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One thing that comes to mind is comparing this with the treatment of Miles Routledge by the Taliban.
Of course it's not apples to apples, but as far as "westernized sperg goes on stroll in country where real shit is going on" it's at least somewhat comparable.
I suspect that the main difference is Miles just plays the part of an idiot whiles CRP may legitimately have been one. But the difference between pneumonia gulags and forced movie marathons is a bit stark. Especially factoring in which country had a diplomatic mission from the UK/US.
The real lesson in all this is that you don't start telling people how to run their business when you're a guest, and that goes double when they're at war.
It's too late for him, but I hope Lira's family makes it okay out of this mess.
Miles never really criticized the Taliban in-country in a way that threatened them, he was swept up as a generic Westerner whose nationality put him on the ‘enemy’ side, but he wasn’t a critic.
The US also locked up hostile propagandists in wartime (in much less desperate situations, it must be said, than Ukraine is in today). Lira knew the risks.
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TBH, you're a nicer guy than I am because my knee jerk reaction was a Nelson Muntz-esque point and laugh.
Soljenitsyne has this passage in Gulag Archipelago that describes people that were fully propagandized supporters of the regime but still ended up in the system, and how they were convinced that they were the one mistake but that everyone else was deported for good reason.
As he describes them and how even more pathetic they are than your average political prisoner, you can't really summon any schadenfreude because no naive idiot deserves such a horrid fate, Marxist bandit or not.
CRP, in all his lolcow glory, is spiritually the same as those people in many ways.
Think about it though, will we really be laughing when Chris-chan finally kicks the bucket?
They were the average political prisoner. That's how Gulag endured for so long: the average political prisoner was a communist that agreed that enemies of the USSR deserved to be sent to labor camps, they just knew they themselves weren't one. When the WWII brought in a fresh haul of nationalists from the limitrophe states and literal anti-Communist Russians keelhauled by the British, it became much harder to manage the camps, as these new prisoners rejected the very legitimacy of their punishment under article 58 and would riot whenever possible.
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The difference is that some measure of sympathy for the most hardcore Stalinists who got Gulaged is ‘justified’ by the fact that they grew up in the system (even pre-1917 many were early members of Bolshevik groups and so on, had parents who were etc), were brainwashed by years or decades of propaganda, and had no frame of reference for the outside world. You can’t be too judgmental of the morality of a core Kim loyalist in the DPRK whose entire fifty-year lifespan has been dominated by an ideology that worships his lineage, at least without some hypocrisy in most cases.
Going to an extremely corrupt shithole country fighting an existential war as an enemy propagandist is just unbelievably stupid. Even in the most ‘civilized’ Western countries that aren’t directly at war with Russia Lira’s behavior wouldn’t be tolerated (see the treatment of Russia Today in recent years), and Ukraine isn’t in that group.
It's not fighting an existential war, it's fighting a proxy war on behalf of western powers.
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It would be stupid if GL thought it was safe, but he was well aware of the danger. You can call it foolish/self sacrificing deed if you wish, but not dumb.
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For my part, probably, but as a guy who's got all three volumes of the Gulag Archipelago along with Cancer Ward and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich sitting on his bookshelf I've got to admit that you got me. As much as I have joked about it on reddit, I may really have lived long enough to become the villain.
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