But also worth pointing out is that despite very uncritical propaganda from the regime about what happens in Russia, RT is one of the only mass media (non-independent publication) where you can have decent news about social uproar in France (gilets jaunes, anti-police-abuse riots, etc).

We haven't reached the point where posts to RT are censored on social media (where it's most popular) so i can't exactly say we have "one side" to the news yet but it's getting closer.

This message is both a fuck you to french ISPs engaging in censorship (remember Sci-Hub? TPB?) and a reminder to all the Putin fanboys around here what "there's only one side to the news" really means: Russia is already there (there's a few independent publications but they've been struggling for years with State censorship and journalist assassinations) and France is getting closer (on the other side of the narrative). The rest of you who live in countries with more free speech can't even realize what information control means so please don't take these words lightly.

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[–] southerntofu@lemmy.ml -1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What the west should have done was Marshal Plan eastern Europe.

I'm not sure the Marshal Plan was a good deal for western Europe, although for sure it accelerated reconstruction greatly. But i'm sure eastern european countries could have fared better without western powers imposing that they must privatize everything, which was not a condition imposed on western european countries post-WWII.

I'm very much against Putin and this is not a defense of him, but the USA establishment basically created the Russian oligarchy overnight (after the collapse of the USSR) by pushing (forcing?) local authorities to sell every State asset as quickly as possible to the highest bidder while the economy is in ruins. So you end up with a handful of people owning the entire country while ordinary people need a bag of bank notes to buy bread. It's the very same technique they used in Iraq/Afghanistan after, and in many other places: it's a widely documented process, but i would personally recommend Naomi Klein's The shock doctrine and Adam Curtis' documentaries.

Once again, i'm not sure a eastern european "marshal plan" would have done better, but lack of western intervention post-USSR-collapse is certainly not what led to Russia being a capitalist hellhole.

[–] Julianus@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

I agree, certainly, that the fire sale was terrible and we're living the karma from that today. Maybe leaving them alone would have been better? It's doubtful, though. Look at Africa. Western capital avoided it like the plague and they simply suffered in stagnation until China's investment today.

How did Vietnam independently become the economic power it is today? Free trade and public investment in education. That's how it could have gone in Russia. Instead people traded their shares of the newly privatized infrastructure for boxes of vodka. And thus, the oligarchs came to own it all.