When the press is the government's lapdog, liberty and freedom can't really exist.
And you wind up with people distrusting both the press and the government. Why? Paraphrasing the title of a book on this theme ... Nothing is true, everything is true, and you get CTs and mis/disinformation flowing like the Mississippi during a 1000 year flood. Sic transit patriae eorum libertas. (I like the ambiguity of the placement of "their" ... "Thus passes their country's freedom" and "Thus passes the country of their freedom." Slightly tweak sentence-level stress and how the meaning changes.)
The liberty of freedom of speech and press is foundational to democracy. Impugn one, you impugn all. Putin's a past-master, with his press bootlickers. Centralized power always produces both sycophants and corruption. Putin's reign, in short.
This strike will be used as agitprop to show how horribly fascist the gay/Jew-loving Ukrainians, ever fascist for opposing the Good Rule of the Sainted Russian narod, is. (The '40s usage was two-way ambiguous between fashist = "fascist" and fashist = "anti-Soviet/Russian". And it continued that way for decades. That the Russian word looks and sounds like "fascist" has been a horrible translator's nightmare, like when Stalin said he was "deepening democracy." Just WTFH!? Orwell nailed it, contrary to his fellow Brit Socialists. But you manipulate language and you get crap salad sans the ideological blinders ... Or the "precedent" of decades of screwed translation ... [iTrados ] traditore.)
My point is that the "Vanya 100-gram" (instead of "Joe Six-pack" ... not quite "Joe with the six-pack"
in the street will hear the government spin. "Bad people hurt the good people, people like you." This will be used to outrage commoners against the Ukrainians, not make them feel the pain.
Kursk was a bit different. "Don't panic. It's all under control." Whatever. I'm keeping a towel close by. (Yeah, a Hitchhiker's reference.)
You live in a bell jar, and the oxygen of liberty is in short supply.
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