I’ve pointed out a couple of times here over the last year or so liberal texts that claim that “democrats” should learn from Putin and behave similarly or they won’t defend democracy. I remind you that the point is not to copy the real Putin, but some sort of caricature Western idea of a dictator. If you want to save liberal democracy, you need to watch the comedy The Dictator with Sacha Baron-Cohen, and then do it exactly the same way.
Those views seem to have bubbled up to the highest levels, so much so that the leadership of the European Union has launched an open war on the tech giants, including arresting their bosses on ridiculous pretexts (and possibly beating them in jail) and the childish accusation that the richest man on the planet, Elon Musk, is being funded by Putin. In addition, it is beginning to emerge that the disconnection of two EU member states from energy supplies was not initiated from Ukraine but from Brussels.
Perhaps Putin would play a similar game. But Putin would have questions in his mind like ‘what are the options of the counterpart? How will he react now?” whereas the European liberal oligarchy is more likely to ask questions like “how will I look in press conferences? How many positive articles will come out of this? How many likes will I get on which social network.” And the difference too is that Putin would have strategic options ready and would have arranged supporting coalitions. I’m afraid the Euro-politicians have no idea what that word means.
So my guess is that the war against big tech will generate a lot of optimistic articles and videos in the first phase, but that the Euro-oligarchy will be defeated again, and that this will bring the big systemic change a little closer. Just as the catastrophically unprepared campaign to the east brought it closer.