Germany, Finland, Netherlands for sure. Also Denmark, Sweden, Norway. Not to mention the Butthurt Belt states: Poland and the three Baltic villages. Romania too.
It's better to ask who in Europe is not fascist. The number of European countries that are not yet already there or well on their way can be counted on one hand.
this is true that the offramp was always going to be Russia keeping Crimea and the Donbas, and Ukraine getting some kind of security guarantees that fall short of NATO membership
That was the offramp back in 2022. It's not anymore. Ukraine and its Western handlers rejected that deal when they walked out of the Istanbul negotiations, reneging on a deal which the Ukrainians themselves had proposed which would have gotten them everything back except Crimea and the Donbass. Now the reality on the ground has changed significantly and that deal is not being offered anymore by Russia. The new terms are significantly less generous:
Russia will be keeping Crimea, Donbass and the other two new regions in their entirety. Either Ukraine surrenders the rest of these regions in a deal or Russia keeps going until they have them. And if this conflict goes on for another year or so even more regions may end up being lost. The longer this goes on the worse the peace terms will be for Ukraine.
As for "security guarantees" the only country that can give that is Russia. The US will never give Ukraine any security guarantees that would risk drawing the US into a direct war with Russia, whereas the Europeans are completely impotent and their "guarantees" meaningless. There will be no Ukraine in NATO or NATO in Ukraine.
And a regime change is coming as well. Zelensky is a dead man walking, whether the US forces him to hold elections which he will inevitably lose, after which he will be of no further use and an inconvenient loose end who knows too much, or whether his own Nazi buddies turn on him and take him out if it looks like he's trying to make a deal.
The terms didn't need to be this harsh, nor did this awful conflict need to drag on this long, or even begin at all. Ukraine could simply have abided by the Minsk agreements and it could have kept the entire Donbass and everything else it wanted short of Crimea itself and NATO membership. It could have not walked out of the Istanbul negotiations. It could have continued to negotiate with the Russians instead of passing a law literally making negotiations with Russia illegal.
Every time they chose violence instead of peace they just made things worse and worse for themselves.
They are usually a niche demographic, but present in any country.
The difference is that in the Baltics and Ukraine this is not a niche demographic anymore. Pro-Nazi views are either the norm or they appear to be because the state has been legitimizing and endorsing pro-Nazi views while suppressing the opposite viewpoint.
You see, most other countries do not officially celebrate SS regiments with parades, they don't name their streets after or erect monuments to Nazi collaborators who participated in the Holocaust and brutally butchered hundreds of thousands of people, and they don't teach children in schools to hate people of a certain ethnicity while teaching that Nazi collaborators were actually national heroes and freedom fighters, all while monuments and graves of the real liberators and anti-fascist fighters are destroyed.
If you feel nazis are your main baddie, it might be better to understand what makes them tick.
Are you implying that Nazis are not "baddies"?
What makes Nazis tick is hate and sadism. There is nothing deeper to understand there. And as long as that hate continues to be taught and endorsed by a country's institutions, from the state to the educational system to media and NGOs, as is happening in Ukraine and the Baltics, the problem will only get worse.
Sounds great until you remember that the current governments of Romania, Germany, France, Britain, etc. are all arming and funding Nazis in Ukraine and enabling ethnic cleansing by a genocidal apartheid occupation regime in Palestine.
it can not be allowed for groups that espouse extreme ideologies to even gather the smallest of support
but it can be allowed to give billions of Euros and tons upon tons of weaponry to swastika-tatooed Hitler worshippers bent on ethnic cleansing. It can be allowed to prop up a corrupt, kleptocratic, dictatorial regime that has cancelled elections, placed all media under state control, declared WW2 Nazi collaborators to be their national heroes, imprisons, tortures and brutally murders journalists, political opposition, people who make online posts against the government or the war, and people who just don't want themselves or their relatives be forcibly drafted into a war against their own brothers. That can be allowed, right?
Personally i just find it extremely hypocritical to constantly talk about how much Europe loves democracy and at the same time steal an election from the candidate who was about to win it and then go on to ban that candidate, who is clearly polling far ahead of all others, from standing in the repeat elections.
The reality is that these right wingers are not being banned from elections for their extremist views (which they undoubtedly hold, i'm not saying they don't), they are banned because they are anti-EU and want peace with Russia instead of war. That is the "extremism" that is intolerable to the Brussels bureaucrats and their comprador lackeys in the Romanian state. A leftist candidate with the same popularity and the same views toward the tyrannical EU and the self-destructive European drive to war against Russia would be treated exactly the same, if not worse.
Democracy as been shown, countless times, it is a very fragile system, vulnerable to players willing to manipulate and distort it in order to achieve personal gains, at the detriment of a large majority.
This has always been happening for as long as "liberal democracy" has existed. The worst offenders of manipulation and distortion of democracy are the mainstream media, who constantly manipulate public opinion in favor of the so-called "moderate" and "centrist" parties that have been getting elected for decades in Europe. This is also to the detriment of a large majority.
Or do you seriously believe that the policies of either the Tories or the Labor party in the UK have benefited the large majority in Britain? How about Macron in France, has he not been a detriment to the large majority of his citizens? So much so that the French voters overwhelmingly rejected his party (yet he somehow is still in charge...)? How about the SPD, CDU and Greens in Germany? How is it not to my detriment as a German citizen for them to cut social spending in favor of massive rearmament? How is it not a detriment to the large majority of Europeans for these parties to push us into a war with Russia? Why is that still allowed?
Why is it that it is not allowed to democratically vote for candidates who oppose the EU (which is a fundamentally neoliberal and highly undemocratic institution that makes it impossible for countries to have left wing economic policies and is now led by unhinged warmongering lunatics who want to pump hundreds of billons of Euros to their friends in the arms industry) and who want peace instead of war?
Giorgia Meloni in Italy is just as much a fascist sympathizer as these right wingers in Romania, but the reason why she was not treated this way is because she was willing to bend the knee to Brussels.
The lab was in China but it the experiments were run by the US. The NIH admitted they funded illegal gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Have you considered that this was perhaps a US bioweapon "accidentally" deployed against China? The US has a history of this: it used biological weapons in Korea in the 50s and lied about it for decades.
And if that is the case (not saying it is; i'm still not 100% convinced of the lab leak theory) then it backfired spectacularly as China took the most serious measures of any country on earth to keep its people safe. No other country managed to maintain Zero Covid for as long as China did.
Over 1.2 million people died in the US. One third of their entire population was infected, potentially suffering long term health damage. In China it was just over 5,200 deaths, not even one hundredth of the US numbers with a population more than four times that of the US.
Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
If that to you says "lax safety precautions" then we are not speaking the same language.
The fact that you ridicule the lack of evidence and imply that this indicates China is covering something up is telling. If there was evidence you would say they are guilty. If there is no evidence then they are also guilty. That is called an unfalsifiable orthodoxy. There is nothing that can convince you otherwise because you have already decided what you want to believe and you don't care what the evidence or lack thereof indicates.
By that same logic i could claim that the lack of evidence just "proves" that the US are very good at covering their tracks and erasing evidence of a bioweapon attack. Do you see how that logic is bad because it can be used to justify virtually any conclusion?
Why is it always the Chinese government that supposedly hides things? How about it's actually the US government that has been hiding the truth all along?
Be that as it may let's put the speculation aside and stick to the facts:
The fact is that China responded to the best of their abilities to a novel and highly contagious disease, which may or may not have been released from a US funded lab. It is objectively demonstrable (the stats prove it) that China had the world's most successful Covid response. It is not China's fault that the rest of the world is so incompetent or indifferent to the wellbeing of their citizens.
Were a few mistakes made in the initial confusion when nobody yet knew exactly what they were dealing with? Probably. It's almost unavoidable to make mistakes when first encountering a situation you have never faced before. That doesn't imply any kind of deliberate conspiracy. The real test is how did each country deal with it once it was understood how serious the situation was.
So you prefer a more centralised state that is still beholden to the will of the populace.
China is actually a very decentralized model. Local government is very big in China and plays a huge role in social and economic development, as well as in how things are run on a day to day basis. In a sense it is not all that different to how the US federally delegates power to state and local governments, but i'd say China goes even further.
Local governments frequently compete with one another to outdo each other in development and cultural projects. This is a country of nearly one and a half billion people, with over fifty different minority ethnic groups, languages and cultures. The entire country being centrally run out of Beijing would be simply impossible.
I know it can be difficult to find good in-depth English language information on this subject, and doing this sort of research can be dry and boring at times, but if you really want to understand China i advise you to look into non-Western sources about how China actually works.
It is a very complex society, not perfect by any means, but one that cannot be reduced to the simplistic caricature that is painted of it in Western media.
from what I've seen it's not a state known for complete freedom of speech
Neither is any western "liberal democracy". The last year has shown us this very clearly with how the pro-Palestinian movement has been treated and how aggressively pro-Palestinian speech has been suppressed.
Speech is tolerated only so long as it does not pose a threat to the status quo. You are free to have any opinion you want so long as you don't act on it in a way that threatens the interests of the ruling class.
This is the same in every country, China included. The difference is that in the West the ruling class are the capitalists and imperialists. In a socialist society the ruling class is the working class and it is their interests that the state protects first and foremost.
when you said "liberal democracy" I took it as a democracy where personal freedoms (speech, privacy etc) are respected
I have already addressed the issue of speech. As for privacy, that concept has become a joke in the US with how ubiquitous surveillance is. Corporations and the government work hand in hand to constantly surveil you.
Have we learned nothing from Edward Snowden's leaks about the NSA? They have backdoors in nearly all the tech you use and corporations regularly steal your private data. Most of the time they do it for commercial purposes...until the state decides that you pose a threat, and then all that data is used against you.
And Europe isn't far behind. Your privacy has long since been eroded under the pretext of fighting crime and "terrorism". People point out the presence of cameras in China, but do you know for instance that the UK has way more CCTV cameras per person than China does?
But at a more concrete, material level, what "personal freedoms" exactly are the Chinese people lacking? What is it that you think they should be able to do but aren't? I mean:
They can open a small business if they please.
They can go on holiday and travel, both inside and outside China.
They can go out to clubs and restaurants, see a movie, go to a concert... they can do pretty much every recreational activity you can think of.
They can buy almost any product known to man, because China produces essentially everything.
They can own their own house (and most of them do, unlike the country where i live) and even a plot of land if they live in a rural area.
They can form/join social clubs for virtually any interest they have, such as music, sports, dance, etc.
They can practice their cultural and religious traditions.
They can express their opinion about how the government is run, and they can even participate in it at various levels if they wish. Anyone can become a party member if they study and pass the tests.
The list goes on. But perhaps even more important than the things they are free to do is what they are free from:
They have peace and safety. They are free from fearing to walk the streets at night.
Food is affordable. Housing is affordable. Healthcare is affordable. Higher education is competitive but also quite affordable. These are also forms of freedom: freedom from the kind of crushing economic pressures that so many people in the US and other Western countries now feel.
Public transportation is modern, extensive and generally affordable, which gives them freedom of mobility without having to own a car to get around. It also increases their economic freedom as greater mobility means more options for work.
They have a very low crime rate, so they are largely free from gang violence and drug addiction.
They have a very low, almost non-existent rate of homelessness, thanks to a combination of various policies such as poverty alleviation, government housing initiatives, and the absence of perpetual property taxes.
There is very little police violence and a high level of trust in society, so they are free from many of the fears that people in other countries constantly live with.
And they are generally free from the crippling levels of debt that people in the US have. In fact one of the things that western liberal economists regularly complain about is that Chinese people tend to have "too much" savings.
So then what real, material freedoms are they lacking in your opinion?
at least to the point no one really complains about it
People do complain about it. A lot. They are simply ignored because they have no power. University studies have shown that in the US the majority public opinion on a given policy has essentially no bearing on whether or not it is implemented. Instead the adopted policies reflect almost exclusively the will and interests of the donor class, of corporate and financial power.
As a result virtually all western governments have extremely low approval ratings. The US is actually one of the ones with relatively more approval (still very far from a majority) due to the high degree of political polarization of its society. European governments are even less popular. They regularly stay in power for years and years with at best 20-30% approval ratings, or worse.
Not the case in China. In China the government regularly conducts polls and studies to figure out what the population actually wants. And most of the time they listen to them and do their best to implement it. As a result, the central government of China has an incredibly high approval rating, easily over 90%, the highest in the world even according to Western studies.
There is much that can still be improved, and the Chinese people are very vocal and critical when they see problems. It would be very naive to think it is some kind of utopia, but one thing that the majority of Chinese people agree on is that they are on a very positive trajectory. They have hope for a bright future. Can we in the West say the same?
"We're coming home!" Crimea celebrates after 97% vote for joining Russia
"We came back home to Mother Russia. We came back home, Russia is our home"
"We are Russia, we have always been Russian people in our souls here in Crimea" "We have been waiting for this day for 23 years"
96.77% of Crimeans vote to re-unite with Russia
"We are going home, Crimea is going to Russia", said the republic’s prime minister
Majority of Crimea citizens one year after referendum do not regret joining Russia
Crimea celebrates 2 years since historic referendum to rejoin Russia
Return to Russia: Crimeans Tell the Real Story of the 2014 Referendum and Their Lives Since
The Majority of Crimeans Are Still Glad for Their Annexation:
"it is incontrovertible that most [...] Crimean residents welcomed joining Russia. Numerous polls at the time of the annexation and in its immediate aftermath revealed broad support for joining Russia"
"Crimea’s annexation in 2014 gave residents grounds for optimism, with a majority of Crimeans hopeful that their lives would change for the better."
"The majority of Crimeans do not experience Russian rule as oppressive, alien, or unwelcome. Instead, based on the evidence of our surveys, they are reasonably happy to be living in Putin’s Russia."
—Foreign Affairs Magazine, official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, arch-imperialist US neocon think tank