Putin’s political opponents frequently fall out of windows or catch some polonium poisoning.

Hmm… I wonder what happened to the original leadership of BLM? And hey, what are Fred Hampton and Mark Clark up to these days? Has Gary Webb published any articles recently?

These things are not the same, and pretending they are, makes you blind to how much worse they can still get. Russia is absolutely more of a brutal dictatorship than even the US, but especially than most European countries.

Oh believe me, I am well aware how bad they can get, you’re just completely unaware of how bad they’ve already been. You believe all these lies about how terrible Russia is, looking at it only through the lens that western propagandists have carefully cultivated for you without realizing that every accusation they’ve levied on their enemies is a confession about what they themselves have been doing all along. You’re as intellectually domesticated by US imperialist interests as any diehard Kremlin-supporting Russian citizen, only you have the benefit of being on the side that enjoys global hegemony without even understanding what that word means. You’re all up in arms about the lies of the media of an enemy state without having even an ounce of self awareness about the lies of the media you’re consuming, the very same media from which you think you’ve learned how uniquely bad the enemy’s media is.

SocDem is not right-wing by even the farthest stretch of the imagination

“Social Democracy objectively represents the moderate wing of Fascism.” - J. V. Stalin

https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/bourgeois-democracy-and-fascism/

Even after the victory of fascism, the influence, ideology and traditions of Social Democracy continue their baleful and disorganising role, preventing the emergence of a united working class front to confront and defeat fascism. Further, if fascist dictatorship’s grip on power weakens, then Social Democracy stands in wait to come to the rescue of capitalism.

What is beyond doubt is that both Social Democracy and fascism are agents of monopoly capitalism; both fight tooth and nail against the struggle of the working class for its social emancipation. With this as their aim, both disrupt and weaken working-class organisations.

Their methods are, however, different. While fascism smashes the class organisations of the working class from without and opposes their whole basis and counters them with an alternative ‘national’ ideology, Social Democracy undermines them from within by diverting them along reformist bourgeois channels. Whereas fascism relies mainly on coercion, along with deception, Social Democracy relies mainly on deception, along with coercion. Their aims are identical; only their methods differ. In view of the identity of their aims and differing methods, one cannot but agree with Stalin’s observation, made as early as 1924, that “Social Democracy objectively represents the moderate wing of Fascism.” (Concerning the International Situation, Collected Works, vol 6, p.294)

Russia is no more a “brutal dictatorship” than the US is, or the UK, or any number of other capitalist shithole countries that call themselves “democracies.” Russian state media is no worse than, for example, the BBC or CNN. But more importantly, it does not have the global reach that the BBC and CNN have. The key thing that you’re utterly failing to understand here is that Russia does not have the global hegemony that the US has (and NATO in general, though NATO is just a collection of vassal states subservient to US capital). Russian state media cannot begin to compete on the global stage with the overwhelming stranglehold that western media has over not only their own domestic populations but the rest of the world. We here in the west are not saturated day in and day out by Russian propaganda, but we absolutely are by western capital (which is synonymous with US state) propaganda. Pretending like this is an even playing field is absurd and it’s why no one here is taking your whining about eBiL RuZzIaN media seriously. It’s not about “defending” Russian media, it’s about recognizing geopolitical reality.