The Chips Are Down

In the best tradition of Juan Guaidó, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is a handpicked potato, to be served with the mince as which she is as thick.

The liberal bourgeoisie's taking to the streets to chant its love of NATO and the EU, while demanding that the votes of the beastly little common people be annulled, is no more edifying in Belarus than it is in Britain, where it has also been happening.

Either spectacle is no more sympathetic than the chanting of similar types for the United States to invade Hong Kong, or for the CIA to stage a coup on behalf of actual Nazis in Venezuela, as previously in Ukraine.

There is plenty wrong with Alexander Lukashenko, and he did not win by anything like as much as he claims to have won. But he really did win. As Nicolás Maduro really did win. As Evo Morales really did win. As Viktor Yanukovych really did win. And as Brexit really did win. 

The kind of people who won it for Brexit are the kind of people who won it for Maduro and for Lukashenko, even if only for the want of anything better. The people who want to remove Maduro and Lukashenko like this are the people who think that our votes should not and do not count as much as their own, if at all.

Imagine that an incoming Biden Administration announced its recognition of Keir Starmer, who is strikingly like Kamala Harris in many ways, as the "legitimate" Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, in order to stop the application of Modern Monetary Theory so as to reverse the deindustrialising effects of globalisation, in order to take Britain back into the EU by acceding to the Schengen Agreement and by adopting the euro, and in order to ensure British participation in any future war that Saudi Arabia might care to order up, from the oilfields of Venezuela, to the lithium mines of Bolivia, to anywhere that, by allying with Russia, might ally indirectly with Syria and Iran.