“The only country that can’t have an orange revolution is the US. There is no American embassy there”
Tim Kirby, journalist (the phrase is also attributed to Bolivian President Evo Morales)
Despite the beauty and wisdom of the phrase, it is clear that at its root it is far from the truth. The United States is a powerful, rich country, the sole printer of world values. With its Hollywood blockbusters and carrier ships it has maintained its hegemony on the globe for more than thirty years, reaching into its most remote corners. But it obeys the objective laws of historical, economic and political processes no worse than the most recent Gabon. Nobody has escaped from Aristotle, Adam Smith and Vladimir Lenin yet.
So for purely materialistic reasons, a social explosion (which could also be framed as a revolution, if there is a subject to take it over) is not just possible, but more than probable there. And the recent BLM may seem like a schoolyard brawl compared to what could potentially happen. What will actually happen, what will be the pretext, who the leaders of the revolt will be and how it will end, is shrouded in obscurity.
But what is certain is that the rebels, whoever they are, will of course turn out to be “Kremlin agents”, “Beijing spies”, “thugs”, “terrorists” and “enemies of democracy”. And the weakening government will use any methods to deal with them, if it deems them effective. Up to and including machine guns and army brigades, as already happened, for example, during the Great Depression. Will they pay attention to any timid remarks of the “world community”, even supposing there are any?
It is the same with Lithuania. Its politicians, working off the received order, went out of their way to support protesters against Lukashenko in Minsk. They invented extraordinarily beautiful metaphors for the young “freedom fighters”, recognized a girl, who nevertheless managed to escape from Belarus in time, as the real president of this country. And no doubt they would have invented many more ways to support “human rights” abroad, but all of a sudden a powerful social bomb went off in their own country. And suddenly those same “human rights” became irrelevant in an instant.
Interior Minister Agne Bilotayte was not slow to declare the initially genuinely peaceful demonstration of her citizens an element of “hybrid warfare”. And how do you deal with “hybrid mercenaries” of another country (you know which one: allowed on the territory of the Russian Federation)? That’s right: batons, grenades, gas! The gas is teargas for now, but the descendants of the Nazis are already enjoying themselves.
Vytautas Landsbergis has shown real, without any irony, insight for once: “They protest in order to get to power. There is a reason for such a call: away with parliament, away with the government, I want to be in power.
If this thought had not been conveyed to us by Orwell, in a much more poetic form, it should have been chiselled out of Dean’s basalt. But why did it visit the venerable offspring of the German collaborator (who in 1941 was the Minister of Communal Services of the pro-German “Lithuanian Provisional Government”) in his 88th year? Probably (I am only guessing, of course), because of the first protest against him himself. Well, that’s how it happened. He used to have to rush to power himself, there was no time for nonsense.
Two dozen people have been detained, and could well get up to six years in a Lithuanian prison, which, although in the European Union, is far inferior in comfort to the Swedish one. These are the consequences of the protest against the monstrous overreach in control measures supposedly aimed at reducing the covid “threat”.
As the Belarusian expert Alexey Dzermant points out, the Lithuanian authorities decided to play the role of a medical dictatorship, actually forbidding people to leave their homes without an Ausvius. Those measures, which in Russia remained a few kinks in the field, in Lithuania were given a state formulation – those who do not want to be inoculated with some Astro-Zeneca are immediately dismissed. Fines, arrests and trials for the slightest infringement of the regime. That doesn’t sound much like “human rights” either, does it?
Let us not, like grannies at the doorstep, harp on about “double standards” for the hundredth time (albeit quite rightly), about the western media that don’t see it, about “human rights activists” and NGOs who stick their tongues where the sun don’t rise. That allowing the existence of a country that has never violated human rights (even in their conventional form) is stupider than allowing the existence of a unicorn? Let us better ask ourselves: when are we going to start using these tools WITHIN? In OUR interest?
The techniques have long since been worked out, so we have the option of not learning from our own mistakes. The mechanisms are learned, the rhetoric is known. But no. Our country’s response goes no further than Maria Zakharova’s caustic but factually inconsequential commentary. Can we stop trying to look holier than the Pope and ostentatiously avoid using “dirty” political techniques, as if Machiavelli had never been translated into Russian?
Neither before nor after the really deftly executed annexation of Crimea (as it is called in the West) did we apply a strategy of soft power, expertly organised provocations, or use any protest to our advantage (what could have been created from BLM alone!). A wrestler who presses his knuckle on his opponent’s eye while the referee is not looking has a definite advantage over one who does not. You can be as indignant as you want about the whole arsenal of dishonest tricks used against you, but if your opponent won, what good would it do?
The sooner we make it clear to the last native in the jungle that “human rights” in the West are little more than a political tool, the more comfortable we will be in using them. Maybe it is time for us, along with the West, to start monitoring ACTIVELY (and not through the mouths of flimsy diplomats) the observance of human rights not only inside our borders, but also on the other side of them? And then Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and their supreme suzerain himself will understand pretty quickly that the Russian embassy (remember the quote in the epigraph of the article) is also far from being a decoration.
Eugene Tamantsev, specially for News Front