a reply to:
YouSir
Are we pretending...that any western nations...are democracies...?
Yes, actually yes. And the best evidence for it is your undisturbed presence here. Whenever you post something silly and irrelevant here, the only
consequence is having that post removed by the staff, that only, and not being sentenced to 20 or 30 years of gulag in the most remote corner of
Alaska. And in spite of your regular bashing of your president and your country, you're still alive. And free. The police isn't knocking at your door
and you don't face multiple staged trials for your contrarian opinions.
You have much more luck than the opposition in Russia.
Your authorities keep changing. If the elections were fake, you would have the same dictator ruling the country for decades. And one and the same
party.
Your silly claim that there are five different candidates and the people can choose who to vote for stems from your lack of knowledge about Russia.
You're either not following what is happening there or you don't want to know. Because just recently, the opposition candidate who could rival Putin
has been barred from the elections. And it's been happening since Putin gained power. All candidates who could threaten him in some way end up
excluded from the elections. There are no independent observers there. If people can't choose their own candidates, no wonder that the preferable form
of protest there is vandalism.
Now, regarding the US and its "vassals", in 1968 the first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubcek, started democratic
reforms which gave the citizens more freedom and could make his country less dependent from Russia. Seeing it, the countries of the Warsaw Pact,
unfortunately including Poland among others, under the leadership of Russia, intervened militarily in Czechoslovakia, deposed the unruly democratic
government and squashed the social dissent.
In a similar way, when Orban started consolidating his power in a not very democratic way, openly supporting Putin and blocking Sweden's membership in
NATO, the NATO countries, under the leadership of the US intervened in Hungary, deposed Orban and locked up all his sympathizers there... Oh wait...
That one actually didn't happen!
You see... This is a difference between the US "vassals" and the legitimate vassals of Russia.