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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Wanna say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost, city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know. Because after listening to stuff you should know you will listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. So four whole months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Bing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I ******* hate headphones. Still, this is Robert headphones behind the ******** and we just spent another like 45 minutes having to figure out how to reconnect the earbuds we're using for this. Very frustrating. But you know what also was frustrating? It's frustrating to live under a dictatorship also, and in a way. Isn't Bluetooth a kind of authoritarianism? I don't know. We're we're going to do part two of our episodes shenko. Yeah, and who is your guest as a guest? What you have to introduce. Oh, ****. Jesus. I'm just so frustrated by the headphone issues that I forgot to introduce the person who fixed the headphone issues. Yeah, the you local youth. Garrison Davis. Yeah, that's my that's my new Twitter handles. Local. No, it's not. At Hungry Bow tie from Twitter. Tear gas proof. Garrison high. Garrison, what was wrong with you? Like, your headphones are terrible. Be good until I'm no longer idea what's wrong with it, I don't know. Fixed it somehow. Your youth. That could be your tick tock handle for however many more days Trump allows. Yeah, tik T.O.K. Contact me to be a yeah, yeah. OK, alright, we're moving on right now. Right now. Right now. *** **** it. OK, so we talked about in the last episode how Lukashenko's most well named known nickname was Botka, which kind of means Daddy, which is a little weird. His name is Daddy. I just need Daddy, OK? He was a joke for the ladies. Uh, yeah, no, not that kind of dad. Maybe that kind of daddy. His opponents though have another nickname for him that basically translates to farm Hitler. That sounds more fun. Yeah, yeah. Which is is a fun nickname. And Speaking of Hitler, like any self respecting autocrat, Lukashenko has a history of saying really weird things about Hitler. Are, yeah, kind of baffling. Good. On one occasion, the Belarussian dictator told an interviewer, quote, Hitler created a powerful Germany owing to the strong presidential power. After all, the German order has been developing for centuries. Under Hitler, this process reached its highest point. This is how we understand the presidential Republic and the role of the President. That's that's that's that's not not problematic. Yeah. When when I when I become president of every country, I will make sure to model my Presidency after Hitler. I prefer to the I prefer to be a strong President like Hitler, a guy with whom I have less disagreements than you might expect. Obviously these remarks caused a bit of a stir, as it ought to when you're head of State compares himself favorably to Hitler. Lukashenko found it necessary to justify himself by semi backpedaling and telling people that he thought Hitler was quote a real fascist, a real idiot in power who destroyed a lot of people. But, and this is where he goes wrong whenever you have that sentence and then add a button, yeah, you know you're doing good with destroyed a lot of people. No, end it there, don't add the ****. But he continues but managed to unite. Nation by means of tough policy. At that stage the result was obvious. Therefore, there is no need to reproach me that we wish to have the serious tough power in Belarus. Wow, the result was obvious. I don't know if we saw the same obvious thing in the results there, Alexander, but yes, Lukashenko has one other weird Hitler statement that he's repeated a number of times, which is the line. Not everything Hitler did was bad, which, again, you shouldn't need to point out. Like, you don't need to say that. Yeah, like it's one of those things. Yes, we could split hairs and discuss the extent to which the Nazi Party deserves credit for the autobahn or whatever. You know, well, here we go. It really isn't important, but here we go. Honestly, Hitler did do one good thing. Yeah, that's that's killing Hitler. That was the one. Yeah. That was the only thing. He did that. Other governments had proved unable to do so far. Yeah, got got to give them credit. Got to give him credit for that. So yeah. Anyway, Lukashenko. Weird, weird Hitler opinions. So yeah, Lukashenko repeatedly admits to having authoritarian tendencies, but he also again gets really ****** when people call him a dictator. In 2012, Germany's foreign minister Guido Westervelt used the term dictator to describe Lukashenko's regime. And I should note here. That Guido is homosexual and the fact that I'm noting that he's homosexual is not a good sign for what's about to come next. Because as soon as Guido called Lukashenko a dictator, Lukashenko responded better to be a dictator than gay, which is like a ninth grade level. That is ninth grade in 2004. Our school grade? No, but at least I'm not gay. Ha ha ha. Yeah. Well, you're get. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, it's it's literally the thing that, like, we moved on from it, like, age 14 when I was a kid. Your generation's much better about that. Sort of a little bit, yeah. So in another interview, Lukashenko made it clear that he's capable of some nuance when it comes to LGBT issues. And I'm going to quote now from an interview he gave to the Independent. Lesbians are bad, but I do not. Again, not a great clause to start us out with. He has a lot of good. Yeah, then add the word, but just seems to be a recurring theme. Lesbians are bad, but I do not condemn them. As with gays. This is not my understanding. I think it's absolutely unacceptable and negative. OK, that's good. So at least he makes a distinction. He is fine with Les. He's not fine with lesbian lesbians. They're not great. I'm not going to condemn them. I used to take a strong anti lesbian stand. You know who's really? Because I think they're hot. Is those gays? Yeah, they're gay. No problem I will get. I feel fine condemning those. Yeah, again, Lukashenko is is like a lot of people you grew up with in your small southern community. Anyway. Lukashenko's cultural conservatism manifest itself in his attitudes towards the Russian Orthodox Church, summed up by the statement he made to a church patriarch quote. Thank God our church does not suffer from the infections that have crushed the Western Church. He's referring to the Catholic Church. There we have heard it all. Pedophilia, gayness, environmentalism. What the hell is going on? The trifecta of my pedophilia, gayness and environmentalism. The three evils of society. Yeah, you're getting sick here, too. So I think that the Orthodox Church and state are not working well enough here. We cannot afford to lose a whole generation of people. Yeah, we can't afford to lose that to environmentalism would be a real shame. Environmentalism and its cousin, gayness could have really just ruined the youth with those. Yeah. In 2014, after Russia's annexation of Crimea, Lukashenko offered to share control over a United Russia slash Belarus with Vladimir Putin telling an interviewer on Ukrainian TV. I told Putin that after the Crimea annexation, people might no longer call me Europe's last dictator. Yeah, and I I don't know. It's interesting because he also held like peace, a peace summit in Minsk that helped bring him closer to NATO over the whole issue. He he kept doing that whole weird, like jumping in to both sides with both feet sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't pretend to have any particularly deep sight into Lukashenko's mind. And like who he is as a person, because he he kind of plays a lot of his **** pretty close to the vest. But studying him, you do really get the opinion that he thinks it's important to be seen as legitimately. Popular after in 2006, after a blatantly false election gave him 86% of the vote in the international community, you know, decried the fact that he was falsifying the elections. He actually admitted to falsifying the results of the election, but kind of lied about the direction in which he faked things, saying, quote, yes, we falsified the results. I've already told this to Westerners. In fact, 93 1/2% of ballots were for President Lukashenko. People say this is not a European result, so he changed it to 86%. This truly happened. So his argument is like people are accusing me of lying and falsifying an election. The way to respond to this is to say, yes, I lied and falsified an election, but just to make myself seem less popular. That's good. I don't think that has the impact that he thinks it has. No, it's not. It's not a good way to build up trust. No. Outside of the official propaganda, a series of local rumors have propped up around Lukashenko. The most common one is that he's mentally ill, suffering from a variant of antisocial personality disorder called Mosaic psychopathy. His opponents will generally declare that Stalin, Hitler, and Mao were all diagnosed with the same disorder. And this is like it's a meme in Belarusian sort of opposition. Groups. But I don't think it's true at all. For one thing, I don't think he's been diagnosed with anything. I know Hitler, Stalin and Mao weren't diagnosed with anything. And Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Lukashenko are all like broadly different kinds of ******. Yeah, they all, they all, definitely. They're not all the same type of dictator. No, no, they're very, very different. And in fact, if you're picking Hitler, Stalin and Mao, you're picking like three guys who are actually like the most different 3 dictators like Stalin and Saddam. Same kind of guy, you know? But but Hitler, Stalin, Mao, all. Pretty different dudes in terms of the way they utilized power and the way that they came into power. Weird that he picks those, I guess. It's just like they're they're the big dictator 3 big Death counts. Yeah, you could add Mussolini there, I guess. But I guess Mussolini is a little bit similar to Hitler. Mussolini is the most similar. More is, like, pretty similar to Lukashenko comparatively. Like I say, OK, he's closer to Mussolini than he is to Hitler, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. Whatever. Alexander Lukashenko does have a wife. Which she very conspicuously doesn't carry out. The job of. First Lady Belarus has no equivalent to Asma Assad or Melania Trump. This is also in line with traditions for Eastern European despots. Stalin was conspicuously single for most of his time in power. There are rumors that Lukashenko's wife lives in a monastery or a mental institution, and likewise there are rumors about his children. We're not really sure how many he has. People are pretty confident that about three of his sons, Nikolai, Dimitri and Victor, and it's kind of worth. Noting that while these guys are sometimes portrayed as particularly his youngest son Nikolai, like we talked about this on the children of ******** episode, he's the kid who got given a golden handgun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. His, his Putin gave him a gigantic golden handgun that he carries everywhere. So there's all these very funny pictures of him, like meeting the President of Venezuela with shiant golden mess of bulging gun in his his little little kid suit for him. It's very funny. It's exactly what you do if you were. 11 years old, what I would do to and like, yeah, yeah, you can carry it everywhere you want, but it's a giant gold one. It's awesome. Of course you would, yeah. But so there's this kind of idea that because of the **** that that Nikolai polls and and because of like, the reputation he has, that he's being groomed as the the, the, like, following in his dad's footsteps. And this is actually pretty heavily debated by people who know anything about the country. There's a lot of argument as to whether or not Lukashenko's children are kind of expecting to follow in his footsteps. For his part, the president himself has repeatedly publicly stated that his children don't want to go into politics and that he doesn't consider them heirs. And yeah, nobody really knows how true this is, but a lot of reputable academics do think that he's kind of being broadly sincere there. And yeah, it it's, it's hard to say, kind of what he wanted for the future. Prior to this last election in the late aughts, there were persistent rumors that he felt trapped as dictator of Belarus and kind of was looking for a way out but couldn't find it. And I'm going to quote now from an article in Deutsche Welle to kind of elaborate on that Lukashenko's biggest challenge. And while still lies ahead his exit from the political stage, he recently announced that the 2020 presidential elections will be held as planned, and he's expecting to run again. In his biography on Lukashenko, Valerie Karbala, which described the leader as a hostage trapped in a political system of his own making. Lukashenko, he writes, has no choice but to try to remain in power indefinitely. With no viable successor Insight, Karpowich says Lukashenko's electoral defeat would lead to radical regime change. So that's interesting. That attracts. Yeah. I I wonder, I always wonder how much to believe it when people talk about like these guys wanting a way out or being trapped because it does happen. Like Saddam before the invasion was like, why? And all the time about how he didn't want to be dictator anymore. And you do have to think that, like for the guys who kind of are less ideological about it and just wanted power, there's a certain point at which you're old and you're rich and maybe you just like. You enjoy being old and rich and not have to constantly worry about being overthrown by angry activists. I don't know. I mean, there's also like, he has a credible there's another person that can run the country, which is his opponent in the election. So if he wants to step down, he can. He doesn't need to be dictator forever. But here's the problem. Once you've been the dictator and you've had a bunch of people disappeared and executed for exercising their political rights, and you've stolen huge amounts of money from the country. Then if you leave power, you're in a little bit of a pickle. Yeah, that is that's the thing, right? Yeah, that that's the cage of your own making. Yeah, that's the case. The cage of your own making is made with the bones of your enemies because at a certain point you've killed too many people, too, Umm to retire peacefully because we don't just have an island where dictators can go. Well, we do, and it's Jamaica, but I don't think he likes the heat. So, yeah, it's he's he's in a complicated situation and as with any controversial. Political leader there's numerous rumors about how Lukashenko ***** both his detractors and supporters. close your close your ears at this point, Garrison. Too pure. I'm covering my ears. There we go. Both his detract. Yeah, we know that the teens don't don't ever hear about dictators doing. I don't know, I don't know. I lost track of the joke here. Yeah, so both of his, both his detractors and supporters feel it necessary to tell stories about Lukashenko's supernatural sexual and ****** sexual prowess and his Titanic ****** appetite. So, like, both people who like him and hate him need you to know how **** hungry he is, which is kind of a weird. I don't know. I guess that's just Belarus. Yeah. One tabloid newspaper clearly put like pushing a government line of propaganda, described to the president's described an alleged adulterous relationship by the president and wrote that Lukashenko is the only candidate who has potent like was basically like, look, he's he ***** around on his wife because he's the only person in Belarusian politics who can get it. Which is an interesting line to take. Yeah, in 2013. Lukashenko was asked by his Fabada journalist how long he felt his political career would last. This was a polite way of asking, do you plan to be dictator for life? Lukashenko responded. If people will elect me, then you have will have Lukashenko for as many terms as you elect him. If, of course, health will allow him. He then added, if you have any doubts about my health, let's take skates and skis and tomorrow we will try. Let's run 10 kilometers. If you come first, then tomorrow you will be president. Yay, I love. I love the good system, dictatorship of the. Marathon. It's my favorite political system. It would be cool if I could just challenge the President to ******* 10K and then get to be president. This is what I hope the final I would I would so beat the President to the 10K. The thing is now is because the election here is such a big mess, we could just have Joe Biden challenged Trump to a push up contest and then the winner just be president. I mean has he kind of always he already, he already talked about that, but now that could just be the way we win the Presidency. I don't have. Men in their 70s pushups and see what happens? No, I don't think either of them could. I don't know if I think either of them could do one good push up. I'm going to be honest, I don't think so either. They're so, but if we want, they're so trash. They're so old and trash. But Kamala Kamala could could do more pushups than Pence, I'm fairly sure. Yeah, probably, but no. But they they can't be on the stage together because it's against his religion to sweat near a woman he's not married to. So I don't think he's going to agree to that in the 1st place. So yeah, that's a weird one. Now. I think the best Lukashenko propaganda I've come across is, again from that Belarus country study guide that was produced with help from the Belarusian government. And I wanted to read a few fun, fun Lukashenko facts that they put out in their, like broken Belarusian to English translated text. Because it's it's fun. Lukashenko has always willingly indulged in sport. The head of the state is sure that enormous psychological strain he undergoes every day, and nervous stress can only be removed by activity going in for sport. That's great, yeah. Although every minute of President's time schedule is interred in the records. He tries to find time amidst the state affairs to come up to a bookshelf. To come up to a bookshelf. Reading books for him is a most pleasant occupation. He obtained satisfaction whenever he gets acquainted with technological novelties, with latest achievements of the scientific mind. He seems like a real eccentric fellow. You obtain satisfaction from a technological novelty earlier today, and then it broke me. And then it broke immediately. Yeah, never by headphones. Yeah, I love the way they describe come. When he needs a relaxation, he comes up to a bookshelf. That's what I do. When I need to feel relaxed, I go up to my bookshelf. And reading for him is a most pleasant occupation. So. Over the last 20 some years, Lukashenko's political agenda has evolved from a vague platform of anti corruption to more or less supporting return to the old Soviet economic system with minor market elements. The private sector has been kept pretty consistently at 20 to 30% of the GDP and Belarus's industry has kept chugging along due in large part to Russian support. Not only did Russia sell cheap oil to Belarus, but they bought the Soviet style product still made in its factory. So like all of the like the the like the Kirkland brand, products in in Russia are all from Belarus. So, like, you can get, like a stove that's made somewhere else in the world. Or if you want a cheap stove that just works, you get the Belarus, you get the Belarus brand. Yeah. And yeah, they were like, and that that's part of what has kept their economy chugging along. So, yeah, Lukashenko pretty much based his entire political capital on stability, but most of that stability has been an illusion. For example, for most of his time in power, Belarus shot to provide workers with an average monthly wage of around 500 U.S. dollars. Unfortunately, the state was rarely able to afford more than about half of this, so they came to rely on regular loans from Russia, particularly in years like 2011 when Belarusian inflation topped 109%. Oh good. Yeah, that's not good in amounts of inflation. But Russia said no sometimes, which is again part of why, like Lukashenko started making more overtures for the EU and he's also gotten loans from the IMF and the European Union, which means he's kind of in debt to everybody a little bit, which is, I don't know. An interesting situation to be in now. In General, Putin and Lukashenko have had kind of a more of a tumultuous relationship than most media tends to present. Belarus and Russia are, on paper, part of that economic union that was always meant to progress to being a political one. And at first, folks assumed that Lukashenko was a puppet of Putin's kind of inevitably bringing his country into this like Union of Russia and Belarus. But over the years, Lukashenko's like repeatedly pulled back, like right at the moment where they might take a step forward. Towards that. And again, it's kind of like he's being a little bit of a **** ***** with Belarus. Like, Oh yeah, we're totally going to like, we're going to get hitched. Don't worry, don't worry. I just got to go see, I gotta go see my like Bay over the the IMF. We're just going to like, hang out for a night like, but it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't. It does not. It's not a big deal. Yeah. So last Christmas, Lukashenko presented Putin with a gift that some people see as a **** you to Russia over the fact that they started, like, demanding repayment of things and cut out anyway. The gift was three sacks of potatoes and a bunch of like. Rendered fork pork fat, which is a weird thing to like bring to your buddy's house as a Christmas gift. Yeah, Putin seems to broadly be kind of have been relatively ****** in recent years, particularly in the last year, and has responded by jacking up oil prices against towards Belarus and ******* with the state of their exports to Russia, which is kind of helped to crater the Belarusian economy. Now all of this has meant that for the last few years Belarus has been anything but stable. Lukashenko has continued to talk a good game about socialism, but he's reverted to the same sort of austerity measures that we see in Western countries he's raised the age for. Drying out your pension, basically, like raise the retirement age. He started permitting moderate unemployment. It used to be like, impossible, basically to be unemployed in Belorussia or Belarus. And, yeah, he's allowed unemployment as a result of the fact that there just was not enough money to force it. And that's brought, you know, political turmoil because people are seeing themselves losing access to some of these, like, state institutions that had at least been like kind of a save on the fact that it didn't have much freedom. Since 2008, Lukashenko solution to this has been to periodically loosen up the rules and allow his political opponents to organize and advocate for whatever it is they happen to want. Is like a safety valve. You know, things are getting worse and worse, so I might as well, like, give them an opportunity, a little bit of resistance. Yeah. And you also get to figure out who's the best at organizing resistance and throw them in dark cells. And he kind of developed he he had a history of being relatively smart about approaching some of these protest movements. So, for example, when mine workers went on strike. Over a delay in wage payments and demanded to be allowed to join a new non state owned Union, Lukashenko made sure that they got their money and they got a 50% raise. But then as soon as that was done, he fired all of the leaders who'd organized the strike and he also fired all of the heads of the new Union. That's healthy likewise. Yeah. But you know what is really healthy, Sophie? I I do, Robert. I think I do. Yeah, the products and services that support this podcast. Extremely healthy, you know? Yeah, very healthy. Never fired the heads of a mining. Strike well, maybe. Well, maybe, if you know, probably no comment. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. 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My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always felt like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with speaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. We're back. So yeah, Lukashenko, so he he was he kind of developed over time a pretty canny way of responding to dissent. Every now and then, he would loosen the rules for political activism to sort of let people gather in the streets more. But he never actually changed the laws so that at any point in time, he could just, like have his police start enforcing the laws again. And that gave him an opportunity to like, kind of trap people and **** with them, but also. Do the safety valve sort of thing when he needed to. I'm going to quote now from a write up in the Carnegie Moscow Center about the way in which the regime dealt with dissent. Quote The regime has several tools to minimize the likelihood of mass protests that might escalate to the point of threatening its survival. First, a significant proportion of Belarusians are excluded from politics as a consequence of the state sector's economic dominance. The country has a widely used system whereby employers are not obliged to extend labor contracts when they run out, usually after one year, so the authorities have a powerful lever. Lever for influencing the majority of the working population. Similarly, students risk being expelled from institutions of higher education, the majority of which your state-run, if they express political satisfact dissatisfaction. So yeah, it's a pretty, pretty sweet situation when you own the state and the state is everything and you could just shut down people's lives. Yeah, maybe. Maybe one body shouldn't control all those things. I don't know. Now, protests are allowed in Belarus, but they have to receive state approval 1st. And yes. Yeah. My favorite type of protest is state approved protest. Yeah. Is when they tell you where you can be, which they always want to do. Like the the police and the authorities always want to be able to tell people where you can protest. Yeah, that's something we're seeing in Portland. A lot is still just close off areas of downtown. Be like, Nope, yeah. Here anymore. Yeah. It's a thing you have to be really on guard for because, you know, it's exactly the kind of thing you do if you want to be able to run an authoritarian. State and stop people from resisting it in 2000. From 2015 to 2017, Belarus's rules about when people could protest and where were briefly loosened. And basically people just got fined for partaking and unapproved protests rather than arrested. And this state of affairs lasted for a little less than two years, until Lukashenko instituted a new law that taxed the unemployed, just the unemployed who he called social parasites. When protests against this got serious, he cracked down again. And start stopped letting people go out of the streets without getting arrested. Yeah, so that's interesting. Lukashenko has shown sort of a a a habit of giving in and giving concessions to protesters in certain situations in which he felt like it was kind of necessary. So in 2011, drivers who got angry at a rise in gas prices blocked Minsky's central thoroughfare, claiming that their vehicles had broken down. A bunch of them were detained and fined. But on the same day, the president lowered the fuel price. Now the fuel price crept up again very quickly. Thereafter, back to the levels it had been before the protests, and he basically just used that as an opportunity to, like, stop the protests, temporarily throw all of the people who organized them in prison, and then gradually raise the fuel tax back up to the level it had been before. Yeah, very, very sneaky. Very sneaky. The kind of the smart dictator way to do this. It's the smart way if you wanna be dictator. It's the smart way to handle a protest. Yeah, it's risky to confront protesters in the street and beat the **** out of them, because that can lead to huge mobs of protests. Radicalized people. Yeah, then more people be on the street, whereas you give them what they want, you throw their leaders in prison, and then you **** them over again and see if they're going to be bold enough to come back out. Smart guy. Likewise, President Lukashenko is deeply cautious about promoting charismatic or ambitious men to positions in government. The only thing more dangerous than being a protester in Belarus is being a politician who works with the President and stands out in some way. I'm going to quote again from that Carnegie Russia piece, quote those who occupy senior posts, know this and try not to stand out, give too many interviews, or develop public profiles. Lukashenko's aim is to ensure that neither elites nor ordinary citizens get the impression that someone has a stable hold on the number two position in the power vertical. There is no clear air or favorite in the eyes of the elite, and one should not be allowed to appear. Moreover, to prevent officials from thinking that they are becoming untouchable and to keep them in line, Lukashenko regularly initiates criminal cases, usually on charges of corruption, against some of them. The rare case is 10 to 15 years ago, in which high profile officials went over to the opposition ended with various criminal charges being brought against them to make sure others got the message. In this system, betraying the president's trust is the greatest sin. It seems this country's stability has been sorely based off of this guy trying to keep the country as boring as possible. Yeah, yeah, you you really get that. But like that impression from it. And that's kind of why Belarus had a hard time. Like Belarusians who were pro, like trying to actually fight against state repression have consistently had a hard time getting any. Getting anyone to give a **** like right now because of the violence in the streets, has been the first time anyone's really cared about Belarus on an international level in quite a while. Because people are terrible. And Lukashenko was good at being like, he was smarter than, like an Assad where it's like, yeah, you don't want to torture 10s of thousands of people to death. You just torture the right few dozen people and kill a handful of those people, and everybody else gets the message. And you let them do their little marching and stuff unless they go too far. And then you just, you know, there has to be enough resistance allowed that people feel like they have a little bit of control so that they don't fully rise up. Exactly, yeah. And he he kind of, it's a balancing act and he seemed to be pretty good at it for almost 30 years, one of the things that kind of. Disrupted his ability to effectively hide from that or to it was one of the things that seems to have disrupted his ability to successfully balance is the coronavirus. So Lukashenko made an interesting call when the virus hit, which is that he just refused to acknowledge that it was dangerous. Oh, we've never seen this before. We haven't. Like, he makes the president look responsible. That's his. Oh, that's good. Yeah, it's not. It's not good. Told his people that the virus was a mass psychosis and that if they got sick, they should all go to the sauna and get drunk to poison the virus. Yeah. Yeah. Let's all go to the sauna in a moist room where all the air is going around. Yeah, yeah, that's a great plan. Let's drink lots of straight vodka to lower our immune systems. You gotta poison a virus. God. Yeah. In late May, he insisted he'd been right not to lock down. Stating. You see that in the affluent W, unemployment is out of control. People are banging on pots, people want to eat. Thank God we avoided this. We didn't shut down. You wanna you wanna guess what happened next? I'm guessing thousands of 1000 people have died. We don't know how many people have died because it's Belarus, but the president absolutely got coronavirus. I you can see a pattern states, Russia, Brazil, all authoritarian kind of leadership styles are so incompetent at handling an actual crisis of this scale. And he he absolutely refused to make any changes to his life. They continued to hold all of his public appearances, government meetings, continued without masks. He continued to play hockey and go to hockey games. In late March, he was interviewed in full hockey gear, saying it's better to die standing than live. On your knees. Ohh boy. And yeah, then he caught the coronavirus. He says he was asymptomatic, but he does not describe being asymptomatic. And he told an interviewer, I apologize for my voice lately. I have to talk a lot. But the most surprising thing is that today you're seeing a person who managed to power through the coronavirus standing on his feet. Good for him. Doctors made this conclusion yesterday. It was asymptomatic. Like I said, 97% of our people go through this illness without symptoms. And thank God I've managed to get into this group of asymptomatic people. Which is not true at all. There's no he cited. He cited no actual statistics from his health ministry or whatever to make this claim. But also he was clearly apologizing for the fact that his throat sounded ******. I wonder why he gotten sick. Very funny. Not funny, because an unknown number of Belarusians died from the virus. Again, we have no actual data on how many of them got sick, but we do know that Belarusians were so desperate at the complete lack of support provided by their government that they started taking to go fund me in massive numbers. One campaign purchased more than $130,000 worth of respirators for doctors and nurses, which are going for like, $16.00 apiece on the streets. OK, because, like, they're just weren't. Masks available. So people, people have been crowdfunding basic medical supplies for their doctors in Belarus, a supposedly socialist state, because the government just refused to admit that the coronavirus was a thing. And it is weird that, like, you've got Belarus, the closest thing we have to the USSR left on the planet, except, I don't know, maybe like Cuba or something. And you've got the United States, which is, you know, this bastion of capitalism, and they both kind of wound up in the same. Positions. Yeah. Where civilians were crossing crowdfunding about doctors. This is this. This is a sign of a perfect working system. When you have people having to use a crowdfunding site for their medical care. This is this is a sign that everything is everything is fine. Nothing is wrong. Yeah, it's it's great. For his part, Lukashenko. Yeah. Refused to cancel. And like, he just. Yeah. Anyway, over the years, Lukashenko clearly grew comfortable with the idea that his words could manipulate and dictate reality. You know, he could change. Lone birth date, like the nature of his dad or whatever, like at a whim for whatever was politically convenient. And again, kind of like we saw with Trump, he ran into the coronavirus, which is this thing that, like, you can't manipulate, can't fake your way, can't lie to it. Yeah, it's just a virus. And it will get you sick if you don't take certain precautions. But, you know it. He let it spread like wildfire through Belarus, and that sucked. And it happened to be also that this year was a presidential election. And so the kind of campaigning season started just as the coronavirus was really biting, and the economy was hitting a nosedive and there was no way for him to hide the rot. Right. You can't. As the President claim, I kept everything stable while people are sick and out of. Yeah, it's hard to just propaganda this one away. Exactly. There's a certain point at which the lying does not work. A government poll taken in April of 2020 found that only 1/3 of Belarus trusted the president's opposition candidate, and this is again a poll his own government released. Always my favorite type of poll, yeah, not great results. Opposition candidates began to come out of the woodwork to oppose his rule. There were three of them initially. One of them was a guy named Sergey Tikhonov esky, who's a famous YouTuber who grew to local fame by putting out videos highlighting corruption and incompetence within the government. And then there were two other like. Opposition politicians who were kind of prominently running against the president, and they all get arrested almost immediately and then, which is like normal, right? That's what happens. Everything happening. But then something weird happens. The wives of all three of these opposition politicians get together and decide to run one single campaign together. They merged their support in campaign and they throw all of their support behind the wife of the YouTube star who got arrested, a woman named Svetlana. And they start running a really credible campaign. Well, in a matter of days they collect 100,000 signatures necessary to register as a campaign with regime controlled election authorities, and the regime lets them. And you get the feeling it's because they thought that it's just so silly. Yeah, they thought it was just like, there's no chance. Yeah, Lukashenko would. Kind of. Like, uh, crudely say something along the line. Like mockingly say, oh, I don't think we're ready for a female president here in Belarus. But she kept getting more popular and more popular and more popular and something really neat happened. Where as this is all going on, starting with like, you know, the the the the coronavirus pandemic. People in Belarus started getting on to apps like Telegram and increasing numbers, hundreds of thousands of them who hadn't been before, to organize these like drives and donations and providing. Like to organize the providing basic medical supplies to medical professionals and they were on all these platforms. When the campaigning started up so they they began like there was this one app created that allowed them to like track votes and like track? What people were voting for, so that they could have like an accurate updated by the minute count of how people were really voting to compare to the government tallies on the election and so and also like you have all these people who are able to get like. Uh, organized voter drives and stuff like that to actually like run a really competent campaign that very quickly overwhelmed the president's like all of the state repressive measures he'd spent decades building up. And it kind of works. I'm going to quote next here from a write up in Vox quote experts told me Lukashenko usually allows some opposition candidates to run against him. Doing so let's the regime keep the appearance of a fair election and also allows those with grievances to address them once in a while hoping complaints die down. Soon after the vote. That seems to have happened in this case, but the President also didn't seem too threatened by Technogym's candidacy. One reason was that Tikhonov Eskaya had no political experience at all. In fact, she'd never spoken at a political rally before. The other was that Lukashenko holds sexist, outdated views of women. Society is not mature enough to vote for a woman, he said in July, adding that the weight of the Presidency would lead her to collapse the poor thing. But Ticknor Skaya didn't collapse under pressure. Instead, she united the opposition and brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets and support. Umm. So yeah, they, uh, put together this campaign like they have that. Like the sign for this campaign was like a heart and a fist and a fist pumping position of and a V for victory. And yeah, it it all, it all works. Grassroots movement led by a woman is a vibe led by three women. Yeah, it's it's definitely a vibe. And because protesters have this, they have this like vote tracking system that they've all set up together independently. They're able to like keep track of how the votes are actually going when the government lies about it, which is what happens. You know, there's an election. The early polls, which seem to be pretty like the the the credible polls suggest that about 80% of people voted for Svetlana. The government claims that 80% of people. Voted for Lukashenko, which again has happened every election, but this time, when he claimed that he'd won by an overwhelming margin, everyone knew it was a lie because they were all online talking to each other. So, like, and you, you'll hear this in interviews, people being like, well, I just assumed he must have a bunch of supporters elsewhere. And like, so, like, that's why he kept winning. But now people were online with hundreds of thousands of their citizens, and everyone was saying, like, no, none of us voted for no, we we're all in communication. We know who we voted for. This guy wasn't it. We're all talking and so, so that's what takes all these people out into the streets. And we're going to talk a little more about what happened next. But first you know what's better than going to the streets? 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I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always felt like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with speaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. We're back, OK. So yeah, it it it it was a really interesting situation. So basically, Svetlana and these other women, like the wives of these candidates, run this incredible grassroots campaign that by all accounts, outside of the Belarusian regime, ******* wins. And there's, you'll hear. So, like, tankies people who listen a lot are a group of people I don't like much, and they're basically this group of leftists. Who finds a reason to defend every dictator and a reason to criticize every movement against a dictator who isn't in line with the United States? Because if you're not a fan of the US, then it doesn't matter how bad a dictator you are anyway. I don't like tankies one of the things that they will attack. One of the things that they will attack Svetlana's campaign from is that one of the proxies that she picked for her campaign, like a local activist who was sort of campaigning for her, praised Adolf Hitler in speeches, which is a bad thing to do, but also Lukashenko never president repeatedly. It's not like he didn't praise Hitler. It's like, if you are going to say, like I agree with you, it's a problem that this person's vetting was so bad that they picked like an election. Proxy who had support like who says nice things about Hitler, but the president repeatedly says nice things about Hitler, so that may not make the point you want it to make in this case. Which is like, yeah, it's it's bad that that happened. But also come on, like the the guy that they're running against his repeatedly talked about how good many of the things Hitler did is maybe this is a sign that nobody who runs for president makes great choices. We're saying it's like, it's like, it's like telling people they should vote for Trump instead of Biden because Biden's creepy around women. It's like, yes, but also Trump, yeah, like that's not that's not a good argument to vote for Trump. No, they're both creepy around women. Yeah. And I don't want to like, criticize that, Lonnie, because I honestly, you get the feeling like she just like she never wanted to be in politics. She she probably just didn't really think much about vetting people. And nobody can be that good in Belarus at running a political campaign like that much experience. It's been illegal. So I I'm going to give her a pass on the fact that one of the people she hired wound up having said some dumb things in the past. Yeah. Doesn't seem cancellable to me. Yeah. And she had, it was one of those things. So she would, she would say things sometimes in speeches that were like kind of brought like, like, like, broadly, let's say gender traditional. So she repeatedly make the claim that, like, I would rather be preparing cutlets for my children than running for President. But like, I just have to do it. Which you can feel about the way you want. But it's also what's a politician? Politician. It plays well. Yeah. Like it's a very pretty patriarchal society. And that'll get people who might not otherwise vote for a woman. The board's no, it's a protest vote, like, yeah, exactly. She also said some stuff that I think is pretty cool. I don't need power, but my husband is behind bars. I'm tired of putting up with it. I'm tired of being silent. I'm tired of being afraid. And obviously, one of the things that's really tragic about this in the immediate wake of the election, you know, all these protests start up, things become, like very violent very quickly with state security forces cracking down, and she has to go into hiding. She sends her children out of the country first, in which she's actually in the same. Vote with Lukashenko, because there's. It's heavily suspected, although not 100% proven. Like the the the presidential aircraft. Belarus Air Force One flew to Turkey as soon as things started getting bad, and it's believed that Lukashenko's family was on board. OK, yeah. Do do we know? Do we know where he is right now? I think he's still in the country. He's supposed to be giving a do we know? Do we know where he is right now? I think he's still in the country. He's supposed to be giving an address pretty soon. OK, probably will have by the time this episode drops. And there's a bunch of different anyway, so. That Lana. Comes on like. Basically goes to ground for a while and. Seems like she gets caught because the next time we see her, protests are going on and she makes a video from the office of a government minister where she's like, everyone should accept the election results and go home and not fight the police. And she looks like ****** ** and Trump like it's it's it's yeah yeah, we know what's going on, you know what's going on. And she's fled the country since. So she is out and safe and hiding for the sake of her family safety. And things in Belarus are very bad right now, 7000. People have been arrested now. Most of those people are. A sizable chunk of those people have been released at this point. Again, we are not talking yet, at least about a regime that is like the Syrian regime where they're going to. They would mediately killed, yeah, they have killed at least two people, probably significantly more. And they're torturing people. Lots of them. There was the audio that came out a few days ago. We're going to include a clip from that in a second, but it's it's audio of protesters from outside of one of Belarus's not so secret prisons. Just like people, you can hear people being tortured and we'll play that now. So yeah, that's horrifying. Not not great, not great, not great. But it hasn't stopped people from coming out. And in the last as I, as I deliver this, things will be in a different state by the time you hear this. Most recent change has been that the government is allowing mass demonstrations again and like, the soldiers are hugging protesters and like they're there. It seems like things got bad enough that he decided, oh God, if I keep repressing people, shooting people in the streets, that will inevitably. Lead to a revolution. And I don't know that I'll win. I mean, because this morning I saw footage of like, police cars joining in on the protest or whatever. Yeah. And it's it's hard to say at this stage because there have been one of the things that was happening is there were viral videos of members of, like, even Russia or even Belarusian special forces throwing away or burning their uniforms to be like, we're not going to hurt our people. And maybe that was enough of a problem that he realized he had to change his response. I I can't tell if the because there have been cases in history. Were, like, police and military forces joined with protesters and then the government got overthrown. Yes. Right. I don't know if that's the case. We don't know if it's actually genuine or if it's kind of been being controlled by him to make himself look good. Yeah. And there's also rumors that basically what's going to happen is Lukashenko is going to be backed by Russia and allowed to stay in power for another year and then resign. And that, like, that's what they're going to try to do. So, like, he can save some space, but, like, they want to put their man. But also, it's like, it's not clear that that would work. Because basically a significant number of the country at this point is actually more pro Europe than Pro Russia. It's it's some polls that have happened have had it been close to 5050, it's usually about 50% Pro Russia, 35 to 40% pro EU. Who knows where things are at this moment? But it is a situation that's like kind of the thing that he's been trying to avoid since 2014, which is Belarus winding up kind of like Ukraine, where you have the country split along pro European or pro Russian lines, and then Russia comes in and takes a chunk of the country. And there's a big, ugly civil war. Like, a lot of really horrible things could happen here. And some of them being that, like, Belarus, could get, you know, sort of pushed absorbed more by kind of the technocratic West and wind up being picked over by capitalists in the same way like Albania did. Easy. Great solution here. Yeah. Besides, like, just getting the elected leader actually elected, like, the person who we probably think won the election. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, which is a start and it is one of those. Things where you can kind of look through what's likely to happen next and be like, Oh well, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of potential for things to end well for Belarus. And I I do like, you can make a strong logical arguments there, right, that like, you know, NATO is going to like like the IMF for whoever. Like, like what? All these different sort of Western powers that have been kind of have been slavering at the chance to get their, to get their teeth around Belarus. We'll do that and it'll make life worse for people. Not impossible. Although at this point, considering how bad things have gotten, hard to see how that would be worse than where things are. There's also the argument, like Russia will take over and like, it'll become more authoritarian and things will get worse for people and, like, none of the options before them are good. And I don't like getting trapped into that kind of thinking because it leads you to like, it leads you to not be excited about what what is a core good thing here, which is that a **** load of people who never thought, who never, who have not had political agency in their lives are now like. Dropkicking riot cops in the street and trying to change their circumstances and that's a good thing. Yeah, absolutely I mean, yeah, it's these people have for the first time in a while. We're having a sense of like agency in their life, yeah, and I. I don't want to like I don't think it should be a foregone conclusion that they will get ****** over like one way or the other by you know, Russian imperialism or or sort of like the the the the kind of the same, like the ******* shock doctrine capitalism like I don't think. Either of those has to be inevitable, like it's an unwritten year. Things could be different. Like, who knows? Anyway, there's there's enough things going on in the world that there's not a foregone conclusion yet. Yeah, so that's what I've got for this episode so far, and I I hope that. If you're in Belarus and somehow listening to this because they shut down the Internet to a pretty heavy extent, people have found ways around it. Thankfully, one of the cool stories is that, like, there's this app that was developed to allow people in China to access the Internet that people started downloading in Belarus before the Internet got or before, like all the app stores got blocked. So people have been passing it around and flash drives. That's so cool. Thousands of people, so that they could get it on the phone. This this is cyberpunk, yeah, but it's. Very cool. That's that's actually cyberpunk. That is awesome and it's neat. There's been some really cool stories coming out, like a bunch of British soccer hooligans flew over to Belarus to like fight the cops on the hat. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's ******* ******* rules. Yeah, like anti racist Skinhead types in the UK, which I I think ******* rocks. And I was reading a really interesting crime thing, published an article, an interview with a number of different Belarusian anarchists. And yeah, people were asked like what their. It was really interesting for a number of reasons. One of them was that, like, one of the guys they interviewed estimated like there's maybe 100 of us in the country, like anarchists who were actually organized in an organized anarchists. And but they're also like the people who have the most time and experience thinking about how to fight the state. Yeah, they've they spend their free time thinking about that. Yeah. So they've been the backbone and help, but trying to like, train up all of these other, these Belarusians who kind of like never would have considered themselves political activists before, which is an interesting story I'd love to to learn more about. Be honest. And yeah. Another one of the people they interviewed, like, was asked, like, what can we do to help? And he was like, well, there's some donations that people can want. But like, really, if you could, if it's at all possible for you to travel to Belarus and help us fistfight the cops, we could really use that help. Right, to be there doing something but not easy to get to at the moment, especially for Americans who are no longer welcome anywhere in the world. But, yeah, Belarus, where we are paying attention and hope that y'all. Figure out how to make things better in your lives, and that everyone who says that this is inherently doomed winds up being wrong. Yep, very hopeful and optimistic ending. I love optimism. You know what else I love? Garrison. Now, what else do you love? Plugging you? You love. You love plegables. I love the attempts. We've tried to plug in headphones all day for hours. Well, actually, because they were not plugging headphones. It was a nightmare that stole like an hour from our we better. If we had a splitter, then we could plug into it. Exactly. Exactly. If people would. Just what? Sometimes progress isn't necessary. What was wrong with the audio Jack? Why did people need something new IT worked fine. Fine. Why? Plegables are good. I'm Speaking of plegables. Yeah. My my plugable is plug your pluggable at hungry botan Twitter. For protests, reporting and other kind of political fun stuff. Yeah, yeah. That's that's what I'm doing right now. It's that's that's my main thing currently, and mine is at I write OK, where you can occasionally see me live streaming Garrison and myself and a number of our other close friends getting repeatedly tear gassed in the streets of Portland, OR. As has become tradition in the streets of Portland, OR on days that end in why it's a good time, Sophie. Great, great stuff. Our city is ruined for a long time. Yeah. On an unrelated note, my lungs hurt every day. I wonder. I wonder why. Ohh OK, well that's the episode products and services, everybody. Just remember, no matter how dark things get, we always have products and services. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break her handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker. Dot com that's spreaker.com. If you could completely remove one phrase from your vocabulary, which phrase would you choose? I don't know. Correct answer. No, I meant I don't know which phrase, and the best way to banish I don't know from your life is by cramming your brain full of stuff you should know. Join your host, Josh and Chuck on the Super Popular podcast packed with fascinating discussions on science, history, pop culture and more episodes that ask, was the lost city of Atlantis Real? I don't know. Is birth order important? I don't know. How does pizza work? Well, I do know. Bit about that. See? You can know even more, because stuff you should know has over 1500 immensely interesting episodes for your brain to feast on. So what do you say? I don't want to miss the stuff you should know. Podcast you're learning already. 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