Part Two: Alexander Lukashenko: The Dictator of Belarus

who is your gus? You have to introduce Jesus. I'm just so frustrated by the headphone issues that I forgot to introduce the person who fixed the headphone issues, Local youth, Garrison Davis. Yeah, that's my that's my new Twitter handles, and locally, it's not at hungry about tie from Twitter. Tear gas proof Garrison, Hi, local youth headphones are terrible. Look, yeah, that would be good until I'm no longer I know what he was around that. I don't know that your youth.

That could be your TikTok handle for however many more days Trump allows TikTok contact me to be a yeah, right, yeah, okay, alright, we're moving on right now, right now, right now, God damn it. Okay, So we talked about in the last episode how Lukashenko is most well named. No nickname was Vodka, which kind of means daddy, which is a little weird. I just daddy, ladies. Uh yeah, no, not that kind

of dad, Maybe that kind of daddy. His opponents, though, have another nickname for him that basically translates to farm Hitler that sounds more fun. Yeah, yeah, which is a fun nickname. And speaking of Hitler, like any self respecting autocrat, Lukashenko has a history of saying really weird things about Hitler. Um are yeah, kind of baffling. On one occasion, the Bell Larusian dictator told an interviewer quote, Hitler created a

powerful Germany owing to the strong presidential power. After all, the German order has been developing for centuries. Under Hitler, this process reached its highest point. This is how we understand the presidential republic and the role of the president. Yeah, that's that's that's that's not not problematic. Yeah when when I when I become president of every country, I will make sure to model my presidency after Hitler. I prefer

to that. I prefer to be a strong president like Hitler, a guy with whom I have less disagreements than you might expect. Obviously, these remarks caused a bit of a stir um, as it ought to when your head of state compares himself favorably to Hitler. Lukashenko found it necessary to justify himself by semi backpedaling and telling people that he thought Hitler was quote a real fascist, a real idiot in power who destroyed a lot of people. But

and this is where he goes wrong. Whatever that and then at a but yeah, you know you're doing with just write a lot of people ended there, don't add the butt. But he continues, but managed to unite the nation by means of tough policy. At that stage, the result was obvious. Therefore, there is no need to reproach me that we wished to have the serious tough power

in Belarus. Um, the result was obvious. I don't know if we saw the same obvious thing and the results there, Alexander, But yes, Lukashenko has one other weird Hitler statement, uh that he's repeated a number of times, which is the line not everything Hitler did was bad, which again you shouldn't need to point out. You don't need to say that. Yeah,

like it's one of those things. Yes, we could split hairs and discuss the extent to which the Nazi Party deserves credit for the auto bon or whatever, you know, but it really isn't important. But here we go this. Honestly, Hitler did do one good thing. That's that's killing Hitler was the one. Yeah, that was the only thing he did that. Uh other governments had proved unable to do so far. Um, yeah, gotta give him credit, Gotta give him credit for that. Uh So yeah, anyway, Lukashenko weird,

weird Hitler opinions. So yeah. Lukashenko repeatedly admits to having authoritarian tendencies, but he also again gets really pissed when people call him a dictator. In two thousand twelve, Germany's foreign minister Guido Westervel used the term dictator to describe Lukashenko's regime. Um, and I should note here that Guido

is homosexual. And the fact that I'm noting that he's homosexual is not a good sign for what's about to come next, because as soon as Guido called Lukashenko a dictator, Lukeshenko responded, better to be a dictator than gay, which is like a ninth grade level. That is ninth grade in two thousand and four. It's a very four school grade. No, but at least I'm not gay. Yeah, you're yeah, it's good. Yeah, it's it's literally the thing that like he moved on

from at like age fourteen. Uh, when I was a kid. Your generation is much better about that sort of little Yeah. So in another interview, Lukashenko made it clear that he's capable of some nuance when it comes to LGBT issues. Uh. And I'm gonna quote now from an interview he gave to the Independent lesbians are bad, but I do not. Again, that's a great clause to start us out with. He has a lot of good add the word, but it seems to be a recurring theme. Lesbians are bad, but

I do not condemn them as with gays. This is not my understanding. I think it's absolutely unacceptable and negative. Okay, that's good. So at least he makes a distinction. He is fine with leslie, he's not fine. Lesbians. They're not great. I'm not going to condemn them. There used to take a strong anti lesbian state. I think they're hot. Those gays I look at I feel fine condemning those. Yeah, again, Lukashenko is like a lot of people. You grew up

with your small southern community. Anyway, Lukashenko's cultural conservatives and manifest itself in his attitudes towards the Russian Orthodox Church, summed up by the statement he made to a church patriarch quote, thank god our church does not suffer from the infections that have crushed the Western church. He's referring to the Catholic Church. There. We have heard it all. Pedophilia, gainnus, environmentalism. What the hell is going on? The trifecta of pedophilia,

gainness and environmentalists the three evils of society. Yeah, you're getting sick here too. So I think that the Orthodox Church and state are not working well enough here. We cannot afford to lose a whole generation of people. Yeah, we can't afford to lose that to environmentalism and environmentalism and its cousin gainness. You couldn't really just ruin the

youth with those, yeah. Uh. In two thousand fourteen, after Russia's annexation of Crimea, Lukashenko offered to share control over a United Russia slash Belarus with Vladimir Putin telling an interviewer on Ukrainian TV, I told Putin that after the Crimea annexation, people might no longer call me Europe's less dictator. Um. Yeah, And I don't know. It's interesting because he also held like piece a piece SMA in Minsk that helped bring

him closer to NATO over the whole issue. He kept doing that whole weird like jumping into both sides with both feet sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't pretend to have any particularly deep sight into Lukashenko's mind and like who he is as a person, because he kind of plays a lot of his ship pretty close to the vest. But studying him you do really get the opinion that he thinks it's important to be seen

as legitimately popular. Um. After in two thousand six, after a blatantly false election gave him eighty six percent of the vote, in the international community, you know, decried the fact that he was falsifying the elections. He actually admitted to falsifying the results of the election, um, but kind of lied about the direction in which he faked things, saying, quote, yes, we falsified the results. I've already told this to Westerners In fact, ninety three and a half percent of ballots

were for President Lukashenko. People say this is not a European results, so he changed it to this truly happened. So his argument is like, people are accusing me of lying and falsifying an election. The way to respond to this is to say, yes, I lied and falsified an election, but just to make myself seem less popular. Um, that's good. I don't think that has the impact that he thinks it has. No, it's not it's not a good way

to build up trust. No. Um. Outside of the official propaganda, a series of local rumors have propped up around Lukashenko. The most common one is that he's mentally ill, suffering from a variant of anti social personality disorder called mosaic psychopathy. His opponents will generally declare that Stalin, Hitler, and mau were all diagnosed with the same disorder, and this is like it's a meme in Belarusian sort of opposition groups. But I don't think it's true at all. For one thing,

I on think he's been diagnosed with anything. I know Hitler, Stalin and Mao weren't diagnosed with anything, and Hitler Stalin, Mao, and Lukashenko are all like broad the different kinds of shitty. Yeah, they all they all definitely, they're not all the same type of dictator. No, No, they're not very different. And in fact, if you're picking Hitler, Stalin and now you're picking like three guys who are actually like the most

different three dictators like Stalin and Saddam same kind of guy. Um, you know, but but Hitler, Stalin, maw all pretty different dudes in terms of the way they utilized power and the way that they came into power. Weird that he picks those. I guess they it's just like they're the they're the big dictators. You could add Musolini there, I guess, but I guess Musolini is a little bit similar to Hitler.

Mussolini is the most similar. More is like pretty similar to Lukashenko comparatively, Like he's closer to Mussolini than he is to Hitler, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, um yeah, so I don't know whatever. Um. Alexander Lukashenko does have a wife, but she very conspicuously doesn't carry out the job of first Lady. Belarus has no equivalent to Asthma assad or Melani A. Trump Uh. This is also in line with traditions for Eastern European despots. Stalin was conspicuously single for

most of his time in power. There are rumors that Lukashenko's wife lives in a monastery or a mental institution. Uh. And likewise, there are rumors about his children. Were not really sure how many he has. People are pretty confident that about three of his sons, Nikolai, Dmitri and Victor um. And it's kind of worth noting that while these guys are sometimes portrayed as particularly his youngest son Nikolai, Like we talked about this on the Children of Bastard's episode,

he's the kid who got given a golden handgun. Yeah. Yeah, his his Putin gave him a gigantic golden handgun that he carries everywhere. So there's all these very funny pictures of him, like meeting the President of Venezuela, which mess of Bulgian gun and his his little little kids suit for him. It's very funny him. It's exactly what you do if you were eleven years old, got to and like, yeah, you can carry everywhere you want, but it's a giant

gold it's awesome. Yeah, but so there's this kind of idea that because of the ship that that Nikolai poll's um and and because of like the reputation he has, that he's being groomed as the the like following in his dad's footsteps. And this is actually pretty heavily debated by people who know anything about the country. There's a lot of argument as to whether or not Lukashenko's children

are kind of expecting to follow in his footsteps. For his part, the president himself has repeatedly publicly stated that his children don't want to to go into politics and that he doesn't consider them airs um. And Yeah, nobody really knows how true this is, but a lot of reputable academics do think that he's kind of being broadly sincere there um and yeah, it's it's hard to say

kind of what he wanted for the future. Prior to this last election, in the late oughts, that were persistent rumors that he felt trapped as dictator of Belarus and kind of was looking for a way out but couldn't find it. Uh. And I'm gonna quote now from an article in Deutsche Well uh to uh kind of elaborate on that Lukashenko's biggest challenge, meanwhile, still lies ahead his

exit from the political stage. He recently announced that presidential elections will be held as planned, and he's expecting to run again. In his biography on Lukashenko, Valerie Karboalovitch described the leader as a hostage trapped in a political system of his own making. Lukashenko, he writes, has no choice but to try to remain in power indefinitely, with no viable successor in sight. Karbolovitch says Lukashenko's electoral defeat would

lead to radical regime change. Um. So that's interesting. Yeah, I wonder. I always wonder how much to believe it when people talk about like these guys wanting a way out or being trapped, because it does happen. Like Saddam before the invasion was like wind all the time about

how he didn't want to be dictator anymore. Um, And you do have to think that, like for the guys who kind of are less ideological about it and just wanted power, there's a certain point at which you're old and you're rich, and maybe you just like to enjoy being old and rich and not have to constantly worry about being overthrown um by angry activists. I don't know. I mean, there's also like he has a credible there's another person that can run the country, which is his

opponent the election. So if he wants to step down, he can. He doesn't need to be dictator forever. But here's the problem. Once you've been the dictator and you've had a bunch of people disappeared and executed for exercising their political rights, um, and you've stolen huge amounts of money from the country, then if you leave power, you're in a little bit of a pickle. Yeah right, Yeah, that's the cage of your own making. Yeah, that's the case.

The cage of your own making is made with the bones of your enemies because at a certain point you've killed too many people to um, to retire peacefully. Um. Because we don't just have an island where dictators can go. Well, we do, and it's Jamaica. But um, I don't think he likes the heat. So yeah, it's he's he's in a complicated situation. UM. And as with any controversial political leader, there's numerous rumors about how Lukashenko fox both his detractors

and supporters. Close your close your ears at this point, Garrett, I'm covering my ears. There we go, both his detract we know that the teens don't don't ever hear about dictators um doing. I don't know, I don't know. I lost track of the joke here. Um yeah. So both of his detracts, both his detractors and supporters feel it necessary to tell stories about Lukashenko's supernatural, uh sexual and

erotic sexual prowess and his titanic erotic appetite. So like, both people who like him and hate him need you to know how fun hungry he is, which is kind of a weird. I don't know. I guess that's just Belarus.

Um yeah. One tabloid newspaper clearly put like pushing a government line of propaganda described to the president's described an alleged adulterous relationship by the president, and wrote that Lukashenko is the only candidate who was potent like is basically like, look, he's he focks around on his wife because he's the only person in Belarusian politics, um who can get it, which is an interesting line to take. Um yeah. And thirteen, Lukashenko was asked by his Phobota journalist how long he

felt his political career would last. This was a polite way of asking do you plan to be dictator for life? Lukashenko responded, if people will elect me, then you have will have Lukashenko for as many terms as you elect him, if, of course, health will allow him. He then added, if you have any doubts about my health, let's take skates and skis and tomorrow we will try. Let's run ten kilometers. If you come first, then tomorrow you will be president. Yeah.

I love the system, dictatorship of the marathon. It's my favorite political system. It would be cool if I could just challenge the president to fucking tin k um and then this is what I hope that I would. I would so beat the president at any k The thing is now is because the election here is such a big mass, we could just have Biden challenge Trump to push up contest and then the winner just be president.

I mean, has he kind of always he already had he already talked about that, But now that could just be the way we win the presidency. I don't have up and see what happens. No, I don't think either of them could. I don't know if I think either of them could do one good push up. I'm gonna be honest, I don't think so either. But if we want, they're so trash, they're so old in trash. But Kamala, Kamala could could do more push ups than Pence, I'm

fairly sure. Yeah, probably, um but no, but they can't be on the stage together because it's against his religion to sweat near a woman he's not married to. Um So, I don't think he's going to agree to that in the first place. Uh So, Yeah, that that's a weird one. Um Now, I think the best Lukashenko propaganda I've come across is again from that Belarush Country study guide that

was produced with help from the Belarusian government. Uh And I wanted to read a few fun, fun Lukashenko facts that they put out in their like broken Belarusian to English translated text, because it's it's fun. Lukashenko has always willingly indulged in sport. The head of the state is sure that enormous psychological strain he undergoes every day, a nervous stress, can only be removed by activity going in

for sport. Yeah. Although every minute of President's time schedule is entered in the records, he tries to find time and meets the state affairs to come up to a bookshelf. To come up to a bookshelf, reading books for him is a most pleasant occupation. He obtained satisfaction whenever he gets acquainted with technological novelties, with latest achievements of the scientific mind. It seems like a real eccentric fell out. You obtain satisfaction from a technological novelty earlier today and

then it broke Amedia never my headphone. Yeah. I love the way they describe coming. When he needs a relaxation, he comes up to a bookshelf. That's what I do when I do you feel relaxed? I go up to my bookshelf, and for him is the most pleasant occupation. So over the last twenty some years, Lukashenko's political agenda has evolved from a vague platform of anti corruption to more or less supporting return to the old Soviet economic

system with minor market elements. The private sector has been kept pretty consistently at of the GDP, and Belarus's industry has kept chugging along, duing large part to Russian support. Uh. Not only did Russia cell cheap oil to Belarus, but they bought the Soviet style products still made in its factory. So like all of the like the like the Kirkland

brand products in Russia are all from Belarus. So like you can get like a stove that's made somewhere else in the world, or if you want a cheap stove that just works, you get the BELARUSI get the Belarus brand. Yeah and yeah they were like and that that's part of what has kept their economy chugging along. UM. So Yeah, Lukashenko pretty much based his entire political capital on stability UM.

But most of that stability has been an illusion. For example, for most of his time in power, Belarus shot to provide workers with an average monthly wage of around five dred u s dollars. Unfortunately, the state was rarely able to afford more than about half of this, so they came to rely on regular loans from Russia, particularly in years like two thousand eleven, when Belarusian inflation topped a hundred and nine percent. Oh good, Yeah, that's not good

in amounts of inflation, UM. But Russia said no sometimes, which is again part of why, like Lukashenko started making more overtures for the EU UM and he's also gotten loans from the I m F and the European Union um, which means he's kind of in debt to everybody a little bit um, which is, I don't know, in an interesting situation to be in now. In general, Putin and Lukashenko have had kind of a more of a tumultuous

relationship than most media tends to present. Belarus and Russia are on paper, part of that economic union that was always meant to progress, being a political one, and it first folks assumed that Lukashenko was a puppet of Putin's kind of inevitably bringing his country into this like union of Russia and Belarus. But over the years, Lukashenko's like repeatedly pulled back, like right at the moment where they

might take a step forward towards that. And again it's kind of like he's been a little bit of a cock tease with Belarus, like, Oh yeah, we're totally gonna like we're gonna get hitched. Don't worry, don't worry. I just gotta go see I gotta go see my like Bay over the the I m F. We're just gonna like hang out for a night, like but it doesn't

mean anything. Yeah. So last Christmas, Lukashenko presented Putin with a gift that some people see as a fuck you to Russia over the fact that they started like demanding repayment of things and kind of anyway, the gift was three sacks of potatoes and a bunch of like rendered fork pork fat um, which is a weird thing to like bring to your buddies house as a Christmas gift. Um. Yeah, Putin seems to broadly be kind of have been relatively

pissed in recent years, particularly in the last year. Um And has responded by jacking up oil prices against towards Belarus and fucking with the state of their exports to Russia, which has kind of helped to created the Belarusian economy. Now, all of this has meant that for the last few years Belarus has been anything but stable. Lukashenko has continued to talk a good game about socialism, but he's reverted to the same sort of austerity measures that we see

in western countries. He's raised the age for drawing out your pension basically like raised the retirement age. Uh. He started permitting moderate unemployment. It used to be like impossible basically to be unemployed in Belarusia are belarus And Um, Yeah, he's allowed unemployment as a result of the fact that

there just was not enough money to force it. Um. And that's brought you know, political turmoil because people are seeing themselves losing access to some of these like state institutions that had at least been like kind of a sav on the fact that they didn't have much freedom. Um. Since two thousand eight, lukashenko solution to this has been to periodically loosen up the rules and allows political opponents to organize and advocate for whatever it is they happen

to want. Is like a safety valve. You know, things are getting worse and worse, so I might as well give them an opportunity a little bit of esteem. Yeah, and you also get to figure out who's the best at organizing resistance and throw them in dark cells. Um. And he kind of developed he had a history of

being relatively smart about approaching some of these protest movements. So, for example, when mine workers went on strike over delay in wage payments and demanded to be allowed to join a new non state owned union, Lukashenko made sure that they got their money and they got a fifty percent raise. But then as soon as that was done, he fired all of the leaders who had organized the strike, and

he also fired all of the heads of the new union. Likewise, Yeah, but you know what is really healthy, Sophie, I do, Robert, I think I do. Yeah, the products and services that support this podcast extremely healthy, you know, yeah, very healthy. Never fired the head of a mining strike. Well maybe maybe probably no comment, We're back, so uh yeah. Lukashenko, so he was. He kind of developed over time a

pretty canny way of responding to dissent um. Every now and then he would loosen the rules for political activism to sort of let people gather in the streets more. But he never actually changed the laws so that at any point in time he could just like have his police start enforcing the laws again. Um. And that gave him an opportunity to like, uh kind of trap people and funk with them, um, but also do the safety

velops sort of thing when he needed to. I'm gonna quote now from a write up in the Carnegie Moscow Center about the way in which the regime dealt with dissent. Quote. The resume has several tools to minimize the likelihood of mass protests that might escalate to the point of threatening its survival. First, a significant proportion of Belarusians are excluded from politics, is a consequence of the state sectors economic dominance.

The country has a widely used system whereby employers are not obliged to extend labor contracts when they run out, usually after one year, so the authorities have a powerful lever lever for influencing the majority of the working population. Similarly, students risk being expelled from institutions of higher education, the majority of which your state run, if they express political

satisfact dissatisfaction. So yeah, it's a pretty pretty sweet situation when you own the state and the state is everything um, and you can just shut down people's lives. Maybe maybe one body shouldn't control all those things. I don't know. Now. Protests are allowed in Belarus, but they have to receive state approval first. Yeah, my favorite type of protest is

state approved approach. Yes, when they tell you where you can be um, which they always want to do, like the police and the authorities always want to be able to tell people where you can protest. Yeah, it's something we're seeing in Portland. A lot is still just close off areas of gentime, Like, Nope, you can't proticey anymore. Yeah, it's a thing you have to be really unguardful or because you know, it's exactly the kind of thing you do if you want to be able to run an

authoritarian state and stop people from resisting it. Uh. In two thousand from seventeen, Belarus's rules about when people could protest and where we're briefly loosened. Um. And basically people just got fined for partaking an unapproved protests rather than arrested. Uh. And this state of affairs lasted for a little less than two years until Lukashenko instituted a new law that taxed the unemployed. Um, just the unemployed, who he called

social parasites. When protests against this got serious, he cracked down again and started stopped letting people go out of the streets without getting arrested. Um. Yeah, so that's interesting. UM. Lukashenko has shown sort of a a habit of giving in and giving concessions to protesters in certain situations in which he felt like it was kind of necessary. So in two thousand eleven, drivers who got angry at a rise in gas prices blocked men central thoroughfare, claiming that

their vehicles had broken down. A bunch of them were detained and fined. But on the same day the president lowered the fuel price. Now the fuel price crept up again very quickly thereafter, back to the levels that had been before the protests. Um. And he basically just used that as an opportunity to like stop the protest, temporarily, throw all of the people who organized them in prison, and then gradually raise the fuel tax back up to the level it had been before. Um. Yeah, very very sneaky,

very sneaky. The kind of the smart dictator way to do is the smart wave if you want to be dictator, a smart way to handle the protests. Yeah, it's risky to confront protesters in the street and beat the ship out of them, because that can lead to huge mobs of protest. Yeah, and then more people will be on the street. Whereas you give them what they want, you throw their leaders in prison, and then you fuck them over again and see if they're going to be bold

enough to come back out. Smart guy. Likewise, President Lukashenko is deeply cautious about promoting charismatic or ambitious men to positions in government. Um. The only thing more dangerous than being a protester in Belarus is being a politician who works with the president and stands out in some way. I'm going to quote again from that Carnegie Russia piece quote. Those who occupy senior posts know this and try not to stand out, give too many interviews, or develop public profiles.

Lukashenko's aim is to ensure that neither elites nor ordinary citizens get the impression that someone has a stable hold on the number two position in the power vertical. There is no clear air or favorite in the eyes of the elite, and one should not be allowed to appear. Moreover, to prevent officials from thinking that they are becoming untouchable and to keep them in line, Lukashenko regularly initiates criminal cases,

usually in charges of corruption against some of them. The rare cases tend to fifteen years ago in which high profile officials went over to the opposition, ended with various criminal charges being brought against them. To make sure others got the message. In this system, betraying the president's trust is the greatest sin. It seems this country stability has been sorely based off of this guy trying to keep the country as boring as possible. Yeah, yeah, you really

get that like that impression from it. And that's kind of why Belarus had a hard time. Like Belarusians who were pro like trying to actually fight against state repression have consistently had a hard time getting any getting anyone to give a fuck, Like right now because of the violence in the streets has been the first time anyone's really cared about Belarus on an international level in quite

a while. Because people are terrible, um, and Lukashenko was good at being like, he was smarter than like an assad where it's like, oh, you don't want torture tens of thousands of people to death, you just torture the right few dozen people and kill a handful of those people, and everybody else gets the message and you let them do their little marching and stuff unless they go too far, and then you just you know, there has to be enough allowed that people feel like they have a little

bit of control so that they don't fully rise up exactly. Yeah, and he he kind of it's a balancing act, and he seemed to be pretty good at it for almost thirty years. Um. One of the things that kind of disrupted his ability to add a actively hide from that or two. It was one of the things that seems to have disrupted his ability to successfully balance is the coronavirus um. So Lukashenko made an interesting call when the virus hit, which is that he just refused to acknowledge

that it was dangerous. We've never seen this before, we haven't like he makes the president look responsible, and yeah, it's not it's not good. He told his people that the virus was a mass psychosis and that if they got sick, they should all go to the sauna and get drunk to poison the virus. Yeah. Yeah, let's all go to the sauna in a moist room where all the airs going around. Yeah yeah, that's a great plan. Let's drink lots of straight vodka to lower our immune systems.

You get a poison of virus um. Yeah. In late May, he insisted he'd been right not to lock down, stating, you see that in the affluent West, unemployment is out of control. People are banging on pots, people want to eat. Thank god we avoided this. We didn't shut down. You wanna you wanna guess what happened next. I'm guessing thousands of thousands people have died. We don't know how many people have died because it's Belarus, but the president absolutely

got coronavirus. You could see a pattern States, Russia, Brazil. All authoritarian kind of leadership styles are so incompetent at handling an actual crisis of this scale. And he he absolutely refused to make any changes to his life. They continued to hold all of his public appearances. Government meetings continued without masks. He continued to play hockey and go to hockey games. UM. In late March, he was interviewed in full hockey gear uh, saying it's better to die

standing than live on your knees. Oh boy, and yeah, then he caught the coronavirus. UM. He says he was asymptomatic, but he does not describe being a symptomatic and he told an interviewer, I apologized for my voice. Lately, I have to talk a lot. But the most surprising thing is that today you're seeing a person who managed to power through the coronavirus standing on his feet. Doctors made this conclusion yesterday. It was asymptomatic, like I said, of

our people go through this symptom illness without symptoms. And thank god I've managed to get into this group of asymptomatic people, which is not true. There's no he cited. He cited no actual statistics from his health ministry or whatever to make this claim. Um. But also he was clearly apologizing for the fact that his throat sounded shitty, gotten sick. Very funny. Um, not funny because an unknown

number of Belarusians died from the virus. Again, we have no actual data on how many of them got sick, but we do know that Belarusians were so desperate at the complete lack of support provided by their government that they started taking to go fund me in massive numbers. One campaign purchased more than a hundred and thirty thousand dollars worth of respirators for doctors and nurses, which were like sixteen dollars a piece on the streets because like

they're just weren't masks available. Um. So people, people have been crowdfunding basic medical supplies for their doctors in Belarus, a supposedly socialist state, because the government just refused to admit that the coronavirus was a thing. Um. And it is weird that, like, you've got Belarus the closest thing we have to the USSR left on the planet except I don't know, maybe Cuba or something. Um. And you've got the United States, which is you know, this bastion

of capitalism. Um. And they both kind of wound up in the same position where civilians were crowdfunding doctor. This is this. This is a sign of a perfect working system when you have people having to use a crowdfunding site for their medical care. This is this is a sign that everything is everything is fine, nothing is wrong. Yeah, it's it's great. Um. For his part, Lukashenko, yeah, refused

to cancel and like he just yeah anyway. Over the years, Lukashenko clearly grew comfortable with the idea that his words could manipulate and dictate reality. You know, he could change his own birth date, like the nature of his dad or whatever, like at a whim for whatever was politically convenient. And again kind of like we saw with Trump, he ran into the coronavirus, which is this thing that like you can't manipulate, you can't lie to it. Yeah, it's just a virus and it will get you sick if

you don't take certain precautions. Um, but you know it, he let it spread like wildfire through Belarus and that sucked. Uh. And it happened to be also that this year was a presidential election UM, and so the kind of campaigning season started just as the coronavirus was really biting and the economy was hitting a nose dive, and there was no way for him to hide the rod. Right. You can't, as the president claim, I kept everything stable while people are sick and out of it. It's hard to just

propaganda this one away exactly. There's a certain point at which the lying does not work. A government poll taken in April of found that only a third Belarus trusted the president UM Opposition Canada and this is again a pole his own government RELI. Yeah, not great results. Opposition candidates began to come out of the woodwork to oppose

his rule. There were three of them initially. UM. One of them was a guy named Sergei Tekanowski who's a famous YouTuber who grew to local fame by putting out video's highlighting corruption and incompetence within the government. And then there were two other like opposition politicians who were kind of prominently running against the president and they all get arrested almost immediately. And then which is like normal, right,

that's what happens. That's happening. Um. But then something weird happens. The wives of all three of these opposition politicians get together and decide to run one single campaign together. Um. So they merged their support in campaign, and they throw all of their support behind the wife of the YouTube star who got arrested, a woman named fet Lana, and

they start running a really credible campaign. Well, in a matter of days, they collect a hundred thousand signatures necessary to register as a campaign with regime controlled election authorities, and the regime lets them. And you get the feeling it's because they thought that it's yeah, they thought it was just like there's no chance. Yeah, would kind of like uh crudely say something along the line like mockingly say, oh, I don't think we're ready for a female president in Belarus.

But she kept getting more popular and more popular and more popular. Um, and something really neat happened. Where As this is all going on, starting with like you know, the coronavirus pandemic, people in Belarus started getting onto apps like Telegram in increasing numbers, hundreds of thousands of them who hadn't been before, to organize these like drives and donations and providing like to organize the providing basic medical supplies to um medical professionals. And they were on all

these platforms when the campaignings started up. So they began like there was this one app created that allowed them to like track votes, um and like track what people were voting for us that they could have like an accurate, updated by the minute account of how people were really voting, to compare to the government talies on the election, UM

and so. And also like you have all these people who were able to get like organized voter drives and stuff like that to actually like run a really competent campaign that very quickly overwhelmed the president's uh, like all of the state repressive measures he'd spent decades building up UM and it kind of works. I'm gonna quote next here from a rite up in vox quote. Experts told me Lukashenko usually allows some opposition candidates to run against him.

Doing so let's the regime keep the appearance of a fair election, and also allows those with grievances to address them once in a while, hoping complaints died down soon after the vote. That seems to have happened in this case, but the president also didn't seem too threatened by takenof Skaya's candidacy. One reason was that Takenovskaya had no political experience at all. In fact, she'd never spoken at a political rally before. The other was that Lukashenko holds sexist,

outdated views of women. Society is not mature enough to vote for a woman, he said in July, adding that the weight of the presidency would leader to collapse the poor thing. But taken off Skaya didn't collapse under pressure. Instead, she united the opposition and brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets and support UM. So yeah, they put together this campaign like they have that. Like the sign for this campaign was like a heart and a fist in a fist pumping position and a V for

victory UM. And yeah it all, it all works. Grassroots movement led by a woman is a vibe led by three women vibe. Yeah, it's it's definitely a vibe UM. And because protesters have this UM, they have this like vote tracking system that they've all set up together independently, they're able to like keep track of how the votes are actually going when the government lies about it. Which

is what happens. You know, there's an election. Um the early polls, which seemed to be pretty like the the the credible polls UH suggests that about eighty percent of people voted for set lana Um. The government claims that eighty percent of people voted for Lukashenko, which again has happened every election. But this time, when he claimed that he'd won by an overwhelming margin, everyone knew it was

a lie because they were all online talking to each other. So, and you you'll hear this in interviews, people being like, well, I just assumed he must have a bunch of supporters elsewhere, and like so, I like, that's why he kept winning. But now people were online with hundreds of thousands of their citizens, and everyone was saying, like, no, none of us voted for Now, we're all in communication. We know who we voted for. This guy, wasn't it. Yeah, we're

all talking. And so so that's what takes all these people out into the streets and we're gonna talk a little more about what happened next. But first, you know what's better than going to the streets but buying the products and participating in the rat wheel of capitalism which provides us with satisfactory answers to all of our needs that are so much better than getting out in the streets and bricking windows all of that bad stuff you don't need with not we're back, okay. So yeah, it

was a really interesting situation. So basically spent Lana and these other women, like the wives of these candidates, run this incredible grassroots campaign that by all accounts, outside of the Belarusian regime fucking wins. And there's you'll hear so like tank these people who listen a lot are a

group of people I don't like much. And they're basically this group of leftists who finds a reason to defend every dictator and a reason to criticize every movement against a dictator who isn't in line with the United States, because if you're not a and of the US, then it doesn't matter how about a dictator you are. Anyway,

I don't like tankys um. One of the things that they will attack, uh, One of the things that they will attack um fet Lana's campaign from is that one of the proxies that she picked for her campaign, like a local activist who was sort of campaigning for her praised Adolf Hitler in speeches, Um, which is a bad thing to do. But also it's not like he didn't

praise Hitler. It's like, if you are going to say, like, I agree with you, it's a problem that this person's vetting was so bad that they picked like an election proxy who had support, Like who says nice things about Hitler? But the president repeatedly says nice things about Hitler, So that may not make the point you wanted to make in this case, um, which is like, yeah, it's it's bad that that happened, but also come on, like the the guy that they're running against his repeatedly talked about

how good many of the things Hitler did. Is maybe this is a sign that nobody who runs for president makes great choice. We're saying, it's like it's like it's like telling people they should vote for Trump insta the Biden because Biden's creepy around women. It's like, yes, but also Trump, Yeah, Like that's not that's not a good argument to vote for Trump. They're both creepy around women. Yeah.

And I don't want to like criticize fet Lonire because I honestly you get the feeling that she just like she never wanted to be in politics. She she probably just didn't really think much about vetting people, and nobody can be that good in Belarus at running a political campaign experience. So I'm gonna give her a pass on the fact that one of the people she hired wound up having said some dumb things in the past. Yeah, it doesn't seem cancellable to me. Um. Yeah, and she

had it was one of those things. So she would she would say things sometimes in speeches that were like kind of broad like like like broadly let's say, gender traditional. So she repeatedly make the claim that like, I would rather be preparing cutlets for my children than running for president, but like I just have to do it, which you can feel about the way you want. Um. But it's

also what's a politician. It's politician. It plays well like it's a very pretty patriarchal society, and that'll get people who might not otherwise vote for a woman on board who's it's a protest vote like exact. Um. She also said some stuff that I think is pretty cool. I don't need power, but my husband is behind bars. I'm tired of putting up with it. I'm tired of being silent.

I'm tired of being afraid. Um. And obviously one of the things that's really tragic about this, in the immediate wake of the election, you know, all these protests start up, things become like very violent, very quickly, with state security

forces cracking down, and she has to go into hiding. Um. She sends her children out of the country first, in which she's actually in the same boat with Lukashenko because there's it's heavily suspected although not proven, like the presidential aircraft bellers Is air Force one flew to Turkey as soon as things started getting bad, and it's believed that Lukashenko's family was on board. Yeah, do do we know? Do we know where he is right now? I think

he's still in the country. Um, he's supposed to be giving an address pretty soon, probably will have by the time this episode drops. And there's a bunch of different anyway, So fet Lana Um comes on like basically goes to ground for a while and seems like she gets caught because the next time we see her protester going on and she makes a video from the office of government minister where she's like everyone should accept the election results

and go home and not fight the police. And she looks like fucked up, and it's it's it's yeah, yeah, we we we know what's going on. You know what's going on. And she's fled the country since, so she is out and safe and hiding for the sake of her family's safety. Um. And things in Belarus are very bad right now. UM, seven thousand people have been arrested. Now most of those people are a sizeable chunk of

those people have and released. At this point, again, we are not talking yet, at least about a regime that is like the Syrian regime where they're going to the immediately kill killed. Um, they have killed at least two people, probably significantly more, and they're torturing people, lots of them. There was the audio that came out a few days ago.

We're going to include a clip from that in a second, but it's it's audio of protesters from outside of one of Belarus is not so secret prisons, just like people. You can hear people being tortured, and we'll we'll play that now. So yeah, that's horrifying. UM, not not great, not great, Uh, not great, But it hasn't stopped people from coming out and in the last as I, as I deliver this, things will be in a different state

by the time you hear this. Most recent change has been that the government is allowing mass demonstrations again, and like the soldiers are hugging protesters and like they're there. It seems like things got bad enough that he decided, oh god, if I keep pressing people shooting people in the streets, that will inevitably lead to a revolution. And I don't know that I'll win because this morning I saw footage of like police cars joining in on the

protest or whatever. Yeah, And it's it's hard to say at this stage, because there have been One of the things that was happening is there were viral videos of members of like even Russia or even Belarution special forces throwing away or burning their uniforms to be like, we're not going to hurt our people. Um, And maybe that was enough of a problem that he realized he had

to change his response. I can't tell if the because there have been cases in history where like police and military forces joined with protesters and then the government got overthrown, right, I don't know if that's the case. We we don't know if it's actually genuine or if it's kind of

been being controlled by him to make himself look good. Yeah, and there's also rumors that basically what's going to happen is Lukashenko is going to be backed by Russia and allowed to stay in power for another year and then resign, and that like that's what they're going to try to do, so like he can save some space, but like they want to put their man. But also it's like it's not clear that that would work because basically a significant number of the country at this point is actually more

pro Europe than pro Russia. It's it's some polls that have happened have had it been close to fifty fifty,

it's usually about fifty pro Russia pro EU. Who knows where things are at this moment um, but it is a situation that's like kind of the thing that he's been trying to avoid since two thousand fourteen, which is Belarus winding up kind of like Ukraine, where you have the country split along pro European or pro Russian lines, and then Russia comes in and takes the chunk of the country and there's a big, ugly civil war like a lot of really horrible things could happen here um

and some of them being that like Belarus could get you know, sort of put absorbed more by kind of the technocratic West and wind up being picked over by capitalists like Albania did. It's no easy, great solution here. Yeah, besides like just getting the elected leader actually elected like

the first and who we probably think won the election. Yeah, yeah, which is which is a start um and it is one of those things where you can kind of look through what's likely to happen next and be like, oh, well, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of potential for

things to end well for Belarus um. And I do like you can make a strong logical arguments there right that like you know, NATO is going to like uh like the I M F or whoever, like like what all these different sort of Western powers that have been kind of have been slavering at the chance to get there, to get their teeth around Belarus will do that, and

it will make life worse for people. Not impossible, although at this point, considering how bad things have gotten, hard to see how that would be worse than where things are. There's also the argument like Russia will take over and like it will become more authoritarian and things will get worse for people, um and like none of the options

before them are good. And I don't like getting trapped into that kind of thinking because it leads you to like, it leads you to not be excited about what what is a core good thing here, which is that a shipload of people who never thought, who never who have not had political agency in their lives are now like drop kicking riot cops in the street and trying to

change their circumstances. And that's a good thing. Yeah, absolutely, I mean, yeah, it's these people how have for the first time in a while or having a sense of like agency in their life. Yeah, And I don't want to, like, I don't think it should be a foregone conclusion that they will get fucked over like one way or the other by you know, Russian imperialism or or sort of like the kind of the same, like the fucking shock doctrine capitalism. Like I don't think either of those has

to be inevitable. Like it's an unwritten year. Things could be different, Like who knows. Anyway, there's a there's enough things going on in the world that there's not a foregone conclusion yet. Yeah. So that's what what I've got for this episode so far. UM. And I hope that if you're in Belarus and somehow listening to this. Because they shut down the Internet to a pretty heavy extent,

people have found ways around it, thankfully. One of the cool stories is that, like there's this app that was developed to allow people in China to access the Internet that people started downloading in Belarus before the Internet got or before like all the app stores got blocked. Um, so people have been passing it around and flash drives thousands of people so that they could get it on this This is cyberpunk. It's very cool. That's that's actually cyberpunk.

That is awesome and it's neat. There's been some really cool stories coming out, like a bunch of British soccer hooligans flew over to Belarus to like fight the cops on the hat like yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fucking fucking rules. Yeah. Um, like anti racist skinhead types in the UK, um, which I think fucking rocks. Um. And I was reading a really interesting crime thing published an article an interview with

a number of different Belarusian anarchists, um and yeah. People were asked like what they're It was really interesting for a number of reasons. One of them was that one of the guys they interviewed estimated, like, there's maybe a hundred of us in the country, like anarchists who were actually organized in an um and but they're also like the people who have the most time and experience thinking

about how to fight the state. Yeah, they've they've just been there free time thinking about this, so they've been the back bone and help. But trying to like train up all of these other these Belarusians who kind of like never would have considered themselves political activists before um, which is an interesting a story I'd love to to

learn more about, to be honest, UM and yeah. Another one of the people they interviewed, like was asked like, what can we do to help, and he was like, well, there's some donations that people can want, but like, really, if you could, if it's at all possible for you to travel to Belarus and help us fist fight the cops, we could really use that help right now. Of course, it's difficult with the play, very difficult. Not a great time.

I would love to be They're doing something, but um, not easy to get to at the moment, especially for Americans who are no longer welcome anywhere in the world. But yeah, Belarus were We are paying attention and hope that y'all uh figure out how to make things better in your lives and that everyone who says that this is inherently doomed winds up being wrong. Yep, very hopeful and optimistic ending. I love optimism. You know what else? I love Garrison? No, what else do you love? Plugging?

You love? You love pluggables. The attempts we've tried to plug in headphones all day well actually because they were not plug in headphones. It was a nightmare that stole like an hour from our We better if we had a splitter, then we can plug into head exactly exactly, if people had just Sometimes progress isn't necessary. What was wrong with the audio jack? Why did people need something new?

It worked fine. My plug doubles are good. Speaking of plug doubles, my plugables at Hungry Bowtown Twitter for protests,

reporting and other kind of political fun stuff. Um yeah, that's that's what I'm doing right now, and that's the main thing currently and mine is at I right okay, where you can occasionally see me live streaming Garrison and myself and a number of our other close friends getting repeatedly hear gassed in the streets of Portland, Oregon, as has become tradition in the streets of Portland, Oregon on days that end. And why oh it's a good time, Sophie,

great reading. Our city is for a long time. Yeah. On an unrelated note, my lungs hurt every day. I wonder, I wonder, why oh okay, Well that's the episode Products and Services. Everybody just remember, no matter how dark things get, we always have products and services.