Worth noting that the EU has banned entire nations (such as Kazakhstan and others) from flying in EU airspace before for not meeting safety expectations. It is absolutely within possibility to ban Belarus for an overt Chicago convention violation.
>It is absolutely within possibility to ban Belarus for an overt Chicago convention violation.
EU did the same thing in 2013 by forcing the Bolivian president's plane to land in an effort to catch Snowden. They have no moral or legal standing here whatsoever.
Those EU countries didn’t allow the plane into their airspace, encouraging it to land in a third country to refuel.
Belarus called in a fake bomb threat and used their fighter jets to force a passenger flight to land in their territory, not to mention the KGB officers on board making a scene.
Outcome might be similar, but it’s specifically the tactics used which make this unacceptable.
Morales plane was searched. If Snowden was on it, he would have been detained.
It's not that Belarus' actions are admissable. It's that the West is acting in a hypocritical way.
If Belarus had as much power as the US, they surely would have followed the same route and forced all the surrounding nations to close their airspace. The end result would be the same.
It a huge difference... You're suggesting there is a conspiracy a foot. When in practice it's quite likely France, Spain, etc. just denied access because then the diplomatic hot potato wouldn't be theirs :)
And I'm hindsight Austria probably regrets they didn't deny access too, because then the potato wouldn't have landed on their soil.
It's not very bold to say: "pass don't involve me", but it's not necessarily a conspiracy to intercept a plane. That would have to involve a lot of people, and would probably leak..
“whataboutism” is a thought-terminating cliche — it’s a directly analogous situation that shows that there are no principles or rule-based order, only power. you have the power to get away with doing this, or you don’t; lofty rhetoric is a propaganda measure
* It generally has no context. Yes, the West did something similar. It does not follow that the West will engage in the same type of systemic evil, that argument must be made on its own.
* Whataboutism often implies that naughty behavior is ok; that the hypocrisy of the West is justification for some further evil. One is at best making the argument that everyone is evil so just do it
* It consistently assumes the ignorance of particularly Americans - that if you just tell the dumb American that his government did something bad too, the scales will fall from their eyes, they will accept everything is evil and meaningless, and they will stop criticizing you
* the West is just plain better, on the historical record, at admitting and correcting hypocrisy. It’s a kind of meta-hypocrisy for these countries that never actually implement a liberal system to do such a great job of helping us improve ours, by pointing out flaws we’re secure enough to fix and they’re not.
Moreover, whataboutism does not prove that only power exists. Much the opposite: it proves that, at least in the West, moral norms can have force. Else why would Easterners bother with it?
No, it was not the same thing. That plane had all means to travel in another direction, including return to departure point (it had more than enough fuel for it). Also, whataboutism.
No. You don't underestand. Snowden = american criminal. America = our friend. This guy = belorussian criminal. Lukashenkon - until some months ago our friend, now - our enemy.
You can fly from Kazakhstan on an European carrier to Europe. Europe previously have also banned shoddy Soviet era airliners that are both incredibly loud, toxic and quite unsafe, which is the right thing to do.
I feel this is a fairly pedantic correction, though of course you're very correct nonetheless. My opinion is that banning all of a nations major airlines from operating in your airspace is functionally equivalent to banning that nation. Belarus is much like Kazakhstan in that the vast majority of routes from its airports are by its national airlines. Most of the routes to the EU are flown by Belavia (Belarus' national airline) https://www.flightconnections.com/flights-from-minsk-msq.
I sincerely hope that this statement finally gets backed up by some decisive action that can put real pressure on these dictators, but I don't get my hopes up.
I know that people can joke about the west in Russia but are people allowed to make jokes about their own government in Russia and in the associated eastern european states?
Is it like China yet? I'm guessing not as there's no visible list of banned words and phrases, but we don't see (in HN) much criticism of Russia, Belarus from there, just attacks on the hypocrisy of the West.
Do you see it headed towards China, where no internal criticism is allowed?
Criticism is allowed unless you have ambitions to work in government. Critique of the government has become actually quite common in the Russian stand up comedy scene. There are some exceptions, like you cannot show any public disrespect to the Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov (you can google how people apologise to him).
Edit (forgot to mention): also, participating in anti-government protests often results in people losing their jobs or being expelled from the universities
Edit 2: also, there is an ongoing crisis with the independent media: the Russian government is trying to suffocate the independent news outlets by classifying them as foreign agents (which has pretty bad practical outcomes for the news outlet)
Not exactly... In the US, organizations use this form of self-censorship to prevent a potential backlash from the public, whereas in Russia, the bans are direct orders from the government and the employers simply don't have any choice.
Often, there is less practical difference than I’d hope for. Look at the credit card networks’ sanctions of things like allofmp3.com, for example.
If you enjoy audio fiction, or short stories you might enjoy “The Revolution, brought to you by Nike”. It was written by an ad industry insider, and touches on a lot of issues regarding corporate self-censorship. (It’s a few years old, and predates Nike’s recent political activism):
For example, there have been many documented cases in the past few years of people getting fired over supporting the BDS movement - or in a few cases, not actively supporting anti-BDS movements.
For the Chinese you can tell when they cannot even refer to, say or admit certain things: e.g. massacres. But they would say "we are not being censored"
For China and Russia, etc, it feels as if by mocking the hypocrisy of the West they are naively assuming that there's no such criticism from within the West.
> For the Chinese you can tell when they cannot even refer to, say or admit certain things: e.g. massacres. But they would say "we are not being censored"
It is exactly the same in Russia, you may not mention certain historical facts at all, e.g. Germany-USSR cooperation during 1939-1941
Well, this is fine example of so-called "lie", plain and simple. You may mention it, and often it is being mentioned by all kinds of media. Things that really are frowned upon are highly controversial topics like alleged mass raping by the Red Army in Germany during WW2 . Other than that, no holds are barred, and things are discussed freely; I'd say hot topics are more frequent in Russian media than in the US one ; but clearly hotness and level of controversy is different in two blocs
You can google my username, and get my social network accounts for the last 20 years, and a lot of details me and even my family, wikipedia article about my grandfather and his history in USSR, and so on. And then ask yourself if state propaganda would go to such trouble for a couple of comments. It's not doxing, I wouldn't use it if I wasn't completely okay with that.
I am very worried that the situation is headed towards China, or much worse.
And the main reason I am worried is that I can see no path towards a peaceful de-escalation. It is a foregone conclusion in the West that "Russia = bad" and any attempt to say anything counter to that narrative gets you labeled a pro-Kremlin troll. Let's see how deep in the grey this comments ends up for example.
Think Germany after WW1. Humiliated, defeated country. The people of such countries tend to follow leaders who promise to make them great again. When they do, they get further mockery and isolation. And I think it's been conclusively proven that this only breeds more radicalism.
But most will read this as "if you are not with us then you are against us" and turn up the intensity.
While criticism is legal, it does significantly increase your chances of falling out a window, if you're in a prominent position. Very careless, these Kremlin critics.
Interestingly, critics of repressive regimes exhibit _themed_ carelessness; those who were a bit too open in Apartheid South Africa fell down _stairs_, instead.
> I know that people can joke about the west in Russia but are people allowed to make jokes about their own government in Russia and in the associated eastern european states?
That's a tough question. For example, when I was active in TikTok (I grew tired of it pretty fast), I've made a lot of very critical videos that had a lot of views. In one of them, that got almost 100k views, I explicitly said that Putin and his gang are usurping power, and while the current Russian laws say that it's punishable up to 20 years in prison, I think that they deserve the death penalty. I did not get in any trouble for that. But many others from Russian Libertarian Party (which I'm a member of) have, even though they've said much less. May be they had a wider reach, or may be it's just random, I don't know. And I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of years later I'll get 5 years of prison for these TikToks.
thanks for your perspective! Is the chilling factor an issue there yet? It feels from your comments that it's not, that its a bit too random yet, or a bit too early?
> I know that people can joke about the west in Russia but are people allowed to make jokes about their own government in Russia and in the associated eastern european states? Is it like China yet?
Yes, plenty of people inside those countries do not like regime and openly discuss it on public internet websites. I don't know about China situation so I can't make a direct comparison. If you're very popular blogger and you'll make direct insults to Putin (or any other person with high position), you might be fined or even jailed, there are laws prohibiting insults against people, but those cases are very rare. And nobody hunts ordinary people.
> I'm guessing not as there's no visible list of banned words and phrases, but we don't see (in HN) much criticism of Russia, Belarus from there, just attacks on the hypocrisy of the West.
Huh? HN is pretty much against Russia, Belarus, etc. Those who try to defend usually are heavily downvoted and labeled as kremlin bots.
Anyway people usually are gathered with similar viewpoints. Any outsiders are expelled quickly. I know web forums, where most of people are holding pro-Russian viewpoint and I know web forums, where most of people are holding pro-West viewpoint. But I know no webforum with balanced opinion. I think that for US people Republicans vs Democrats might be a close analogy.
Belarus aside, which ones? Because I can't think of any.
Seriously, it's been over thirty years since the end of Cold War and people still think there are some eastern European states associated with Russia... Almost all of them are in the EU now with the notable exception of Ukraine which is in a state of de facto war with Russia. Even Lukashenko has a bitter-sweet relationship with Putin.
There is this reaction in internet communities to demand a kind of reaction from a democratic organisation that would only be possible in an autocracy.
1. High-ranking official says they're "gravely/deeply/very concerned" within the first 24-48h.
2. Some EU parliament member mentions the problem within two or three weeks, shaming other members. A clip of this few minutes long speech gets shared all over social media.
3. Absolutely nothing happens until everyone forgets about the issue.
Over and over again, issue after issue, day after day.
Democracies can be capable of quick direct action too. See U.S. esp. U.S. some 50-70 years back. Democracy is no excuse for being inefficient, if democracies don't find a way to protect their values and interests, they will eventually be replaced by more efficient states
I was just explaining to my children that there was a time when the USA government employed censors (an actual job title) to control television content.
Much that the USA was or did 50-70 years ago was decidedly not democratic and not their proudest moment.
Ah yes, the glory days of "quick direct action" in Vietnam and Cambodia. What fun was had by everyone! What progress was achieved! We should totally long for that.
These are examples of unsuccessful wars, although we don't know how many times the possibility of American intervention prevented USSR from starting theirs. Korean war was partially successful though, the whole Korea could look like North Korea if US didn't intervene
Good, so you're in favour of an EU army? Armed invasion of Bielorussia to kidnap the guy back?
The geopolitical armchair experts complain more about responses than actually giving realistic suggestions to give.
(Sure, we can cut Belarus out, and see thousands of "Russian tourists" go for a holiday there right after - maybe that would be a good response?). And yes, you won't see me defending Borrell.
Friendly note: people from the country of Belarus call themselves "Belarusians" (pronounced like "bela-roo-sians", not like "bela-russians"), and take offence at the term "Bielorussia".
That's interesting! From my (admittedly very weak) understanding of Cyrillic, I'd expect Беларусь to be pronounced with a "y" sound as part of the "e", similarly to the vowel at the start of Ельцин (Yeltsin).
Presumably that's because of a lack of orthographic knowledge on my part... or is it something more subtle (say, the belorusian language differing from Russian)? I have a vague memory of languages in the former Yugoslavia being either "ekavsky" or "ijekavsky".
Noted and fixed, as the other commenter noted it was the wrong language (and yes the romance languages call it something like Bielorussia, not much that can be done about that, sorry)
Yes, and all of them take time to be put into motion. A lot of different parties will have to agree, including immoral profit-driven scum like Ryanair. That's what democracy looks like in practice; it ain't as pretty and orderly as a tyrannical dictatorship, where one guy says something and everyone complies right away.
All of that means it's early to complain about any lack of European reaction. In some areas there has been a strong response already, and it will likely get stronger in the next few weeks.
This is where professional politicians need to learn a lesson from the Great Orange One. If Buttigieg had just answered "No, I don't think our passenger planes are safe over Bellarus anymore, and I'm going to do whatever it takes to protect the safety of US citizens flying in Europe", that would have been fine.
Considering the recent revelations that Russia is literally blowing shit up in NATO countries (Bulgaria, Czechia) and EU and NATO's lack of response, this will most likely not result in any meaningful reaction either.
Golergka has been here longer than you and has a much larger online footprint than you do. The chances of you being a propaganda account are larger than theirs. Besides the obvious rule violation I think you should probably apologize. Flagging this comment.
You can't attack another user like that, and we ban accounts that do. Please read the site guidelines and stick to the rules from now on. Note this one:
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I've posted endlessly for many years about how the overwhelming majority of such accusations are based on nothing but fantasy—poisonous fantasy, which it is not ok to pollute the threads with, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. No more of this please, regardless of political orientation or ideology or nation.
No, much smaller. I would agree that the EU's foreign policy is a disaster because of traditionally corrupted elites. The fact that the russian elites are even more corrupted is not an excuse.
„The Common Foreign and Security Policy […] deals only with a specific part of the EU's external relations, which domains include mainly Trade and Commercial Policy and other areas such as funding to third countries, etc”
This is a random result when you search for Borrell in Moscow. Look for his behavior in Turkey if you want some more examples of how random this guy is while he is considered an EU representative. His position requires for him to coordinate responses of the 27, but he is just wandering around wasting time and resources. As far as the EU is an economic powerhouse, letting dictators do whatever they want while allowed access to the market is making him irrelevant.
Yeah, the HR role has been systematically sabotaged since its inception, by way of appointing weaker and weaker nominees and starving it of any real power. At the moment it's a glorified PR position, with no decisional power whatsoever. Javier Solana effectively lost the battle for being the EU "foreign minister" and since then it's all been about individual member states.
Chances are this will not change until there is a serious rethinking of the European role in NATO. As long as the big decisions are taken there, there is no real role for an EU "ministry" beyond trade interests.
as it should be, the EU states act collectively at most trough NATO and the current decade EU so focused on being the political voice of its members is something being tacked on against the initial premise by which its members came together; the EU should always had been an economic union first to combat the tremendous advantage of the internal market that both USA and China enjoy and nothing more.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
