Alexander Lukashenko is president of Belarus: they call him "the last Soviet dictator." He is responsible for decades of brutal human rights abuses and comic mismanagement, and he led a coronavirus response that was so inept, it even made the US look good by comparison.
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Lukashenko's not even good at being a dictator. His master plan to maintain the pretense of free and fair elections this year involved purging the establishment candidates running against him, "businessmen" running on a ticket of "efficiency."
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He also purged a popular anti-corruption Youtuber.
This left only one opposition candidate at the fore: Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, running as a proxy for her imprisoned husband Sergey Tikhanovsky.
jacobinmag.com/2020/08/belaru…
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This left only one opposition candidate at the fore: Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, running as a proxy for her imprisoned husband Sergey Tikhanovsky.
jacobinmag.com/2020/08/belaru…
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Tikhanovskaya was a powerful rival to Lukashenko, who has used populism to style himself a champion of ordinary Belarusians - the sort who might have looked skeptically upon business leaders promising to replace him.
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But Tikhanovskaya ACTUALLY champions causes important to everyday Belarusians, winning support from the country's workers, as well as political freedoms like a release of political prisoners and free and fair elections.
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Her platform was so obviously, visibly popular that it led many to predict an imminent change in power in Belarus, a new Maidan moment. So when Lukashenko stole the election, claiming a brazen 80% majority, the people rose up.
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For days, larger and larger crowds have taken to the streets, demanding political change, braving vicious police violence that only seemed to inspire larger turnouts. Lukashenko's claims that the protests are driven by outsiders have not convinced anyone.
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The perseverance of the protesters is a moral lesson to everyone else in the country - including, incredibly, some of the police who had been beating and gassing them. Even though 6700 people have been arrested and tortured, the protesters keep facing down police lines.
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Military officers, appalled by the crackdown, are posting social media videos in which they destroy their uniforms. Police officers are giving media interviews in which they proclaim their unwillingness to follow "illegal orders."
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The interior minister went on TV to formally apologize to the protesters for their treatment.
And 50 riot cops dropped their shields and embraced the protesters, switching sides.
cnn.com/2020/08/14/eur…
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And 50 riot cops dropped their shields and embraced the protesters, switching sides.
cnn.com/2020/08/14/eur…
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Solidarity is a powerful force. Everyday people always have more in common with each other than we do with our leaders. Getting your soldiers to shoot the other soldiers is one of the hardest problems in any military.
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Many people know the story of the Christmas Truce of 1914, when German and British soldiers emerged from their trenches to fraternize in no man's land, singing carols, playing football and exchanging gifts.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas…
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas…
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Less well known is the utter horror this provoked in their command structures, the generals who took every step possible to avert such an occurrence again.
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Something like the scene in Belarus was on my mind when I wrote the climax of my 2017 novel Walkaway (I won't give away any more spoilers). For me, the ultimate lesson here is that the two sides are "bosses vs everyone else" - not "everyone vs the bosses' shock troops."
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So much of the status quo depends on people who should be on the same side fighting one another on behalf of minorities of powerful people, who, while formally opposed to one another, are only contesting who should be dictator, not whether dictators should be abolished.
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