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Breaking down large communities of Lukashenko loyalists into smaller, more soluble groupings that can be digested and re-absorbed into Belarusian civil society will take time and lots of patience. You can’t get rid of all the passionate sadistic hatred all at once.
It’s easy to be anti-realist against Belarus, because enemies of democracy are scheming against changes and rationalizing the dictatorship, if only to justify their own servility for a quarter of a century. They will claim human rights are a conspiracy and that the Internet really is just a tool to foist the correspondence theory of truth on everyone.
That’s where deflationism comes in: downplay everything and enjoy pretty sunsets.
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