Thread by @pawelwargan

Whatever measures the EU takes in Belarus from today will not be motivated by concerns about "democracy" or "free speech".

There were no sanctions against Saudi Arabia when it dismembered Khashoggi, Britain when it kidnapped Assange, or Israel when it decimated media offices.

A recent @Europarl_EN resolution gives us a clue as to the real motivation.

The resolution expressed “regret” that the Belarusian authorities failed to follow World Bank and IMF recommendations to privatize the state sector, implement austerity, and "encourage entrepreneurship".

The resolution also expressed “concern” that state regulations were hostile to the private sector, "particularly the requirement to pay a minimum wage not lower than the average wage of the ten most successful state-owned enterprises."

Source: europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document…

This is the fine print of regime change. It first strikes not at political repression, but at the tools of economic sovereignty. It calls for the selling-off of industries to foreign capital at garage sale prices, and masks these anti-popular measures behind appeals to "freedom".

It often sides with reactionary anti-communist elements, which rehabilitate pre-socialist symbolism — some tainted by association to fascism — and call for campaigns of "decommunization". These forces are then wielded to silence opposition to liberalization.

We need not look far for precedents.

In Ukraine today, the opposition media has been shut down, neoliberal orthodoxy has taken root, and increasingly radical fascist elements within the state and beyond them are violently suppressing remnants of left-wing thought.

Labour protests are crushed by right-wing thugs acting in cahoots with security officials — including on one occasion the Ukrainian special forces. Social support is cut. "Democracy" offers up a few bickering parties with the same neoliberal agenda.

Meanwhile, the western press cheers on Ukraine's newfound "freedom", a loaded word that signals one thing but means another. It is a freedom for the ruling class, for business, for foreign capital — not for the workers and poor, who are written out of our narratives.

The thing is, many post-Soviet states have occupied a strange liminal space between socialism and capitalism — retaining welfare and housing programs, job security, public ownership, and so on, even if in weakened form. These institutions guaranteed a modicum of stability.

Since the collapse of the USSR, the EU and US have worked tirelessly to eradicate these last remnants of socialism on the continent, often through undemocratic means. Their efforts have thrust nations into violent reaction, the effects of which are plain from Warsaw to Bucharest.

You don't have to support a government to understand that regime change forced on the back of economic and informational warfare is unlikely to increase freedom. Once capitalism, as a set of political, cultural, and social conditions, takes root, it is there to stay.

I am reminded now of the words of a Ukrainian trade unionist.

"We had no idea what was coming for us," he told me last year. "And we urge our Belarusian brothers and sisters not to repeat our mistakes."

Of course, after last night, the situation may be outside their control.