Law, Power, and Justice

x.com/revcomintern/status/2057072046731870567

APPLEBAUM: If you are leader of Russia or China, what’s thing that’s most threatening to you? Language of liberal democracy.

All this stuff we find boring and we’re used to, like idea of freedom of speech, separation of powers, rule of law, all those things we take for granted in our societies are huge challenge to political systems in Russia or China.

What’s Putin most afraid of? He’s most afraid of street revolution of the kind we had in Ukraine in 2014. When people are standing in the street and they have signs saying “we’re against corruption, we want democracy, we want to be in the European Union, we want to be integrated with Europe.”

He’s afraid of that happening in Russia because if you live in autocratic state where you don’t have freedom of speech, where there’s no justice, where government decides what all the rules are, then those ideas are explosive and exciting.

They were the same way in 18th century when they first appeared in Declaration of Independence. People can be motivated by them, people will go into the street for them, people will risk their lives for them, and autocrats know that.

Really, for the past decade you see them seeking to spread those ideas, to promote them. I mean, we all know now about Russian propaganda campaigns, we know what Russian disinformation

looks like.

There’s a Chinese version, too, which we don’t see that much in English, but it appears in other countries. We see them seeking to undermine democracy, trying to spread the influence of different set of ideas.