Alexei Navalny's Prison Diaries

    I knew from the outset that I would be imprisoned for life—either for the rest of my life or until the end of the life of this regime.
    
    Regimes like this one are resilient, and the most foolish thing I could do is pay attention to people who say, “Lyosha, sure, the regime is going to last at least another year, but the year after that, two at most, it will fall apart and you will be a free man.” And everything along those lines. People write that to me frequently.
    
    The U.S.S.R. lasted seventy years. The repressive regimes in North Korea and Cuba survive to this day. China, with a whole bunch of political prisoners, has lasted so long that those prisoners grow old and die in prison. The Chinese regime does not relent. It releases no one, despite all the international pressure. The truth of the matter is that we underestimate just how resilient autocracies are in the modern world. With very, very rare exceptions, they are protected from external invasion by the U.N., by international law, by the rights of sovereignty. Russia, which right now is waging a classic war of aggression against Ukraine (which has increased tenfold the predictions of the regime’s imminent collapse), is additionally protected by its membership in the U.N. Security Council and its nuclear weapons.

It’s remarkable what people will do in the name of principle. Walk into police batons. Accept a death in prison. Raid Harper’s Ferry and see your sons perish. Stand in front of an advancing tank. Most of us haven’t, most of us won’t. What makes those people so intransigent? Is it their circumstances? Are they doing what any honest person would do, or are they driven further, by something else?

sevensor · a year ago

I want to be clear that I’m not complaining about the downvote, honestly I was expecting more of them. It’s rather that between when I started this comment and when I finished it, the thread vanished from the front page and became essentially impossible to find. So that’s my question here: how did somebody even find this thread to downvote my comment?

Can I pull more downvotes by discussing the details of the June 4th incident? Here’s a helpful Wikipedia page on the subject: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protes...

You see, what happened was, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army massacred a large number of civilian protesters whose anti corruption, pro democracy views were seen as a threat to the regime.

I’m posting this in the name of science. Nobody with reasonable reading habits is going to see this. Are there people out there with unreasonable reading habits?