Skiluros

Lack of courage and bold ideas from liberal democrats.

While I generally agree with messages in the interview. I cannot help but notice the overly positive attitude towards Gorbachev (albeit with some nuance):

At the end of the Cold War, Gorbachev played a crucial role. For me, he is truly the hero who helped bring it to an end – not alone, but it was very much a personal matter. He started in 1985, and if we imagine what might have happened if the Soviet Union had continued unchanged, it would have been catastrophic.

Gorbachev believed communism needed reform, thinking it was possible. In my view, we can all be thankful for this misconception. I believe communism couldn’t be reformed, but because he thought it could, he initiated change. Had he believed reform was impossible, he wouldn’t have started at all.

Gorbachev supported the continued occupation of independent countries via the USSR. He also approved of russia’s annexation of Crimea. There is a lot more commonality in worldview between putin and Gorbachev than the interview would lead one to believe.

Recognize the goods things that he did, but also recognize that he very much supported the russian genocidal imperialist mindset (that is still widely popular in russia today).

That’s a fair point.

Difficult to say. One possible area to look into is formerly colonized nations that have experienced very strong economic growth in the last 30 years. What do you think?

Would Brazil be a good example? I believe colonialism ended over 200 years ago and they’ve seen pretty strong growth in the last ~25 years. How would you rate their attitude towards modern colonialilsm?

What about South Africa? Or is that a bad example. Their consistency on the topic of imperialism is interesting to say the least.

Does this hold true even if these countries (often times the population at large, not just the leadership) are avid supporters of imperialism and brutal occupations?

You ask for reparations for colonialism, while at the same time supporting russia’s genocidal, imperialist invasion.

EDIT: This is not aimed at the poster. More so the countries that would receive these proposed reparations and a much lesser extent Amnesty itself (the director of Ukrainian Amnesty international resigned after the head office released some asisine accusations against the UA army).

Unfortunately this is really just the EU’s version of “thoughts and prayers”.

Austria’s Raiffeisen bank still has not left russia after almost 3 years of full scale war.

And let’s not forget how Merkel greenlighted Nord Stream 2 right after the beginning of the war; the invasion of Crimea.

Agreed. My comment was a general statement of solidarity. :)

Curious to see how this goes. Wish all the best to the democratic, liberal-minded folks in Hungary.

The impression I get is Orban’s rule has become ironclad over the last few decades (which makes sense as you get time to institutionalize “permanent” rule and condition society to such a state of affairs). I do hope I am wrong and my knowledge of Hungarian politics is subpar beyond foreign policy elements.