Democracy is a foreign agent

It is an old argument, well known to the oldest of the place. It was used by Francoism and now it is used by Putinism and its friendly regimes, such as that of Kazakhstan. Riots are always the work of foreign agents. There are no serious reasons to protest. The cheap ones are usually excuses, and they are solved with quick concessions like those that the Kazakh regime has made when lowering the price of fuel for cars after doubling it as of January 1. And there are no politicians: sovereign, genuine democracy is assured, adapted to the circumstances of the country and obedient to the vertical of power, as seen in the elections in Belarus last year or in Hong Kong now. Blame it on foreign agents with foreign ideas.

It is the effective model of gangster and authoritarian capitalism. The same family-based party, which emerged from the communist system, has held power for more than 30 years. Corruption is oceanic. The inequalities, lacerating and growing. The secret police are in charge of substantiating the argument that the opposition does not exist. The combination of economic growth with prisons and even cemeteries is enough to maintain peace and the fiction of sovereignty, even vis-à-vis Moscow. A portion of Panturquism in its special relationship with Ankara, another of Islamic solidarity in its critical distance with the Chinese repression in Xinjiang, and yet another of Westernism in the doors wide open to European and American investments. But when the alarm sounds, Russian troops must be counted on to save sovereign democracy.

They know how to do it. They have done it other times. And they will also stay. Never waste a crisis. The Russian redemptive mission belongs to a long tradition, with two climactic Soviet moments - Hungary in 1956 and Prague in 1968 - and a dense post-Soviet chronology: Georgia, North Ossetia and Abkhazia (1991-93), Transnistria (1992), Tajikistan (1992-97), Chechnya (1994-96 and 1999-2009), Dagestan (1999), again Georgia (2008), Ukraine (2014) and Syria (2015). Putin is right. Democracy, as a pluralistic and competitive system of majority rule in which the minority and, of course, individual rights are respected, is a foreign agent for the autocratic international. Its mere existence in the world threatens the sovereignty of Russia and China, a foreign aggression that deserves the answers we already know.We are seeing it in Ukraine and Hong Kong, territories over which autocratic empires demand the right of veto. It also serves for the white and Anglo-Saxon supremacism of Trumpism, which wants to deprive the right to vote of those it considers foreigners even if they were born in the United States. Does anyone doubt at this point that Trump is an agent infiltrated by Putin and in command of the Republican Party?

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