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Comment by jampekka | Hacker News Reader

There's probably a very equivalent story that a lot of Russians believe in.

I’m sure there is yet it’s not NATO troops trying to occupy land in Eastern Europe. When one party openly behaves like a villain then they most likely are one. You can blab about the US invasion of Afghanistan but the US didn’t go in to setup a totalitarian kleptocracy that replaces their culture with another.

Noy sure if you are joking or not, but US definitely installed cleptocrats, if you ever actually cared about say afghan local news. Generals switching sides for money, while investing in massive real estate projects around big cities.

They may be local but in society like afghan one that can have various meaning too since there are many distinct clans who often openly fight each other. Ie British previously loved in their colonies to give power to some minority to focus hatred within locals and keep eyes from their exploitation business. Quite a few of that caused some recent conflicts in Africa.

Afghanistan opium cultivation in 2023 declined to one in 20 compared to earlier (95% less), following drug ban by those who are now in power (official United Nations statistics):

https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/press/releases/2023/November/...

You know when the opium production numbers started to rise, in earlier times (according to the same statistics)? 2004. Correlates with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...

Well, it certainly isn’t “equivalent” given that the Russian version of the story/belief isn’t created and maintained in the open air of a free information environment. In the US, you’re welcome to (and people actually do) contradict “official narratives” whenever you want.

they just get downvoted instead of jumping out of the window

There can be, because there are, multiple real boogeymen.

I read Russian forums and these people are more sober than you may think. They are fed up with Putin and with what is happening to Russia now. It's not so much that they care about Ukrainians but more about the terrible direction the country is heading. For many, it's the return of the dark era of the collapse of the USSR, they don't see any bright light on the horizon.

This is because chaos warfare and the attempts to just straight up reestablish an old school empire, are bad in the context of modern global commerce. I think it might have worked better for them had Putin run his country along more communist lines, but instead he held power in his government with the same chaos warfare tools he used overseas, and the cost of that is that he's clung to power unto death, but all the systems that are supposed to make Russia work, disintegrated.

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