Thread by @kokokaraib

Manufacturing consent to siege both 🇵🇸 and 🇧🇾 I see...

https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1396838625283825666

To be clear, Roman Protasevich is an up-and-coming colour (counter)revolutionary

foiaresearch.net/person/roman-p…

Protasevich is a long-time member of Malady Front, who work towards free markets + Christian democracy (so inoffensiveness to right-wing capitalists)

MF are on record praising leading 🇧🇾/🇺🇦 Nazi collaborators in a country that *still* hasn't recovered from Holocaust atrocities

Protasevich here can be seen flying the flag of the short-lived (anti-communist) Belarusian Democratic Republic of 1918, inspired by the colours of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

It would once again be used by Nazi occupiers & fascist collaborators in the puppet Central Rada

MF continues this legacy of external interference today. After failing to be registered as a party in Belarus, MF registered in *the Czech Republic*! They also sought status in Lithuania and Poland (sound familiar?), plus Ukraine

Protasevich also ran Nexta, a Telegram-based regime-change network

And he worked for Euroradio.fm + the 🇧🇾 section of RFE/RL. Both stations exist to build support for opening up markets/gov'ts to the West in countries unwilling to toe their exact line - not freedom

Most shockingly (or not) of all, he volunteered as a photographer for Azov Battalion, a fascist paramilitary in Ukraine that grew in power after its own colour revolution in 2013-14

Regardless of your ideology, from the POV of any state, these acts flirt with treason and sedition. Any state naturally defends its own existence, so what Belarus is doing is very much above board, if not unprecedented

And that's the thing - messing with planes for geopolitics isn't exactly unprecedented

In 2013, President of Bolivia Evo Morales, on a flight from Russia back home, was forced to land in Austria for refueling after France, Italy and Spain refused his entry into their airspace

Why did they refuse? The day prior, he announced that Bolivia would be willing to grant whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum, and all three states feared Snowden was on board

bbc.com/news/av/world-…

Snowden is no colour revolutionary. (Unfortunately), he doesn't want the US to fall. He simply wants more data-literate public with more privacy and a transparent/accountable government

He's what you call a civil libertarian

Bolivia was angry, but sanctioned no one in response

Meanwhile, flights to and through Belarus are being prohibited, and its relations with Latvia are severed

The strong response this time around is another operation in a hybrid war against the Belarusian state waged since last year. The ultimate goals are to expand EU influence & isolate Russia

Colour revolution in 2006 (see the Jeans Revolution) didn't work, so they're trying again

This isn't to say that the grievances behind colour revolutions are not real, or that they can't have mass appeal. They do, which is why they worked so successfully in the 1980s as actual strategies towards democratisation in the Philippines

The agitation towards participation in Belarus' own comes from real strife living under capitalism - shittier jobs and the shrinking of the social wage (welfare, esp pensions)

But with the false promise of equal enjoyment of Western standards, the playbook is being used to make things even less regulated, more ensnared by Europe

These are the very conditions that immiserate workers, make social minorities vulnerable, and enable genocides to happen. The state of Belarus knows this, as do all historically astute Belarusians, whatever their views are of that state

So don't be fooled - Roman Protasevich is not some freedom fighter, and Belarus is not doing responding to his activity unfairly or in a wholly unprecedented manner

He is one element of a greater war on one of the few countries in Europe that got away from Western control