not surprise me if this ends up being a huge problem for them long-term.
- pydry 5y agoIt helps Lukashenko win the domestic propaganda war. The West is trying to present itself as a viable alternative to Russia to Belarussian people. The opposition politicians he is attacking largely support leaning westwards. How do they criticize this without appearing hypocritical? It's very hard. If the West tries to punish Belarus with sanctions that hurt the ordinary Belarussian it will likely look even worse. I can't actually think of a scenario here where Lukashenko doesn't win something.
- Mordisquitos 5y agoWorth noting that the incident in 2013... • did not affect Belarus in any way. • had nothing to do with Greece, Lithuania or Ireland, the countries most directly affected in this incident. • resulted in immediate diplomatic apologies from both Spain and France, two of the countries that were involved. • was condemned by the U.N. Secretary General.
- skjoldr 5y agoYes, Snowden's treatment is appalling. What does it have to do with this case?
- jomnasi 5y agoNothing. It is however valid to point out the staggering similarity where a nation state forces an airplane to land in order to arrest/try to arrest a person the government considers a criminal.
- throwaway210222 5y ago> Yes, Snowden's treatment is appalling. What does it have to do with this case? Really ? Dead, deep in you heart, ask yourself what the USA would have done if Snowdon or Assange were on a Mexican flight over the continental USA to Canada.
- skjoldr 5y agoHuman rights violations are human rights violations, regardless of who commits them. In the Russian space, they occur daily, in the West they are rarer. What is the point?
- skjoldr 5y agoI think any reasonable person understands that international politics are inherently driven by national interests and thus are hypocritical by default, because often there are no perfect solutions that are acceptable to everyone. Least you can do is to call hypocrisy out when it happens, and ask yourself whether it was at least done in your interest as a citizen or not. If you want to compare political systems, do it systematically, not on case-by-case basis. Russia had jailed many more political activists and has far more draconian laws against freedom of speech and freedom of assembly than Western countries, even if Western countries sometimes unjustifiably limit these freedoms as well.