Index

Air Piracy, Again

Now that Belarus has officially breached international standards and hijacked a flight over their airspace, people are suddenly waking up to the possibility that this could become a regular thing. Wake up, world! This is where Putin, Xi and all of their proxies have been taking us all along.

Trump, Kim Jong Un, Lukashenko, Duterte, and the list goes on - all of these names will live in infamy for their work to destroy the rule of law, both within their own countries and internationally. The fact that one of Putin’s proxies decided to cross yet another line should have been expected, although the specifics of the case make it worse than even I expected.

Putin has long sought to force the rest of the world to help him when someone “goes rogue” and becomes a dissident. Russian dissidents are people who simply want Russia to have the same living standards and personal freedoms as the western world has kept anyone from bothering, although Trump would have if he had been given the time.

Putin puppet Lukashenko was the lucky one chosen to take the heat for what Putin wants to do, and Putin has been happy to cheer him on and even add fuel to the fire. Putin has long wanted to extend his internal state terrorism (what he calls suppression of dissent) to the rest of the world, and Lukashenko has taken a giant step in that direction. Nobody should be surprised.

Putin has spent his career working on taking the backbone out of western democracies by building up the right-wing groups there. Now we have a drastically weakened Europe that will not stand up to him. Putin has always worked through proxies, whether the fascist tea party and “religious” right in the U. S. or the resurgent Nazi party in Germany. He is not ideological - if Islamist terrorism in France will weaken the government, he encourages it, even as he viciously suppresses it at home.

Putin and Xi have won this round, and this is part of their victory lap. Democracy has been trashed everywhere. It is no longer a question of “rebuilding” democracy, but of starting over with a new, more people-centered form of government that is harder to wreck with authoritarianism. Time to get to it if you care - I haven’t a lot of hope.