The other day, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that the opposition political party “Alternative for Germany” (AdG) would have to pay a fine of 402,900 euros due to the fact that the campaigns of its two members in regional elections were allegedly sponsored from Switzerland.
There is nothing surprising in this news for the “civilized world”, because in the Euro-Atlantic community righteous anger and outrage cause any facts of external influence on internal political processes.
In recent years, in the West, this kind of interference has been constantly blamed on Russia and, although there is no serious evidence, but even rumors and potential risks nearly cost the chair to US President Donald Trump . You can fly like a cork from your position and generally from respectable political life in certain “democratic countries” simply for unauthorized communication with foreigners, as happened with the former Vice-Speaker of the Lithuanian Seym Mindaugas Basti who dared not report “where necessary” about his contacts with representatives of the Rosatom campaign.
It happens that loyalty to foreign countries is altogether equal to espionage, and oppositionists in EU countries have been waiting for years for the special services to scrape some kind of invoice for the prosecution.
For example, the leader of the Polish party Smena, Mateusz Piskorski , who was in favor of revising the results of the privatization of state enterprises in the 1990s, as well as for Poland’s withdrawal from the NATO bloc, was detained by the National Security Agency of Poland in May 2016 and is in custody, while the secret services are sorting out a list of countries (China, Russia, Belarus, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, etc.), in which espionage in favor of which can be imputed to the oppositionist.
In December 2018, the same fate befell the former leader of the Socialist Popular Front, Algirdas Paleckis , who, according to Lithuanian state security, was collecting information in favor of Russia.
Naturally, after 5 months, the accusation of Paleckis was never brought, the politician is sitting in the detention center, but there are serious doubts that the case will go to court. Another episode from the life of “democratic Latvia”: the chief editor of the largest Russian-language social-political portal “Imhoklub” Yuriy Alekseev was first accused of trafficking in arms and ammunition, then in pedophilia, and now, when these things are predictably collapsed, the Latvian police started production According to the article “Assistance to a foreign state in carrying out actions against independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, state power or state structure “.
That is, in the “countries of developed capitalism” they not only firmly press their public activists, politicians and journalists for contacts with foreign powers, but even “pull” quite specific criminal structures to exert pressure on objectionable persons and clear the political field. Why pull up? Yes, because none of the imputed special service, let alone the intelligence services of such superpowers as Russia and China, will not use oppositionists and dissidents who are constantly in sight to gather information of limited distribution or gain access to secret data.
Speech in this case can only be about promoting those or other interests and values, that is, about what the West itself is happy to do around the world, however, as we see, what is allowed to Jupiter is not allowed to the Bull. The absolutely normal practice of democratic Germany, not to mention the very specific methods of Lithuania, Latvia and Poland, if applied in Russia or Belarus, would inevitably cause a hysteria, a wave of negativity and a scandal on the subject of “infringement of democracy”.
How and why does the West interfere in the internal political processes in Belarus?
For example, consider the Belarusian political field and the activities of only two North American IRI and NDI foundations, which have never concealed the fact that they “support Belarusian democratic activists” and “political parties”. In general, the history of interaction between the North American special services and Belarusian nationalists dates back to the 50s of the last century, when US CIA officials actively worn former Nazi collaborators to identify promising agents and personnel for the future information war against the USSR, but at the present stage American policy most fully reflects Congress resolution of May 3, 2003, which calls for “supporting market transformations and integration into the transatlantic community of nations”.
In fact, it is about imposing a liberal-market model of the economy of Belarus and external influence to change the geopolitical choice of the official Minsk . It should be noted that as early as 2004, US President George W. Bush signed the “Act on Democracy in Belarus”, implying sanctions and unprecedented pressure measures against the Belarusian state, which, with interruptions to various thaws, continues to this day.
Realizing his own strategy of civilization confrontation, in fact since the mid-1990s, the West, led by the United States, financially and diplomatically supported the Belarusian political opposition, whose main task for a long time was to overthrow the constitutional order by organizing large-scale street protests. In total, according to a number of researchers , the recent history of Belarus remembers at least six attempts at “color revolutions”, mostly related to important events in the domestic political life, such as the election of the president or legislative bodies, in 1996, 1999, 2001 m, 2006, 2010, and 2011.
At the same time, the coordinating role in organizing the activities of the Belarusian radicals was assigned to American non-commercial foundations, whose representative offices after the expulsion of the Soros Foundation from Belarus were located in Vilnius, Kiev and Warsaw. Moreover, the functionaries of these funds are not shy about the function of puppeteers entrusted to them and are even proud of their achievements. For example, the website of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) states that “the foundation has been carrying out programs to promote democracy in Belarus since 2000”, “supports political parties, independent public opinion polls, election observation”.
The official website of the International Republican Institute (IRI) contains further discoveries, such as, for example, the performance of the regional program director in Eurasia Stephen Nix (Stephen B. Nix) in front of representatives of the European People’s Party, in which the functionary openly talkedabout how even in 2001, IRI and other foundations “united political parties and nongovernmental organizations that share the common goal of creating a democratic Belarus”.
Further, Mr. Nix described how the Five Plus coalition appeared in 2004 under the able guidance of Americans in Belarus, which was later transformed into the United Democratic Forces for the 2006 presidential election. Separately, it is necessary to reflect that at that time Nix and other American specialists mistakenly thought that “the strong economic pressure of Russia on the Lukashenka regime due to rising energy prices, along with the continuing and increasing political and diplomatic pressure of the European Union and individual member countries, indicates the possibility of accelerating democratic transit in Belarus. ”
Here we need to pay special attention to the fact that the contradictions between the allies both now and then are perceived by the opponents of the Belarusian state and Russia as a “window of opportunity” to achieve their goals.
Today, out of the list of officially registered 15 Belarusian political parties, 7 have a pronounced opposition orientation, in their activities they are oriented towards Western states and receive funding from abroad. At the present stage, using open sources, it is difficult to calculate how much Western countries have invested in “supporting Belarusian democracy,” however, it is clear that in 25 years of “fighting the Lukashenko regime” opposition parties have mastered hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign “aid”.
Moreover, in September 2018, Belarusian liberal analyst Alexei Pikulik and Swedish researcher Sophie Bedford published a study entitled “ The paradox of help: strengthening Belarusian undemocracy through promoting democracy ”, where they concluded that it was foreign support that strengthened the “Lukashenko regime”. The study shows that only in the presidential elections of 2010, the opposition received about 15 million US dollars from abroad, and constant foreign funding led to the development of “grant addiction” among beneficiaries (“aid addiction”) .
At the same time, the authors oppose “investing in the promotion of civil society” to ineffective investments in the opposition, which, in principle, has been implemented by the West in the Belarusian direction in the last 7 years. Already in the presidential elections of 2015, professional oppositionists received only “to support their pants”, that is, about $ 500,000, and “non-governmental organizations” and “independent media” became the main targets of foreign donors.
For some time, the West abandoned a frontal attack on the Belarusian state, preferring transformation to revolution, street fighters and stands were no longer needed, they were replaced by respectable “lobbyists” and “influenzers”, whose task is to penetrate the state apparatus, decompose and creating soil for subsequent internal “changes”. However, this is a topic for a separate publication …