Unless you live in Russia, it’s basically impossible for someone’s views to be determined just by Russian propaganda. We are submerged in Western liberal hegemony. Any kind of worldview we develop is going to be related to that liberal hegemony and the narratives it presents. At worst, we might overreact to the propaganda by deliberately swallowing the Russian narrative, but I think that it’s also not true that we are uncritically following the Russian narrative (even when it’s a lot closer to the reality I’ve surmised than the Western liberal narrative) where Russia is the beacon of traditional Western value against the woke, perverted West. That’s also trash. We prefer to stick to analyzing material reality and the facts on the ground, not vibes.

Also, in my own comments I think I’ve done a good job of showing that there has been, indeed, a fascist coup of Ukraine in 2014, that was ethnically cleansing Russian speaking minorities and threatens all the same minorities that nazis always threaten. I showed you that while primarily citing liberal Western media like CNN, NBC, and the BBC. If those sources are too pro-Russian, then what sources can we use to get a level-headed assessment of the situation?

One solution that’s been commonly used is democracy.

The problem with Hong Kong voting on it is the same as when Crimeans voted on secession. There’s obvious external pressures at play. Hell, there’s even internal pressures in all elections that will show that there is no such thing as an ideal democratic process, only real democratic processes that are influenced by internal and external contradictions. I’m not familiar enough with the history of the Hong Kong integration to tell you exactly what the calculus the politicians of China and local rulers made, but it is at least fairly clear from a basic understanding of how the world works that holding a poll in Hong Kong asking them how they feel about independence is like asking a bank teller who’s currently being assaulted by 3 separate robbers how they feel about the concept of finance. The forces at play, between the legacy of British imperialism, currently existing American imperialism, and the Chinese threat to the existing mode of social organization in the island, means that (as with all things) a vote would only be a show of class power.