Catalonia's Failed Independence Drive, What Do the Chinese Think?, Northern Ireland and the Politics of Demography, Censored Leftist Media, The Cashless Society
One cannot help but notice all the flags of Catalonia hanging from the endless balconies that populate much of Barcelona. They are an inevitable visual presence, seen in some neighbourhoods more than others, numerically dominating the physical presence of Spanish flags. It may be an easy way to gauge local opinion on the status of Catalonia within Spain, but it’s a valid one that works. Pride in Catalonia as a separate place outside of the rest of Spain cannot be denied, but the question remains as to how committed to it are the Catalonians themselves.
Catalonia has the reputation of being a liberal, tolerant, progressive, and cosmopolitan corner of Spain, one that is incredibly popular with tourists, and one that seeks to distance itself as far away from Madrid as possible. For some, this means that Catalonian autonomy within the Spanish state framework is enough. For many others, separatism towards the foundation of an independent state is the ultimate goal, and this goal is rather popular, at least in Barcelona from my own personal experience.
The desire to maximize one’s own autonomy and sovereignty is a universal one: no one except the masochist or the incompetent seeks to be dominated by others. In a perfect world we’d all be sovereign individuals who voluntarily enter into associations to create groups for self-defence to protect our own interests, with the ability to detach ourselves if need be and not being punished for doing so. The problem is that we live on Planet Earth, an imperfect place with imperfect people.
One need only look at stateless peoples like the Kurds, the Scots, or the Quebecois. The latter two have managed to gain quite a bit of autonomy within the constitutional framework in which they exist. The Kurds are victims of geographical, historical, and geopolitical forces completely out of their control. Location matters, and it doesn’t care about your feelings, to paraphrase that shithead Ben Shapiro.
The Catalans belong to that first group alongside the Scots and the Quebecois; they have gained maximal autonomy within existing state structures, and have held independence referendums, but without achieving that desired goal of actual independence. Why? In my opinion, it boils down to the fact that they simply aren’t willing to shed blood for it, instead solely relying on principle. You need both to succeed, which is a big reason why my country managed to become independent.
On October 10th, 2017, hundreds of people gathered outside the parliament of Catalonia in Barcelona. With bated breath, they watched a large TV live-streaming Catalan President Carles Puigdemont as he approached the speaker’s podium inside. The region had just completed a historic referendum to decide its independence from Spain. After a brief speech, he made the declaration that Catalan nationalists had been dreaming about for generations: “I assume the mandate of the people for Catalonia to become an independent state in the shape of a republic.”
The crowd erupted into celebration—the dawn of Catalan independence was here. I was there in the crowd that night, singing songs of freedom with strangers who had become my comrades. It didn’t feel like the end of a referendum, but a national beginning after which there was no turning back.
Then, exactly eight seconds later, it was over. It wasn’t because the Spanish police had stormed the Catalan Parliament, as they had with the voting stations. Nor did the army suddenly appear on the streets of Barcelona. Instead, Puigdemont himself announced to the cheering crowd that his government was “[asking] Parliament to suspend the effects of the declaration of independence so that in the coming weeks we can undertake dialogue” with Spain. He also pledged to search for international mediation.
Instantly, disbelief and utter confusion engulfed the crowd. The moment’s frustration was immortalized in a popular meme. Puigdemont’s time as a Catalan national hero had lasted only moments. Now, the cheers were replaced by boos, jeers, and curses.
Two weeks later, the Catalan parliament declared independence again. But by then, it had no meaning. The declaration wasn’t recognized by any sovereign state, including Spain. But in the streets and cafes of Barcelona as well as on Twitter, people directed their ire toward the very first political authority to not recognize the Catalan Republic: the pro-independence government itself. Catalonia’s dream to become a sovereign country in 2017 was over.
Dream vs. Reality, and how the more serious side will always win out:
What they didn’t foresee was the outcome, or the extent to which Spain was willing to go to prevent it. Catalan elites, unaccustomed to the affairs of statehood, approached secession like an administrative measure or a policy decision—like business as usual. But Spanish elites, knowing what it takes to rule a state, took a much more serious approach to the matter. They were willing to suspend political and legal norms to stop Catalonia’s independence and prevent the breakup of Spain. In the face of the Spanish response, the Catalan government fell apart at the very moment when they seemed victorious.
Incorrect assumptions:
The Catalan leadership crafted its strategy around the belief that in a liberal democratic regime, the democratic will of the citizens is the deciding factor in any political dispute, and that other dimensions of power are secondary. Catalonia’s leadership believed that if they could electorally show that a significant bulk of the Catalan population wanted independence from Spain, that would be enough to surpass any Spanish opposition. That would give Catalan authorities bargaining power vis-à-vis Madrid and perhaps even force the external diplomatic intervention of the “international community.”
The Catalan government, as well as the broader independence movement, attributed inherent power to the performative action of casting a ballot. The vote in the referendum was seen as the culminating point of the struggle, not its beginning. Catalan leaders invoked the precedents of the self-determination referendums of Quebec in 1995 and Scotland in 2014—neither of which ended in secession. The government itself seemed to view the foundation of a new Catalan state as a mere administrative question, not a moment of sovereign exception against the Spanish state. Nonetheless, even before October 1st, it was clear that Catalan independence wouldn’t be a costless transition.
Centralist reaction:
In Madrid, a different worldview prevailed. The prime minister of Spain, Mariano Rajoy, with the cooperation of all the major Spanish political parties, opted to put Catalonia under a non-declared state of exception during the autumn of 2017. Police raided newspapers, post offices, and the Catalan ministerial headquarters. Websites linked to the referendum were censored.
Authorities in Madrid knew full well that its fellow members in both the EU and NATO would fully take their side as none of these states wanted to open the Pandora’s Box of separatism within their own countries, in which an independent Catalan state would serve as a precedent. Catalan authorities made the mistaken assumption that by doing everything according to the rules of liberal democracy would reward them with a state of their own. Principle ran face first into the wall of reality.
Not serious:
Puigdemont did not want to get caught in this trap by his coalition partners and reiterated Catalonia’s declaration of independence on October 27th. But he gave no directions for how to proceed and didn’t ask for any civil disobedience or street action.
Madrid, on the other hand, certainly was:
In the immediate aftermath, Spain took direct control of Catalonia’s government. There were no calls to resist from the Catalan authorities. Some pro-independence officials lost their jobs, but many high-ranking figures of the previous pro-independence government kept their positions and actively collaborated with Madrid. Pere Aragonès, a pro-independence politician who is now the president of Catalonia, spent this period as its vice-president and Minister of Economy and Finance.
More on the failure to grasp real, hard power and the over-reliance on principle and liberal democratic proceduralism:
They had no backup, having not bothered to cultivate more independent sources of power outside the regional institutions. While Catalonia has its own police force, most of its members are pro-Spanish. Its major companies rely on Spain for the international ties they benefit from. The judiciary, likewise, remained intertwined with the Spanish legal system and had no particular loyalty towards the independence cause. Catalan elites had simply never foreseen a scenario in which the loyalty of the security forces, corporate sector, and state administration could be crucial for achieving their goals.
Instead, both the government and the independence movement viewed these hard dimensions of power as obsolete. Ideologically, the Catalan leadership was informed by European civic liberalism as a strategy for creating a state, not just governing one. They could not fathom the use of force on a large scale against a political movement that portrayed itself as peaceful and democratic. Even if Spain took extra-legal measures, they believed that the international community would step up for them because Catalan independence was a democratic cause. After all, a democratic state member of the European Union would need to restrain itself to remain in good standing.
In the end, their naive idealism ran up against political reality when even EU institutions supported Spain’s actions to preserve its territorial integrity. With real state interests on the line, only local activists and Catalan politicians carefully insulated from sovereign politics believed in liberal democracy as a practical path to challenging Spanish sovereignty.
All disputed separatist movements are revolutionary in spirit, and all revolutions require both the defection of some elites and the willingness to shed blood in order to achieve independence. The failure of Catalonia’s independence drive shows us that while the Catalans appealed to principle, they forgot the role of power.
Those of you who have been reading me for some time know that I have been asking the most important question for a few years now: Will the USA focus on Russia or China, or will they engage in hubris and try to take on both? The answer is now obvious: both.
This is an incredibly frightening prospect as the stakes cannot be higher. The world’s most powerful state is moving towards conflict with numbers 2 and 3. Russians are well aware that they have been in the USA’s crosshairs for some time now and have reacted accordingly, one of these reactions being the invasion of Ukraine. But what about the Chinese? What do they think?
The irony is that the Chinese owe their current global standing to the deal that was struck between Beijing and Washington DC when Nixon went to China a half century ago to split it from the USSR by way of opening the door for US industry to offshore to East Asia. Current Chinese prosperity is indebted to the Americans thanks to this.
The strategic thinking went that increasing personal wealth in China would create a middle class and a wealthy class that would challenge the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly on power, eventually liberalizing the regime and allowing for multiparty democracy, thus granting the USA the ability to play favourites and to play off one party against another. This line of thinking has been proven wrong and the CCP maintains a tight grip on power.
Unlike Russia, China is an economic “death embrace” with the USA. The two countries’ economies are so tightly connected to one another that one cannot survive without the other. This makes the idea of a Chinese-American showdown counterintuitive, but nevertheless here we are. Obama’s regime was the first to push the idea of a “Pivot to Asia”, in which the USA would lessen its focus on the Middle East and work towards preventing an increasingly assertive China from threatening its regional hegemony. Obama’s pivot did not take place due to the Syrian Civil War dragging on. Trump began the pivot, but the USA’s hyper-focus on internal affairs prevented that pivot from taking root. The Biden regime is now effecting this move.
What do the Chinese think about all of this? David Hutt takes a look at popular opinion in China and informs us that the Chinese are very well aware that they are in the sights of US foreign policy planners.
Russia has overtaken Pakistan as the Chinese favourite:
A new survey of over 3,000 mainland Chinese respondents shows that public perceptions of Russia have improved over the past three years, with Russia now being the country the Chinese public now favors the most, closely followed by Pakistan.
The survey, which was conducted by the Central European Institute of Asian Studies think tank in March after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and released on May 12, suggests the Chinese public largely supports Moscow’s aggression, while public views about the US have significantly worsened in recent years, according to the survey’s organizers.
Of the 25 countries that Chinese respondents were asked about, Russia was the most positively and the US most negatively perceived. Almost 80% had positive feelings about Russia, whereas less than a third had a similar disposition towards the US. Four-fifths reported that their views of Russia had improved over the last three years.
The Chinese realize that they must stick by Russia or that they will hang alone:
Of the Chinese who said their opinions of Russia had improved, it was because they trusted Russia’s leadership. Common responses were “trust Putin,” “Putin has guts,” “strong leadership.” Many Chinese also said they felt there was “brotherly love” between Russia and China, and believed that an “enemy of an enemy is our friend.”
The negatives:
India was the second-most negatively viewed country of the 25 surveyed, followed by Japan. Of Southeast Asian countries, 48% had negative opinions of Vietnam, and more than two-fifths had negative perceptions of Indonesia and the Philippines.
Self-explanatory, to be honest.
On how to approach foreign affairs:
When asked to what extent China should adopt either tough or friendly policies, almost 60% said a tough policy with regards to the US. More than 20% said “very tough.” The vast majority of respondents said “protection of China’s sovereignty and security” should be Beijing’s number one foreign policy priority.
American soft power still resonates though:
On the one hand, such negative opinions of the US don’t spill over into all areas of life. A majority (53%) viewed America as culturally attractive, while only 26% disagreed.
“The tense diplomatic relations have not significantly damaged the Chinese public’s admiration for American culture, and a majority of Chinese still considered the US culturally attractive. We are not in a full-fledged Cold War yet,” Tao Wang, research associate at Manchester China Institute and co-author of the report, said in a statement.
The lazy line of thinking that has come out and will come out of the west is that the Chinese are victims of an authoritarian dictatorship and yearn for democracy. This might have fooled the western public even a decade and a half ago, but it simply isn’t a viable argument. The Chinese are rather content with their regime for the simple reason that it has been wildly successful in raising their living standards in such a short period of time. It is perfectly reasonable for them to be suspicious and antagonistic to those that threaten it.
“The Great Replacement” is once again in the news thanks to that mental case shithead in Buffalo who killed all those innocent people. Guilt by association is the easiest go-to form of attack, and one that will often work. That’s why it is employed so often by media and others. It’s unfair, but so is life.
That theory falls under demographic politics, and specifically how changing demographics affect actual politics and serve to change culture and society. This makes it valid for discussion whether you agree with it actually happening or not. It does not make you a bad person to be concerned about swift changes in the composition of the population around you and how it will affect you.
Demography as a tool of politics has worked repeatedly in the past. One need only look at the sky high birthrate of Kosovar Albanians during the Cold War vs. the plummeting Serbian one to see how the balance was tipped in the former’s favour in Kosovo. This resulted in independence for them. The Palestinians have cranked out babies as well to pressure the Israeli regime, which has its own baby making factories among the Haredim of the occupied West Bank.
A somewhat-accepted argument goes that Northern Ireland will be reunited with the rest of the island once Catholics become the majority there. This was considered inevitable when confessional identity was the prime driver of politics there. But what about now? Paul Morland argues that unification will not be won through the womb.
Baby Boom Politics:
When I was researching my first book, which was about demography and ethnic conflict, I met with a well-known Sinn Féin politician in his Stormont office. I wanted to understand whether the elevated Catholic birth rate in Northern Ireland during the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies — higher than among the Catholics of the South, despite the much easier availability of contraception — was a conscious effort on the part of the Nationalist minority to boost its numbers.
He told me how the Unionist authorities had tried to counter that higher birth rate by encouraging Catholic emigration through discriminatory housing and employment policies. Generally, those authorities were successful: Catholics disproportionately left Ulster and thus their share of the population held stable, with higher arrivals of babies being offset by higher departures of working-age people looking for opportunities on the British mainland and the US. But sometimes these policies backfired.
“One friend of ours went to the housing office to ask for a bigger house,” my Sinn Féin interlocutor remembered. “They said: ‘Come back when you have eight children.’ So he did.”
The traditional argument:
However the two sides have played their demographic hands in the numbers game, there is no doubt that they are closely watching the results. Catholics have been making headway; although their fertility rate is now not much higher than that of Protestants, the historic gap is still delivering them a growing share of the population. Sinn Féin certainly has high hopes that, in Gerry Adams’s words. “demographic dynamics… make Irish reunification a realistic objective within a reasonable time scale”. Earlier this year, one commentator suggested demography as the leading reason why Irish unity was “inevitable”. But Adams and the inevitabilists may turn out to be disappointed.
Shift:
The great Catholic advantage in fertility has decreased significantly. Recent censuses have shown a declining Catholic share of younger cohorts. And a great many Catholics who feel part of the Nationalist community and probably vote for Nationalist parties are quite content in the UK and — or at least until Brexit — would not have voted for unification in a border poll.
The erosion of the Old Binary:
There is evidence that the binary nature of Northern Irish society is breaking down. Despite the persistence of inner-city sectarian citadels, more people are ceasing to define themselves as members of one tribe or the other, either because they have lost the strong sense of identity with which they may have been brought up, or because they hail from outside the Province. All this plays to unionism with a small if not a large ‘U’, because few such people are eager for a change to the status quo. One prominent Unionist politician told me that he would love a few thousand Hong Kong Chinese to emigrate to Ulster for that very reason. Note how the rise of the Alliance party has meant that, at these elections, parties committed to Irish unity actually lost four seats.
The ultimate question:
There is no doubt that support for unity is much stronger among the young than the old. But just as with radical change in the socio-economic order, changes to the constitutional order are likely to get less appealing as people age, and the support of youth today does not necessarily translate into support for it among the middle-aged tomorrow. Scottish independence, like Brexit, may change the equation, but not necessarily decisively. More than twice as many Catholics as Protestants admit to having changed their minds on the issue of Irish unification.
Morland’s argument is that the Catholics of Northern Ireland will grow more conservative as they get older, and will not see a real need to unite with the rest of Ireland because their interests will be in preserving their own material conditions within the UK, which he believes will help them conserve it. Time will tell.
The bifurcation of the American public has led to echo chambers where one side is completely oblivious as to the fine details of what goes on with respect to the other side. This is only elevated as you get further from the centre towards the harder left and right, but then reverses itself the further you go to the extremes. Both sides see each other as victims of grand conspiracies, each with their own complexes, hierarchies, etc. I will not elaborate on this right now, but all of you know which way I lean anyway.
If you are a news junkie like all of us reading this are, it is rather important to familiarize yourself with the ideas and arguments of those opposed to (or really and really, really opposed to you) in order to understand the assumptions upon which they base their worldviews. It often serves to help tighten up your own arguments, and sometimes even works to change your mind on an issue or two (God forbid!).
The American right is being very honest when they scream that they are the victims of censorship in media, both mainstream and social. This is undeniable. However, there are many on the right who are completely oblivious to the censorship that affects certain parts of the US left, particularly those who fall well outside of the Democrat Plantation, and are critical of US Government, especially its foreign policy.
In the last week or so, the online payment platform PayPal without explanation suspended the accounts of a series of individual journalists and media outlets, including the well-known alt sites Consortium News and MintPress. Each received a variation of the following message:
Unlike many on the list, Consortium editor Joe Lauria succeeded in reaching a human being at the company in search of details about the frozen or “held” funds referenced in the note. The PayPal rep told him that if the company decided “there was a violation” after a half-year review period, then “it is possible” PayPal would keep the $9,348.14 remaining in Consortium’s account, as “damages.”
“A secretive process in which they could award themselves damages, not by a judge or a jury,” Lauria says. “Totally in secret.”
Robert Parry as a prime target:
Consortium, founded by the late investigative reporter Robert Parry, has been critical of NATO and the Pentagon and a consistent source of skeptical reporting about Russiagate, as well as one of just a few outlets to regularly cover the Julian Assange case with any sympathy for the accused. Ironically, one of the site’s primary themes involves exploring disinformation emanating from the intelligence community. The site has had content disrupted by platforms like Facebook before, but now its pockets are being picked in addition.
Justin Trudeau’s de-financialization of Trucker Protesters set an ugly precedent:
This episode ups the ante again on the content moderation movement, toward the world hinted at in the response to the Canadian trucker protests, where having the wrong opinions can result in your money being frozen or seized. Going after cash is a big jump from simply deleting speech, with a much bigger chilling effect. This is especially true in the alternative media world, where money has long been notoriously tight, and the loss of a few thousand dollars here or there can have a major effect on a site, podcast, or paper.
It’s going to get worse:
One is the ongoing possibility of government or law enforcement involvement in fact-checking decisions, as PayPal announced just last year it would be cooperating with authorities in a content moderation campaign. The other is that the thread connecting the recent affected accounts — which include the former RT contributor Caleb Maupin and the host of the Geopolitics and Empire podcast Hrvoje Morić, among others — is that they’re all generally antiwar voices, who’ve been critical either of NATO or of official messaging with regard to the Ukraine conflict.
MintPress as another target:
The experience of MintPress exemplifies the logistical Whac-a-Mole controversial publishers have to play now in order to survive as businesses. In addition to the PayPal ban — which hit MacLeod, Adley, and one other former Mint contributor, forcing the company to stop paying its writers via the platform — MintPress last month saw two of its fundraising campaigns on GoFundMe shut down. According to Adley, the outlet was able to receive about 90% of donations across a two-year campaign before they were abruptly cut off. At least GoFundMe didn’t try to keep “damages,” as several thousand dollars earmarked for MintPress were instead returned to donors.
Adley believes the chief crime of MintPress is that it exists as an alternative to monolithic messaging surrounding issues like Ukraine. Moreover, she believes it’s in trouble with PayPal not for being false, but precisely for printing true uncomfortable things, like MacLeod’s NATO-to-TikTok story, or Dan Cohen’s recent piece about the 150-odd Western public relations firms working with Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry. Several of these MintPress pieces about Ukraine have gone viral in recent weeks.
“We name the names, we break through the propaganda, we show the profiteers,” Adley says. “There’s so few of us left that do that, and I think that’s why we’ve become a target.”
Naturally, the ADL has involved itself in the censorship regime:
On July 26th of last year, PayPal announced a new partnership with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to “fight extremism and hate through the financial industry and across at-risk communities.” In describing the arrangement, PayPal talked about a third actor — the government:
PayPal and ADL have launched a research effort to address the urgent need to understand how extremist and hate movements throughout the U.S. are attempting to leverage financial platforms to fund criminal activity. The intelligence gathered through this research initiative will be shared broadly across the financial industry and with policymakers and law enforcement.
While companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter at least occasionally explain why prominent accounts have been suspended, neither PayPal nor the ADL will comment about how suspensions and confiscations of companies like MintPress and Consortium fit into their efforts to head off “criminal activity.” I reached out this week not just to the media relations offices of PayPal and the ADL, but to figures quoted in last year’s announcement, including ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt and PayPal Chief Risk officer Aaron Karczmer, getting no response anywhere.
Maybe it’s due to me getting older, but I like having the option of paying for things in cash. Cashless payments are incredibly convenient, and I do like them, but the feeling of having cash as an option gives me peace of mind. I have no doubt you readers feel the same way.
We were walking down Cannery Row, rechristened long ago for the John Steinbeck novel, when we came to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. There was a small debate about whether we would go; we decided we would, even if the price wasn’t right. I checked my smartphone and saw it would cost $49.99 per person to enter. Plenty high, sure, but this was California and I wasn’t terribly interested in budgeting anyway, not while enjoying this escape from the East Coast.
A sunny young man outside the aquarium greeted us. I asked where we could buy tickets. He told us we needed to get them online, ahead of time. It was simply not possible to buy them in-person. Such an option didn’t exist. It was easy, you see—all you had to do was purchase them on your smartphones and surely you had those and then the QR code could be scanned.
We shook our heads, thanked him, and walked away. We weren’t going to the aquarium. Something about having to do it this way killed the mood.
I know that feel, bro.
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The illusion that secession and sovereignty can be achieved at the ballot box is a very useful fiction from the point of view of the liberal democratic world order. It lulls secessionist movements into the trap of imagining that they can achieve their goals without developing the sources of hard and soft power upon which sovereignty ultimately rests. Leadership then invest their time in referenda, while the rank and file fail to develop the sort of belligerent fanaticism required to motivate a militant struggle. Central authorities then have plenty of options to prevent secession: rigging the referendum, as may have happened in Scotland; increasing the immigrant population, as was done in Quebec between the 70s FLQ crisis and the 1995 referendum; or if all else fails, naked force.
An overweening faith in liberal proceduralism is a more general handicap for dissident movements, too. It's easy to forget that the protections and rights nominally awarded by the liberal order will be happily suspended by that same order when directly challenged, that challenge being viewed as a state of exception. See e.g. the financial warfare waged against the trucker convoy or dissident media outlets.
Shedding blood for your political goals seems indeed to be the minimum required threshold, at least from my experience as a Romanian directly involved, as a child, in our bloody revolution that ended up with the army shooting and killing people that were chanting near me. Will never forget the horrors of that night, the blood, the torn limbs still inside a cheap rubber winter boot, the running away in terror with my mother while bullets flew by and people were crying in pain. Later, my mother would return to her hospital job to see the bodies in morgue, only to be taken away to be cremated by our secret police.
That was not the end of it, I lost 2 of my closest friends in the Yugo conflicts, both Serbs youths that crossed the Danube illegally with the gasoline traffickers to fight against "the Turks". As a Romanian, even then, I understood why they did it and why they thought their lives were worth it, even as it crushed their families completely. I understood the historical legacy that was transmitted onto us each generation, to defend Europe from invaders, to accept our role as border guards that are often sacrificed so the core can remain safe. A legacy that has been made into a mockery, of course, after so many died for it.
So yes, I think blood remains the price that is historically proven to maybe change important things.
The illusion that secession and sovereignty can be achieved at the ballot box is a very useful fiction from the point of view of the liberal democratic world order. It lulls secessionist movements into the trap of imagining that they can achieve their goals without developing the sources of hard and soft power upon which sovereignty ultimately rests. Leadership then invest their time in referenda, while the rank and file fail to develop the sort of belligerent fanaticism required to motivate a militant struggle. Central authorities then have plenty of options to prevent secession: rigging the referendum, as may have happened in Scotland; increasing the immigrant population, as was done in Quebec between the 70s FLQ crisis and the 1995 referendum; or if all else fails, naked force.
An overweening faith in liberal proceduralism is a more general handicap for dissident movements, too. It's easy to forget that the protections and rights nominally awarded by the liberal order will be happily suspended by that same order when directly challenged, that challenge being viewed as a state of exception. See e.g. the financial warfare waged against the trucker convoy or dissident media outlets.
Shedding blood for your political goals seems indeed to be the minimum required threshold, at least from my experience as a Romanian directly involved, as a child, in our bloody revolution that ended up with the army shooting and killing people that were chanting near me. Will never forget the horrors of that night, the blood, the torn limbs still inside a cheap rubber winter boot, the running away in terror with my mother while bullets flew by and people were crying in pain. Later, my mother would return to her hospital job to see the bodies in morgue, only to be taken away to be cremated by our secret police.
That was not the end of it, I lost 2 of my closest friends in the Yugo conflicts, both Serbs youths that crossed the Danube illegally with the gasoline traffickers to fight against "the Turks". As a Romanian, even then, I understood why they did it and why they thought their lives were worth it, even as it crushed their families completely. I understood the historical legacy that was transmitted onto us each generation, to defend Europe from invaders, to accept our role as border guards that are often sacrificed so the core can remain safe. A legacy that has been made into a mockery, of course, after so many died for it.
So yes, I think blood remains the price that is historically proven to maybe change important things.