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It's surprising how radicalized people have become by the western empire / media / ngo complex. Seems like this also involves efforts to limit foreign NGO influence https://www.politico.eu/article/commissioner-upbraids-slovakia-on-changes-to-ngo-public-media-laws-robert-fico/ and is a similar situation to the bill causing all the riots in Georgia and of course a few years ago Hungary... attempted? or actually passed? I don't remember, a similar bill to label and monitor NGOs with significant foreign funding among other attempts to rid their local media of foreign influence. Are these people just NPCs that listen to too much Slovakian NPR? Or people that see themselves as members of the borderless global professional (laptop) class? Seems strange to me that labeling foreign funding for NGOs would be controversial and bad. The US and EU response to these laws is very telling as well.
The same has been done in India also. It seems to be a common play to fund left wing activities through NGO funding.
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How is it surprising? People in this kind of Eastern European state can look honestly at the situation and compare the extraordinary increase in prosperity that Poland, Hungary and they themselves have seen in the EU orbit with the continuing shitholes for ordinary people that Belarus, pre-war Ukraine and even Russia itself to some extent are. It’s unclear whether Russia is ever going to reach Western European income levels (seems unlikely), while it’s pretty much guaranteed that Poland will very soon. Obviously there are relevant additional factors, but average people don’t consider most of those. I wouldn’t want to join or stay in the Russian orbit.
Let's not get carried away.
It was by no means extraordinary anywhere. It may seem extraordinary to many youngsters, I suppose, because they compare a world of fancy touchscreens of all sorts, social media, the laptop class lifestyle etc. to a world of stagnant socialism without any of those, and conclude that there must have been a huge improvement in the average quality of life, when in fact there was no such thing, and it's all just self-delusion driven mostly by Russophobia. I can very much assure you, for example, that there is no, and has never at any point been, consensus on this supposed extraordinary increase in Hungary.
To the extent that there was tangible increase in prosperity in Poland, most of it is obviously explained by the severity of austerity measures introduced in the final years of socialism. It's a matter of relative difference, and people's emotional revulsion at a regime which permitted the evil Russkies to station their orcs on sacred Polish soil and whatnot.
I find it somewhat odd that you added Belarus to this list. As far as I know, it was, in fact, the one post-Soviet country that largely survived the '90s without economic collapse, social disintegration and widespread anomie, at least compared to the other unfortunate post-USSR republics.
But anyway, let's not pretend that this is not even surprising. Slovakia has been an independent polity for a combined period of roughly 35 years (1939-45, 1993-). Was there even one political assassination such as the current one during those years? As far as I can tell, no.
There was a huge improvement in average quality of life. The number of Western countries that saw similarly rapid transformations is very small. Ireland is probably the only one that wasn’t communist before 1989.
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B-but there might be a Pride parade there!
In any case, it seems the shooter was a pro-Russian far-righter:
This still doesn't necessarily indicate a particular conspiracy related to these movements or anything else, such movements tend to draw unstable personalities to them like flies to honey.
This is part of the spin I see a lot in conjunction with insane conspiracies even in supposedly rational progressive circles - one example being that there was no blood seen at the scene and that people around did not panic, so maybe it was just some stunt. Yes, these things are unironically shared among a lot of pro-opposition people, this is where we are now - in culture war filled disinformation age. When it comes to the assassin then yes, on one side he had photos with pro Russian aligned paramilitary organization Slovenský Branci (although supposedly to convince them to not support Russia as part of his movement against violence) and he also had some rant against Roma/gypsies - BTW not that rare even among progressives in Slovakia. However he also voted for progressive president Zuzana Čaputová, he strongly supported Ukraine in the current war and he participated in anti-government protests that were organized basically since Fico took power as every government action was painted as a huge problem, threat to democracy and all that.
His actions were politically motivated and he decided to assassinate Fico for reasons broadly in line with current opposition rhetoric. I think he really fits the description of "stochastic terrorism" - an unhinged person with fringe views who was sensitive to heightened emotions around the current issue™ and just decided to act extremely on a given day. This gives plausible deniability of any responsibility to any side - look, he is unhinged and we do not bear any responsibility for anything, we could even pin it on the other side due to cherrypicked issues like that he was racist toward gypsies, so he was no true progressive. By the way there was also an interview with his son who said that he was not medicated that he did not have any history of actual mental illness and that nothing suggested that he would do something like that - that is why I use the term unhinged.
And I am not even saying that as some judgement, I just think this is the world we live in. We may see more and more of these types of operations where political violence is used with cloud of plausible deniability, that can itself feed into the overall culture war further polarizing everybody into even more insanity. What a world to live in.
There is supposedly even video evidence of this, courtesy of a local TV channel. I can't comment on this because I don't speak Slovak.
Form the video he shouted "nech žije Ukrajina" (long live Ukraine). The rest of the video was testimony of his friends, the first one was his coworker miner who mentioned that he he was a rebel and anti-beurocracy before, the second one was also in the "movement against the violence" that the assasin founded and expressed incredulity about how it could come to violent action. The rest is his brief CV about his sympathy toward now disbanded paramilitary organization Slovenskí Branci, his career as writer and member of the official club of Writers/Authors in Slovakia.
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It's likely a "Who? Whom?" thing. If you're a Slovakian leftist and you notice that all the orgs you like and non of the orgs you hate are being shut down under this law, you may (reasonably?) conclude that the law was generated through 'Schelling gerrymandering': motivated rightists first finding a distinction between their orgs and yours, then claiming that it's a material difference when it actually isn't, in order to hurt leftists with plausible deniability.
The law would apply equally to somebody funded by Russian organization or let's say Misk foundation that is backed by Mohammed bin Salman. I personally think that there is a huge difference between let's say Club of Slovak Tourists which is a private NGO funded by hikers to mark our excellent hiking trails and who repair water springs or huts as opposed to organization funded by governments like China or Saudi Arabia or Quatar - it is hard to even call them NGOs in that sense. Also was it also not part of the whole controversy of "Russian collusion" where everybody was up in arms that some foreign player - maybe financed by Gazprom funded “NGO” or whatever - is meddling in US domestic politics?
To me this adds transparency to NGO sector. The fact that leftists call it as "chilling effect" or even as you say that it will "shut down" the sector is telling. Of course they are arguing from slippery slope and there may be something there, but it is a different argument from what is happening now.
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Voice of America is a thing. TBH I’d be shocked if the EU didn’t have similar programs.
Honestly a big, wealthy, influential country is naturally going to perceive a nationalist-ish media law, no matter how anodyne, in its poorer, smaller periphery to be aimed at it.
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