Partisan tactics once used to fight the Nazis have been turned against Alexander Lukashenko’s brutally repressive regime. In Minsk, what people here call the Great Patriotic War is never far away. Monuments, street names and museums venerate the memory of the awful years from 1941 to 1945, when the Soviet Union was at war with Nazi Germany. Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since 1994, has used the years of partisan resistance against the Nazi occupation of the country, and the eventual victory by the Red Army, as the basis for a neo-Soviet, Belarusian identity. But in recent months, something strange has happened, as Lukashenko faces angry and sustained protests to his continued rule and has launched a vicious crackdown. The war narrative that his regime has done so much to promote still resonates among the population, but with a twist: now, his authorities have become the Nazis. It has become normal for people to speak about the authorities as “fascists” and “occupiers” who remain in power only due to their military and police might. Given some of the images that came from the crackdown in August, it is not hard to see why: thousands of Belarusians were subjected to ritual beatings and abuse from security officers dressed in black and wearing balaclavas; military vehicles patrol the streets; and anyone supporting the opposition movement can be snatched for interrogation at any moment. “We were brought up on endless films and books about fighting the fascists, and then, when you look at the uniforms, the style, the methods used by the authorities, it’s not hard to see why these memories resonated,” said Yulia Chernyavskaya, a Belarusian cultural anthropologist. (…) It is true that almost overnight, tens of thousands of Belarusians acquired their own white-red-white flag, which had been effectively banned for the past two decades. Groups on the app Telegram have sprung up to organise the protest in individual towns, streets or apartment blocks, with the participants often using conspiratorial methods to shield their identities from each other, so that if one gets caught by authorities, they will not be able to give the others away. In short: a modern partisan movement sprang up in a matter of weeks.
via guardian: ‘Crush the fascist vermin’: Belarus opposition summons wartime spirit