So people who live in a country aren’t responsible for the actions of their government? Then why hold the American people responsible for Venezuela? Why should they be expected to protest? The government just does what it does.
That user is saying that the fact that Russians face more danger for protesting means that any lack of protest reflects less poorly on Russian people than on Americans who face less danger, not that this is a win for the Russian government.
You are making a separate argument. @[email protected] was saying that Americans can dissent more easily, so the lack of dissent reflects more poorly on them than on Russians. Regardless of the fact that genuine radicals are violently suppressed in America (true), it’s clear that the average American is fairly content (and often even thrilled) to live with the violence their government has perpetrated abroad for its entire existence.
To address your completely separate argument, the fact is that Russians are held responsible MATERIALLY (not just in the moral judgements of others or in social media posts, but by sanctions and travel bans) for the actions of their government and Americans are not.
Edit: tagged the wrong user.
Edit 2: I missed this when replying.
Russia brutality suppresses dissent because, at some level, the Russian people and culture accepts it.
How familiar are you with recent Russian history? Do you have any idea what the 90s where like, how the country stabilized, and which politicians had prominent public roles in that? There’s a reason Putin has some support, people are obviously terrified that life will go back to how it was in the 90s before he took power. This judgement of blaming Russian “culture” for this rather than the neoliberal shock therapy and rampant nazism and social murder of the 1990s strikes me as borderline racism or at least ignorance of the subject that should prevent you from making such judgements.
No, I mean you are no longer discussing Wildmimic’s comment or the point of the comic (which were both comparisons between how Russians and Americans ARE treated, in reality). You’re making a separate argument that is beside the point.
If “they” is Wildmimic, they clearly did so in their original comment. That was the whole point of the comment, actually, that Americans were more free to protest.
American support for the Iraq war was about 75% before it started and reached above 90% during the early days of the war. Arguing that foreign intervention is always unpopular in America is simply a denial of reality. As a general rule, Americans have been easily convinced to support these interventions unless they felt they were substantially personally affected in a negative way, as was the case (for example) during the later days of the Vietnam War or of the Iraq War.
We can revisit this when MAGA has had to deal in living memory with rampant child prostitution and death due to poverty, as well as roving squads of nazis committing murder with impunity in the streets. To even compare the very real experiences of Russians in the 90s to the possible fears of Americans today is ridiculous. The 1990s caused 3 million excess deaths in Russia based on 1991 mortality. I’ve become convinced reading your reply that you don’t actually understand Russian history as well as you think you do.
First of all, the nazis were inspired in part by manifest destiny and American racism. Second, that line referred to Russia, not the US. It was Russia where nazi gangs acted with impunity in the 1990s under Yeltsin - who was installed with the help of the Americans, which they bragged about at the time.
This is just Russiagate nonsense. Your genocidal settler colony doesn’t need Russian influence in order to be racist (founded on slavery, which is still legal if you bother to charge the enslaved with a crime first), and whatever minor meddling Russians might or might not have done in recent developments (again, America has always been a white supremacist nation) did not have a significant impact, especially compared to domestic factors and even other lobbies such as the “Israelis” (another genocidal gem in the empire’s crown, which wouldn’t exist today if not for America). I think you and I are unlikely to find common ground because we see a fundamentally different version of your country.