MEDUZA: WOULD RUSSIANS SUPPORT PUTIN IF HE DECIDED TO END THE WAR? 70 PERCENT OF RUSSIAN RESPONDENTS IN A NEW SURVEY BY THE LEVADA CENTER SAID THEY WOULD
NOVEMBER 17, 2023 NATYLIESB
Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com
Meduza, 11/1/23
Russians are ready to support the war’s end (if that’s what Putin decides). They are in favor of negotiations with Ukraine.
The majority of Russians would support an immediate cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, according to a new poll conducted by the Levada Center. However, a majority of respondents said that they don’t agree with giving Russian-occupied territories back to Ukraine.
As part of the survey, which the Levada Center conducts on a monthly basis, respondents were randomly divided into two groups. The first group was asked: “If President Vladimir Putin decided to end the military conflict in Ukraine this week, would you, or would you not, support this decision?”
Responses
37% — Definitely support
33% — Mostly support
12% — Definitely oppose
9% — Mostly oppose
9% — Difficult to answer
The second group of respondents was asked: “If President Vladimir Putin decided to end the military conflict in Ukraine this week and return the annexed territories to Ukraine, would you, or would you not, support this decision?”
Responses
16% — Definitely support
18% — Mostly support
19% — Definitely oppose
38% — Mostly oppose
10% — Difficult to answer
More than half of respondents said they would support peace talks over continuing the war.
Russians support the army
Three quarters of respondents said that they support “the actions of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine.” 62 percent of respondents aged 18-24 and 82 percent of those over the age of 55 gave this response.
Nearly half of Russians would like to ‘reverse’ the decision to start the war.
Respondents were asked: “If you had the opportunity to go back in time and either reverse or support the start of the military operation in Ukraine, you would…”
Responses
23% — Definitely have reversed it
18% — Mostly likely have reversed it
22% — Definitely have supported it
21% — Mostly likely have supported it
15% — Difficult to answer
Russians believe that the war will go on for a long time, though they believe the war has been successful
Nearly half of respondents (46 percent) believe that Russia’s war against Ukraine will continue for at least another year. In May 2022, three months after the start of the full-scale invasion, 21 percent of people said they thought it would continue for at least another year.
62 percent of respondents said they were confident that Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine is going “very successfully” or “rather successfully.”
Why did Russia start the war?
When asked why Russia started the war, 23 percent of respondents said they don’t know why, or found it difficult to answer why. 25 percent said they believe Russia is “protecting and liberating” the residents of the Donbas. Every 10th person believes that “it’s necessary to reclaim our historic lands.” 14 percent said that it’s necessary to “eradicate fascism,” while 13 percent believe that “we were forced and abused."
https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2023/11/med ... hey-would/
Russia has been telling everyone it's in for the long haul. It is certainly capable of that, but could be blowing smoke. The manpower/morale situation is such that a serious breakthrough could lead to a 'Germany 1918' situation. And Russia has been husbanding it's mechanized reserves for just such a possibility I believe.
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Russia is transitioning to gas heating in the countryside – Europe is moving to log fireplaces in the city
gilbertdoctorow Uncategorized November 18, 2023
These past few days the international situation has stabilized at bad to terrible, and, accordingly, with nothing much changing I have had no requests for interviews from international broadcasters. But a few developments right around me here in Brussels have set my mind to projecting an essay that I now wish to share with readers.
Once again at the center of my attention is how the Green Agenda is wreaking havoc on the European quality of life and on the economy. Put more broadly, the problem is that European elites who run the show have followed and then gone a few meters further down the rabbit hole of ideology-driven policies than their American counterparts. The economic interests of the middle and lower classes count for nothing. The Gross Domestic Product is taken for granted if you throw enough debit-financed subsidies around here and there to cheer up business executives. And we roll on towards the ….stone age.
What got me going was the sight of a few cubic meters of split logs blocking my way on the sidewalk as I pulled my caddy with groceries up the hill on the short path back to my home. As I passed, a middle aged woman resumed her work loading these logs into plastic crates for carrying up to her apartment.
The dump of split logs in front of a house is a sight I had last seen a couple of years ago when a truck deposited a half-load, 10 cubic meters of split birch logs in the driveway of our dacha house in Orlino, a hamlet 80 km south of St Petersburg, Russia. Back then every house in the community that was occupied in winter took such deliveries. However, even then some of our neighbors were being connected to the Gazprom network and moving to natural gas heating.
Since the start of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine and the European boycott of Russian pipeline gas, the process of ‘gasification’ of the Russian countryside has been made a priority task under orders from Vladimir Putin. Effectively, a good part of the gas that Europe no longer takes is now being redirected to warm the houses of Russian country dwellers and provincial cities.
As we know, new Russian gas production capacity is being fed into compression plants for delivery of LNG worldwide by sea-going tankers. I am speaking now strictly of gas that was produced in European Russia and Western Siberia for European markets. Gas in the Far North was intended for LNG exports from the start. Gas in Eastern Siberia was produced for the Chinese and other Asiatic markets from the start. A connecting pipeline still has to be built to unify the Russian pipeline grid from the Western frontiers to the Pacific.
And now, what do I see in Brussels? An apartment owner in a building that is obviously served by a heating oil or gas-fed furnace is turning to logs for heating! There is no reason to be surprised that advertisements for lodgings for sale or rent listed on the secondary market in Brussels feature ‘a working fireplace’ as a point of pride for prospective clients. And aesthetics have nothing to do with this choice.
This new trend in the city follows by about a year what has been going on in suburban housing around Brussels. Our daughter, who owns a house 20 km from Brussels invested a year ago in an upgrade to her fireplace and has used every opportunity to take wood from trees felled by friends to keep warm this winter.
Thus, by irony of fate, the Green Regime now sharing power at the regional and federal level in Belgium is supervising a shift back to …the stone age. And it is all due to the implementation of cruel sanctions against Russia over its dispute with Ukraine, that in turn, had at its origin a clash over the structure of European security between Russia and NATO. The Greens were among the most vociferous Russia-bashers, though to be fair about it, nearly all Belgian and European elites were of a single mind about this. A bit of common sense and self-interest might have prevented the return to the stone age, but common sense has no place in ideologically-driven policies.
*****
Moving from the international dimension of our woes today to the strictly local dimension, my thoughts focus on the terrible effects of the Green Agenda on ordinary citizens as I proceed with latest requirements imposed on everyone putting a residential property up for sale in Belgium or considering a purchase. I have in mind the filing of a Certificate of Energy Performance. The ratings go from A, which has the characteristics of a hermetically sealed tomb, to G, which has the characteristics of living in the wild. That the pluses and minuses of living in a hermetically sealed tomb might be debatable seems to interest no one. Obviously our elites have not heard about the life cycle of microscopic spiders in our houses that hate air currents. And they have forgotten or never read about how our 19th century ancestors were firm believers in the health value of open windows.
The whole issue suddenly came to my attention when we decided it was time to ‘downsize’ and move out of our townhouse in Brussels and into an apartment. The certification (PEB, in French) was performed and yesterday I read the results in a pdf file kindly forwarded by our real estate agent. Naturally, our old house came in at the ‘G’ level, and the accredited estimator gave a long description of what must be done to double glaze our windows, while not violating the rules on preservation of the original look of vintage houses; how to insulate the floors and ceilings; how to replace the small 50 liter electric hot water boiler serving the whole house that we purchased a year ago by some new contraption working on ‘dynamic’ principles, etc., etc.
All of his recommendations are in keeping with the government policies put in place to reduce energy consumption, whatever the capital cost to homeowners. By my guess, it would take fifty years or more to recover the expenses you would incur following the recommendations of the PEB specialist by annual savings in heating and electricity costs.
Though the real world has nothing whatever to do with these regulations, the reality is that we modest folks have paid a pittance in heating oil bills because our old house has very thick brick walls, and because we are a row house and only two facades are exposed to the elements. Yes, we have large expanses of windows, which provide the ‘luminosity’ that is a positive feature in the description of the property to prospective buyers. Yes, they are single pane windows. But, and this is a ‘but’ that plays no role in the estimates, the largest windows, as for example those in the ‘jardin d’hiver’ room facing the tiny garden, are equipped with the wooden slatted shutters that you can lower at night for sound and heat insulation. These shutters were de rigueur throughout France at the time of construction in 1895.
I will not go on further. My point is simple: it is not only in Germany that homeowners are up in arms over the Greens imposed regulations on home heating and shift to heat pumps. Here in Belgium the same awful expenses are being imposed on homeowners in other areas, including, by the way, encouragement of installation of solar panels on rooftops, without regard to the obvious climatic fact that we have a vast number of overcast and rainy days.
And now, in the midst of this sanctimonious policy-making in favor of proper insulation of houses and clean energy heating, what I see around me is stone-age heating with logs taking hold as people try to stay warm without going broke.
*****
On these pages, I mentioned some observations about the terrible consequences of the Green Agenda policies as they concern our forests in Belgium. In particular, I shared my thoughts about the degradation of the main forest attraction of the Greater Brussels region, the Forêt de Soignes. Allow me to quote from the visit.brussels website with regard to this forest:
With its approximately 4,000 hectares of surface area, the Forêt de Soignes is the green lungs of Brussels, even if it is traversed by some roads, highways and train lines. This space in close proximity to the city shelters natural forest and archeological reserves. It extends across the Brussels Capital, Flemish and Walloon regions and the Bois de la Cambre is one point of entry to this forest.
A sign that is posted at various other entry points to the Forêt de Soignes informs visitors that half of the forest consists of beech trees. What it does not tell you is that this very concentration on one tree species was unique in Europe. This is the largest beech forest in Europe. It was planted in the days when the region was ruled by the Hapsburgs and the aristocrats in their suite knew what they were doing when they created an outdoor cathedral of immense trees for us all to enjoy.
More to the point today, the sign and the visit.brussels website do not mention that this single species forest has beena matter of contention, with the Greens in power doing what they can to return the forest to its “natural” state consisting of the ‘native trees’ to the region. I will not comment on the aesthetic value of these ‘native trees,’ for example, dwarf oaks. There is little need to do so because there have been almost no apparent tree planting operations in the past decade. Instead what gives the Forêt de Soignes its main shambolic characteristic today is the implementation of the second Greens principle: to allow fallen trees to naturally decay and provide a home for various types of insects. Remember biodiversity?
This ‘policy’ has its advantages for the state budget: no culling of trees, removal of fallen debris means no need for a budgetary entry. Little matter that in the distant past clearing the forest of debris and harvesting trees was a right sold to outside entrepreneurs. Letting logs rot on the ground also seems most peculiar today when there is a tight market for firewood even in the city center. However, do not look for logical consistency in the various policies written and implemented by our governing elites.
When Josep Borrell famously commented that all the world is a jungle while Europe is a garden, he obviously was not thinking of the forest land on the edge of the city where he keeps his office and his home. Perhaps he simply does not like walks in the woods.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/11/18/ ... -the-city/
Well, those recommendations are good but should not be made mandatory without serious carrots to accompany the sticks. Petty bourgeois whining. As for the forests, Gilbert don't know shit about ecology and wants the environment to look like a city park.
*******
For Latvian Independence Day
No. 11/87.XI.2023
“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter,” one of the smartest enemies of communism, Winston Churchill, once said.
The idiocy that is happening on the Internet on the eve of “our common Latvian holiday” is overwhelming and does not fit into any framework.
Not only ordinary people, but also people familiar to many from TV screens and social networks express their complete historical and political stupidity - social activists and politicians who have made the goal of their existence the fight for the rights of Russian Latvians and are regularly outraged by both the difficult economic situation of the country's inhabitants, and the political repressions that the Latvian authorities have unleashed in recent years against dissidents.
It is impossible to solve a problem without delving into its essence. But the wrestlers not only don’t want to delve into it, but they refuse to study it properly with all their hands and feet.
If we are talking about state patriotism, then finally drive simple truths into your empty heads: state patriotism is not a Christmas tree on which you need to hang as many ribbons of the “correct” color as possible, but commitment to the basic foundations of the state in which you live.
Once you understand this simple truth, you will never have stupid questions:
*Why did the regime demolish the Victory Monument?
*Why is it increasingly difficult for most residents to literally survive every year, receiving pittance wages, while officials wallow in luxury?
*Why didn’t they give citizenship to such and such, because they did so much for this state?
*Why did they open a criminal case against so-and-so or why don’t they open a criminal case against people talking about Russian occupiers or Russian lice?
A brief history of Latvian (and not only) statehood for irons.
In February 1917, the Russian Empire collapsed.
The bourgeois revolution was obviously progressive in nature, because it sent the autocracy (along with its obscurantism, classes, unresolved land issue, poverty and lawlessness) into the trash can of history.
The bourgeois revolution in February 1917 led to a parade of bourgeois independence in the territories of the former Russian Empire with fairly developed capitalist relations. It was extremely important for the national bourgeoisie to take advantage of the new opportunities to create their own national fiefdoms, where they could rule undividedly, imposing their economic and political will on the population of these territories.
In order to rely on the population in this matter, they raised national banners and national slogans, which always has an exciting effect on the fragile minds of people of any nation.
The only way to unite the country, torn apart by the proto-Kravchuks, proto-Yeltsins, proto-Shushkeviches, proto-Putins (that is, representatives of capital who sought to create their own national capitalist states on the remains of the stinking tsarist corpse), was to unite all these peoples on a different basis - on the basis of social economic justice, on the basis communism, at that moment understood as the principle: to each according to his labor contribution to the common cause.
It was thanks to this formulation of the question that the Bolsheviks were able to wrest their national banners from the hands of the bourgeoisie and lead all these peoples, defeating most of the new bourgeois state formations.
And Latvia was no exception in this regard. In Latvia, in the period 1917 - 1920, three concepts of government, three governments, fought for life: the bourgeois government under the leadership of Ulmanis (based on English capital), the bourgeois government under the leadership of Niedra (supporters of German capital) and the Soviet government under the leadership of Peter Stuchka.
Each concept has its own heroes, its own symbolism, its own values.
If it were not for the active support of the Entente and Kaiser Germany, the likelihood of the Latvian bourgeoisie retaining power would be zero. Just as there would not have been a bloody civil war in Russia.
And the fact that the Entente was not interested in preserving the integrity of Russia, much less the formation of the USSR within the borders of the Republic of Ingushetia, must be explained to the Russian Ruskomirs, who are firmly convinced that the collapse of the Republic of Ingushetia is the merit of the Bolsheviks and... Latvians.
The Russians are a completely separate topic that deserves a separate study. In their stupidity and straightforwardness of thinking, they are no different from the stupidity and straightforwardness of the Latvian national patriots.
Latvian nationalists completely ignore the civil war that broke out between Latvians during this period, vulgarly equating all Latvian riflemen and presenting them as fighters for an independent bourgeois state. Independent is independent, but the Latvians had completely different ideas about the structure of this state.
In the minds of modern Latvians, the successors to the work of the Latvian riflemen are the Latvian SS legions, who fought Bolshevism during the Second World War together with their German “comrades,” but at the same time this public does not recognize itself as supporters of fascism.
The Russians, both in Latvia and in Russia, rightfully hating modern bourgeois Latvia, absolutely blatantly expose the Red Latvian Riflemen as the founders of bourgeois Latvia and at the same time the support of the Bolsheviks in establishing Soviet power in Russia, who, quote, “abundantly shed seas of Russian Orthodox blood on territory of Russia and are engaged in genocide of modern Russians on the territory of modern Latvia .”
Both positions are a blatant lie and obvious schizophrenia, in which, despite all the existing contradictions among themselves, there is a common basis - anti-Sovietism and anti-communism.
In essence, on the territory of Latvia during this period, as, indeed, everywhere on the territory of the former Republic of Ingushetia and as, most likely, will happen tomorrow, several forces clashed simultaneously, having completely different goals, entering into temporary, shaky blocs and alliances, trying to use each other.
These are both the interests of the Latvian bourgeoisie and the goals of the Latvian communists; these are both the interests of the Russian White Guards and the goals of the Russian Bolsheviks; These are the interests of English and German capital.
But today both sides of the “patriots” primitively reduce this whole mess to November 18th. The Latvian nationalists and the ruling clique are drooling over him, on the one hand, and the Russomirites are cursing him, on the other. With the formulations “all Latvians are fascists” or “all Russians are Putinists.”
Briefly about the formation of Latvian statehood.
In August 1917, the Executive Committee of the Council of Workers', Soldiers' and Landless Deputies of Latvia (Iskolat) established Soviet power in the territory occupied by the Latvian Red Rifles. The so-called The Republic of Iskolata, whose power extended to the part of the Livonia province not occupied by German troops and the Latgale districts of the Vitebsk province.
Fricis Rozin was elected chairman of the Iskolat.
In September 1917, in Riga, occupied by German troops, Latvian political parties formed a bourgeois coalition - the Democratic Bloc.
On December 24, 1917, in Valka, the Central Committee of the SDL and Iskolat adopted a declaration on the self-determination of Latvia as an autonomous part of Soviet Russia, which stated:
“The Latvian proletariat... has never, anywhere, expressed a desire or shown a tendency to secede from Russia.”
After the breakdown of peace negotiations with Soviet Russia in Brest-Litovsk, on February 18, 1918, German troops launched a rapid offensive along the entire front and by February 22 occupied the entire territory of Latvia.
And only after the Kaiser’s Germany admitted its defeat in the First World War, on November 18, 1918, the Declaration of Independence of bourgeois Latvia was adopted. Karlis Ulmanis became the first Prime Minister of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Latvia.
Moreover, under the terms of the Treaty of Compiegne, Germany was obliged not to withdraw its troops from the Baltic countries in order to prevent their Sovietization.
At the same time, on November 18 and 19, an underground XVII conference of Latvian Social Democrats (Bolsheviks) took place in Riga, the participants of which, among the first tasks, put forward the organization of an armed uprising, the expulsion of occupation army units from the republic, the overthrow of the Provisional Government of Karlis Ulmanis and the establishment of Soviet power in Latvia.
For the practical implementation of preparations for the uprising, the Military Revolutionary Committee of Latvia was formed at the conference, under which were mobile organized combat squads. The leadership of the Latvian Military Revolutionary Committee was taken over by members of the SDL Central Committee Janis Šilf and Janis Zukovsky.
In a short period of time, local cells of the Latvian Military Revolutionary Committee were created in many cities and towns of the country. On November 27, 1918, the Riga Military Revolutionary Committee was formed. Its most active participants were fighters for Soviet power in the republic Fritz Schneider, Janis Miram and Vilum Zile.
On November 29, 1918, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin sent a telegram to the commander-in-chief of all armed forces of the RSFSR, Joakim Ioakimovich Vatsietis, in which he instructed the Red Army to support by all means the process of establishing Soviet governments in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Belarus.
Even before this telegram was sent, on November 13, an extraordinary meeting of the Military Revolutionary Council of the RSFSR was held, at which it was decided to immediately begin to provide support to the Baltic Bolshevik armed forces fighting to establish Soviet power in the former Baltic provinces occupied by the Kaiser’s army. According to this decision, in mid-November, the military units of the Western Defense District were consolidated into the Western Army.
Further, realizing the numerical and technical superiority of the German armed formations left in Latvia, the Military Revolutionary Council of the RSFSR sent separate Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian Soviet army units, which had previously fought on other sectors of the front, to the republic at the disposal of the Seventh and Western Armies.
On December 4, 1918, the Central Committee of the SDL, together with representatives of the Council of Workers' Deputies of Riga, Valka and Liepaja, formed the provisional government of Soviet Latvia. Peter Stuchka was elected its chairman.
On December 17, 1918, the Manifesto of the Provisional Workers' and Peasants' Government of Latvia, headed by Peter Stuchka, was issued on the establishment of Soviet power.
On December 22, 1918, the Russian government issued a declaration recognizing the independence of Soviet Latvia.
With the help of the Latvian Red Rifles and other units of the Red Army, the Stuchka government managed to establish control over the main part of Latvia, including Riga, which was taken on January 3, 1919.
On January 13, 1919, the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic was proclaimed in Riga.
Thus, the Bolsheviks in 1918 supported the SOVIET Latvia of Stuchka, but the Bolsheviks never supported the BOURGEOIS Latvia of Ulmanis in the same way as they spoke AGAINST the bourgeois Ukraine of Petlyura and FOR Soviet Ukraine.
Therefore, all accusations from the Russians about the Bolsheviks encouraging separatist sentiments in the country and about the creation of a modern Nazi Ukraine by the communists themselves are anti-scientific and false.
Precisely because the Bolsheviks were materialists, they did not go against historical laws of an objective nature, only directing such processes in a creative direction. “National in form, socialist in content”—this is the formula with which they snatched the population from the clutches of the national small-town bourgeoisie. The Bolsheviks did the main thing to eradicate the causes of ANY nationalism - SOCIALIZED the means of production .
Returning to the events of a hundred years ago in Latvia.
As a result of bloody battles and the intervention of the Entente, Poland and Germany, by August 1920 the Latvian Red Army was defeated and was forced to leave the country. On August 11, 1920, the government of already bourgeois Latvia signed an armistice agreement with the RSFSR, according to which the Soviet government recognized the independence, independence and sovereignty of the Latvian bourgeois state.
On January 26, 1921, the victorious countries in the First World War officially recognized the independence of the Republic of Latvia.
On September 22, 1921, Latvia and the other two Baltic countries were recognized by the League of Nations.
It is quite natural that bourgeois Latvia of the 1920s is building its own system of values, at the forefront of which are integration into Europe, anti-Sovietism, anti-communism, and opposition to Soviet Russia.
In 1940, we omit the details, but this type of state ceases to exist and is replaced by another - the Soviet one, which succeeds the Stuchka government from Latvia.
Then the Great Patriotic War, against the backdrop of which another civil war broke out within Latvia between old opponents - supporters of bourgeois and Soviet statehood.
The red flag over the Reichstag brings back the Soviet model to Latvia.
The destruction of the Union in 1991 restores here again the type that was from 1920 to 1940, and therefore the same basic values are restored with it.
In my opinion, it is not difficult to understand why May 9 is not a holiday in modern Latvia, why there are no more monuments to the Latvians Sudmalis, Vilis Lacis, Oshkalns in cities - they are heroes of THAT other Latvia and, therefore, for this, the current one, they are enemies.
When Soviet power is restored in Latvia, in the same way all the heroes of bourgeois Latvia will be outlawed, and modern bourgeois monuments will be dismantled so as not to generate nationalist sentiments in society. The political and punitive apparatus of bourgeois Latvia will be subjected to the most ruthless repressions, but only from the side of the Soviet state and the Soviet punitive authorities. For only that power has the right to exist that knows how to defend its class interests.
This is the function of any state, whether bourgeois or Soviet. So it was, is and will be, no matter what the petty-bourgeois hamsters in the street and liberal intellectuals like the journalists Alekseevs or Mamykins, who did poorly at school and today bat their eyes stupidly under the flywheel of the state repressive machine of the Latvian bourgeois state, fantasize about. Either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, or the dictatorship of the working class, which holds all market lovers by the throat with an iron hand.
Why? Yes, because the market is unable to give birth to anything other than nationalism and Nazism.
So. On March 16, Latvian legionnaires are honored who fought under Nazi banners for the bourgeois model of the state, hand in hand with their German Nazi brothers.
You can make tearful films as much as you like about non-citizens who worked for “our country” and were deprived of citizenship, or cry about the demolition of monuments to Latvian Soviet writers and scientists, but they worked for the Soviet model of the state and therefore IN THIS, bourgeois, their merits are not check.
The funny thing is that all of the above is constantly drummed into your heads, but not by the “evil ruling regime,” but by the entire way of modern life, from street names and public holidays to de-Sovietization, nationalism and statelessness.
But only blind and deaf “Russian-speaking Latvians” continue to goggle and shout about the inadmissibility of rewriting history.
Yes, you yourself rewrote it a long time ago... in your heads, from the moment you accepted the bourgeois market model of socio-economic relations. When they themselves abandoned the fight for Soviet power in 1989-1991, when the Popular Front of Latvia could have been strangled with relatively little bloodshed.
You yourself rushed with gusto into the seething capitalist sea, frantically privatizing your apartments, which the bourgeois government threw to you, like hungry dogs, in exchange for your silence, when there was a grandiose slaughter of the people's Soviet property - land, forests, enterprises. And now you whine about exorbitant utility bills, property taxes, and the inaccessibility of medicine and quality education.
The authorities are directly shouting in your face, quote:
“It’s just that Lenin died more than 100 years ago, and the land does not belong to the people - it is private land, private property.”
Forcing you to pay land barons, forcing you to take out bank loans for home renovation, which supposedly will save you from wild heating bills.
Don't hope - it won't save you. And on top of the regular inflated bills for water, electricity and gas, you will also be paying greedy bankers.
If you are happy with capitalism, then maybe you shouldn’t torture Latvians with Soviet monuments and the Russian language?
And the Latvians, whom the authorities are leading like sheep to the slaughter, under the roar of drums into the millstones of the third world war, perhaps they should not torture their authorities about the reasons for their disregard for their own population and the introduction of newfangled gender topics in schools?
After all, capitalism is a struggle for personal profit and survival, where only one in a hundred fortune hunters will survive, right?
In a word - welcome to hell, which was successfully illuminated with festive fireworks.
Both sides deserve it.
Y. Aleinikov
11/18/2023
https://prorivists.org/87_latvia/
Harsh judgement, but I will not argue. A good history lesson.
