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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Any state ultimately derives its power from the people. There are countless examples of this, from peaceful protests to civil disobedience, violent revolutions and military coups.

Or from a different perspective: if the opinion of the citizens doesn't matter, then why is Putin shutting down independent journalism and turning up the propaganda in his own country? That only makes sense if he cares what the public thinks.

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The very fact that opposing media is being shut down, matters.

Shutting down the media limits the average person’s reason to know there is even a thing to protest against.

It’s not absolute power over the people, but it does diminish the power of the people.

It's also an obvious sign to anyone with half a brain that the remaining state run media is full of lies.

Harder to spot if you don’t have an outside view. From inside, all you hear and see is that the media which was shut down were “evil propagandist” aligned with $ENEMY who wanted to harm $NATION by spreading lies about $POLITICAL_BUZZWORD.

No a state derives its power from capacity for and willingness to use violence. The state is whatever group has the most of that in a given area. The population can obviously be a threat to a state, but it's ridiculous to expect people to risk their life to stop a state just because they happened to be born in its territory.

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