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Comment by MaxGanzII | Hacker News Reader

The Russian State is and has been for a long time pushing a profoundly anti-Western agenda.

The Russian people are completely controlled. They have no way, even if they knew exactly what was going on and understood it for what it is, to rally, no one to lead them, no way to resist.

The Russian people are not a mechanism by which the Russian leadership can be affected.

> We can not allow Russia to run the narrative by cutting of the internet.

I may be wrong, but I understood the request was to remove ".ru" and two other related top levels. It was not to cut them off from Internet access.

I am in favour of both the removal of ".ru" and related domains, and also of cutting Russia off from the net, if such a thing were possible, which I think it is not.

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> The Russian State is and has been for a long time pushing a profoundly anti-Western agenda.

We've been having our fair share of anti-Russia propaganda as well, we're not innocent of what we're accusing Russia of.

> The Russian people are completely controlled. They have no way, even if they knew exactly what was going on and understood it for what it is, to rally, no one to lead them, no way to resist.

What exactly do you think would happen to the west if we censored Russian "propaganda"?

> I am in favour of both the removal of ".ru" and related domains

... And they'll move to another TLD just as easily as they were booted off the .ru or even worse; it moves outside the scope of the "accessible" web where their ideas are not challenged. Overall, a bad idea, IMO.

> We've been having our fair share of anti-Russia propaganda as well, we're not innocent of what we're accusing Russia of.

No. These are not comparable. In the West, you have a range of views and there is no deliberate censorship of views by the State. In Russia, you get and only get what the State produces, and what they've been producing over the last several years has been crazy; Ukraine is not a country, and we have a holy mission to liberate them.

> Overall, a bad idea, IMO.

It is sometimes better to act than not to act, even if what you do is not perfect; it all adds pressure and expresses that you are serious about what you're doing.

> In the West, you have a range of views and there is no deliberate censorship of views by the State. In Russia, you get and only get what the State produces

I would argue that big tech is making an effort to sway public opinion in certain favorable directions, if not outright censor them under the guise of safety or whatever generic excuse we've heard over the past decade. The information we've been digesting is essentially only what big tech allows to be heard.

Yes, there are several ways to access information from alternative methods but from what it seems like, only a fraction of both the West and Russia do that.

By censoring an opposing agenda, albeit anti-west propaganda, you will create exactly the same vacuum as you accuse the Russian government of.

> It is sometimes better to act than not to act, even if what you do is not perfect; it all adds pressure and expresses that you are serious about what you're doing.

Strong disagree. We should do the right thing rather than just anything that could put pressure on them.

The West is a vast place and what you say about censorship is not universal, and I very much doubt it is absent at all. Tell me about Assange or Snowden. And if you want to hear what happens in Greece (a Western country you, in another country, probably hear nothing weird about in the news apart from new austerity measures) it is like Northen Korea with capitalism, and I must struggle to think why this could be a stretch except from executing people - oh wait, that is a thing too, if you piss off the wrong people. Plus, on the censorship side, social media did ban russian sources, and governments did ban russian channels from operating.

> The Russian people are completely controlled. They have no way, even if they knew exactly what was going on and understood it for what it is, to rally, no one to lead them, no way to resist.

You say that while thousands if not more Russians are protesting on the streets each night against this war, despite brutal repression. In any kind of regime, the consent of the people does matter - the way that consent is obtained just varies. Russia is not the USSR or China and it is certainly not North Korea - it is an authoritarian country, but nowhere near the level of dictatorial control where they can completely ignore their populace.

> Russia is not the USSR or China and it is certainly not North Korea - it is an authoritarian country, but nowhere near the level of dictatorial control where they can completely ignore their populace.

You are extremely, even naively optimistic. The gap between what you understand under the term democracy and what is "Russian democracy" is several times bigger than the difference between Russia's and N.Korea's "democracies".

> what you understand under the term democracy

You're the only one using the term "democracy".

Even under an authoritarian dictatorship without any pretense of democracy, the consent (or at least acquiescence) of the populace is necessary for the dictator to rule. Civilians far outnumber the rulers, after all, or even the military. Even if the entire Russian military sided with Putin—and against their own friends and relatives—there is no way he could stay in power in the face of a mass civilian uprising.

There is no question that there is no "Russian democracy". Putin is a dictator - just not one as powerful (inside his own country) as Kim or the Chinese ruling elite or Stalin/Brejnev/Hrusciov etc. For an example of this, there is public opposition to Putin in Russia (Navalny, Kasparov some years ago), and even though it is repressed (imprisoned, covertly poisoned), it is not brutally obliterated like it would be in, say, N Korea, or in Stalin's USSR.

And even in the worst dictatorships, mass public protests will almost always lead to the regime being toppled (perhaps only to be replaced by a worse regime, unfortunately, but still toppled). The population of any country is simply too huge to completely ignore, if it turns against the regime en masse.

If you don't believe any of this, then tell me - why do you think Russia is investing so much resources in internal propaganda? Why are they pretending to hold free elections? Why does Putin pretend he has a noble goal in Ukraine? It's certainly not fooling world leaders, so if his own population can't do anything about it, why even bother?

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