Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
Since it's 9th of May today, of course Victory Day events are taking place. This has historically been mostly ignored in Western/Central Europe, aside from minor things like ambassadors laying flowers on whatever monument is available locally. Over the past few years, these things have been successfully prevented through organized performance art style protests drawing gigantic crowds of journalists. Of course, something similar happened again this year:
https://streamable.com/e/fnrnke
None of this is news, of course. What is interesting is that they haven't updated them at all in about two and a half years now, with these performance art events now kind of falling into irrelevance. This year they actually didn't even prevent the thing they were trying to prevent and the only attention they garnered was derision from their opponents. Whether it means that the media and the general public are now less interested in this kind of pseudoshock content, or is this subject in particular now being retired?
Sorry, not sure I'm parsing correctly. What are they preventing?
Traditionally Russians have this thing, where they (in contrast to rather lukewarm interest in Western Europe) send their ambassadors, cultural orgs, and anyone else who is in any way official - to go and put flowers on wherever local WW2 monument is. The propaganda point there is fairly obvious - hey, we still remember the war that we won, while the rest of you don't, and are probably cryptonazis or at least sympathizers anyway.
In the past few years the actions of local governments have really, really nicely played into that message, since EU members have acted unbelievably and consistently dumb in pretty much everything they did as far as foreign policy is concerned. There are extremes, like near-baltic microstates, where governments themselves are arresting people for flowers or flags, but in the actual EU, this was mostly done via the sort of organized performances by shady activists like the ones on the video above, just on a larger scale. It worked fine, with journos being able to get a headline of glorious victory of activists or whatever, but this year they've been relegated to just part of the background.
Since as it seems virtually nobody cares for both Russians' privatized victory day and their shenanigans on that day - at least the mentions of it in Western press seem to be rather scarce - then paying attention to whether or not they successfully performed those shenanigans would also be counter-productive. In this particular matter, ignoring them seems to be the best course of action. Of course, declaring the new large weapons shipment to Ukraine would be a better reaction, but that seems to be beyond hope now.
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