What Belarus Learned From the Rest of the World
Belarus has become unrecognizable in recent weeks. Hundreds of thousands of people have turned out to protest longtime President Alexander Lukashenko and his violent crackdown in the aftermath of this month’s disputed election. In cities across the former Soviet state, the official national flag has been replaced with Belarus’s historical white-and-red flag, which has come to represent the growing movement. Flowers and balloons are commonplace symbols of peaceful resistance.
In some ways, though, the scenes in Belarus are all too familiar. The spontaneous, decentralized rallies across the country and the widespread adoption of social media by protesters resemble the prodemocracy movement in Hong Kong. The featuring thousands of Belarusians dressed in white are reminiscent of the human-chain demonstrations made popular by the Soviet-era independence movement . Even the protests’ mirrors that of other protests as far afield as Catalonia, Chile, France, India,
