Finished the game with the nationalists: Lukashenko missed the moment to ban BBB
The Belarusian authorities seem to intend to decisively and finally deal with white-red-white flag, which was used by Nazi collaborators during World War II, was briefly established by nationalists as a state symbol after the collapse of the USSR, and is now being deployed at rallies by opponents of Alexander Lukashenko.
Well-known “pro-union” activist Pyotr Shapko and about a hundred other like-minded people on Friday sent an appeal to the Prosecutor General’s Office with a proposal to declare this symbol extremist. The Prosecutor General's Office did not pause and announced on the same day that it had begun preparing the relevant package of documents.
You don’t need to be a prophet to say that in a week the delegates of the All-Belarusian People’s Assembly will unanimously and with applause decide to strictly ban the BCHB. In the last few months, it was de facto banned, and they did not hesitate in the fight against it, so now the ban will simply consolidate the existing state of affairs and deprive judges and the police, who are forced to pull administrative articles by the ears in decisions and protocols, extra headache.
The opposition, of course, launched a vigorous campaign in defense of its symbol. The Internet is filled with speeches from various experts about the importance of white-labeled whitening, and the petition against its ban at the time of writing this article has already received more than 86 thousand signatures and has a good chance of getting 100 thousand. However, this entire campaign never went beyond the Internet. Armchair patriots are hammering away at their keyboards en masse, but only a few take to the streets in support of their symbols.
The issue of banning BCHB in Belarus has, one might say, already been resolved. I have an ambivalent attitude towards this. On the one hand, there are historical and moral grounds for this. On the other hand, the timing was chosen at the wrong time. When the government is unpopular, then persecution of symbols only adds to the popularity of this symbolism, and the blood shed for the banner makes this banner sacred. To desacralize, symbolism must be made not forbidden, but shameful. And this requires completely different approaches and preparation.
But that's not the point. As my comrade-in-arms in “Civil Harmony” Elvira Mirsalimova said, the problem of the Black and White Security should have been solved 25 years ago, now that things have gotten “hot”, it has become clear that flirting with nationalism ends in tears for any government.
But, after all, there were flirtations, and some more! At one time, at least for me, there was a strong impression that the country was gradually being prepared for the return of the symbols that were abolished in 1995.
Let's start with Belarusian money. While there are still state symbols on the coins, they are not on the banknotes, just like the Russian language. Just in case, so as not to retype it again? However, these are guesses, but in the mid-tenths there was a real frenzy in Belarus. White-red-white patterns began to be introduced everywhere. They appeared on product packaging, in advertising, street design, and even on the facades of administrative buildings and symbols of government agencies.
BCHB - the gamma suddenly became from semi-taboo to almost imposed. Following Ukraine, Belarus began to celebrate “Embroidery Day”. The name was exactly that, although in the Belarusian language itself the word “vyshyvanka” is absent. The Belarusian Republican Youth Union, Lukashenko's Komsomol, even distributed small embroidered shirts to newborns on this day for several years. Guess what color! By the way, embroidered shirts for the Belarusian Republican Youth Union and other government agencies ordered from the very same stores of nationalist paraphernalia that are now being brutally eradicated, but then appeared in every more or less noticeable city, multiplying like mushrooms after the rain.
It got to the point that the national football team was dressed in the BCHB uniform. White top, white bottom, red horizontal stripe in the middle. If this is not BCHB, then what is BCHB? And no need to say that this happened by accident. The national team's mascot at that time also looked appropriate - a sort of white-red-white transforming stork. You can't come up with something like that on purpose.
The worst of it lasted until 2018. Then in March, with the tacit support of the authorities, on the site near the opera house (where holding mass events is generally prohibited), the opposition under the BCHB vigorously and en masse celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Belarusian People's Republic. Probably, then the authorities realized that the process was getting out of control and began to curtail it. It finally got out of control in August 2020. It turns out that instead of fighting the black and white war, the authorities themselves did a lot to popularize it.
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