From the article: … … … … Meanwhile: Apparently, one way of encouraging belief in conspiracy theories is to actually engage in conspiracies: There is a similar domestic strategy: for people who...
From the article:
Perhaps the most prominent case of strategic corruption in recent years is the Ukraine imbroglio that led to the impeachment of U.S. President Donald Trump in 2019. Many Americans may think of this as primarily a domestic political scandal. But it is crucial to understand its foreign roots.
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Beginning in 2018, a group of plotters launched a concerted effort to smear the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and push for her removal from office.
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Parnas and Fruman were working for Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian tycoon “who’d taken over the Turkmenistan-Ukraine-Russia gas trade with the backing of the Kremlin.”
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The plot’s political objectives and Firtash’s apparent involvement elevates this sordid tale from the level of ordinary sleaze to that of strategic corruption. Firtash is a well-known figure in Ukraine. For many years, he managed trade with Ukraine for Gazprom, the state-controlled Russian gas company that is, in the words of the economist and Russia expert Anders Aslund, “probably Russia’s foremost geopolitical tool in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.” For Russia, effective control of the gas trade in and through Ukraine is a national objective of paramount importance. And Firtash was Gazprom’s man in Kyiv; indeed, according to Aslund, “Firtash appears to have been a Kremlin influence agent rather than a businessman.”
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The upshot is that by spending millions of dollars and dangling bait about information to help Trump, Firtash and his associates are apparently trying to keep him from being extradited, put control of Ukraine’s energy sector in more pliable hands, get rid of the American officials who stand in the way, and propagate conspiracy theories that have long been a staple of Russian propaganda. It is no coincidence that these aims almost completely match the Kremlin’s. It’s quite an agenda—and little of it originated in the United States.
Meanwhile:
Experts disagree about whether, on balance, BRI [China’s Belt and Road Initiative] poses a threat to U.S. interests. Regardless of one’s judgment on that question, however, it’s essential to see that corruption is central to the BRI, which involves little transparency and lots of money and which puts officials all over the world in hock to the Chinese Communist Party. It also connects infrastructure on three continents to an authoritarian government in Beijing known for collecting personal information and suppressing dissent.
Apparently, one way of encouraging belief in conspiracy theories is to actually engage in conspiracies:
In the United States, a steady drip of revelations about this foreign influence has fed citizens’ tendency to view their political system as corrupt and to conclude that U.S. policy is for sale to the highest bidders—even overseas rivals.
There is a similar domestic strategy: for people who distrust government and want others to share the same belief, undermining government processes itself encourages more distrust. An example of that would be to encourage distrust in elections by undermining elections.
And I’m reminded of how, for terrorists, journalists publishing news of their attacks is itself part of the strategy. It’s hard to report on bad events without being complicit when that publicity is what they want.
tbf, outside of the US, a state is roughly synonymous with a nation, most countries use a different word for internal provinces. We use states because the original 13 were nations/states in their...
tbf, outside of the US, a state is roughly synonymous with a nation, most countries use a different word for internal provinces. We use states because the original 13 were nations/states in their own right, and the original idea of the US was more an alliance between nation-states rather than a nation-state of its own.
Yeah, originally the headline said “US states.” If you want to get really picky, Bret Devereaux makes a technical distinction between states (a form of governance) and nations (people who have an...
Yeah, originally the headline said “US states.”
If you want to get really picky, Bret Devereaux makes a technical distinction between states (a form of governance) and nations (people who have an imagined common ancestry), and then says that the US is not a nation, and that’s fine:
Anglo-Americans make up perhaps as much as 18% of Americans (if we add together ancestry responses of English, Scottish, Scotch-Irish and simply ‘American’), which probably captures the lion’s share of individuals tracing their families back to free persons present at the founding (and a number of people whose families do not go that far). That’s not meaningfully larger than the slice of the country which reports German ancestry (14.7%) most of whose ancestors arrived between 1850 and 1930. It’s also not meaningfully smaller than the slice reporting Italian, Irish and Polish ancestry (collectively around 19%), groups arriving mostly between 1840 and 1910 but who often faced pronounced anti-Catholic bigotry in the predominately protestant United States. And those slices aren’t very different in size from the 12.4% of Americans who report Black African ancestry, most (though not all) of whose ancestors arrived on slave ships between 1619 and 1860. And that isn’t very much larger than the roughly 11% of Americans who report Mexican ancestry. And of course none of these groups is very much larger or smaller than the roughly 14% of Americans who were born somewhere else, immigrated and naturalized.
I could keep going, but the key thing here is that no group is really large enough to demand that their story be the central core narrative.
I kind of like the ring of “nation of immigrants,” though. This is reaching, but maybe it’s a common ancestry if you’re vague enough about it, considering all stories of the form “we (or our ancestors) came from somewhere else and ended up here” to have something in common? Even many Native Americans had to move.
From the article:
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Meanwhile:
Apparently, one way of encouraging belief in conspiracy theories is to actually engage in conspiracies:
There is a similar domestic strategy: for people who distrust government and want others to share the same belief, undermining government processes itself encourages more distrust. An example of that would be to encourage distrust in elections by undermining elections.
And I’m reminded of how, for terrorists, journalists publishing news of their attacks is itself part of the strategy. It’s hard to report on bad events without being complicit when that publicity is what they want.
Mirror: https://archive.ph/bO5aw
The headline seems wrong: this article uses “states” as a synonym for “nations.” I don’t see anything about American states.
Edit: thanks!
tbf, outside of the US, a state is roughly synonymous with a nation, most countries use a different word for internal provinces. We use states because the original 13 were nations/states in their own right, and the original idea of the US was more an alliance between nation-states rather than a nation-state of its own.
Yeah, originally the headline said “US states.”
If you want to get really picky, Bret Devereaux makes a technical distinction between states (a form of governance) and nations (people who have an imagined common ancestry), and then says that the US is not a nation, and that’s fine:
I kind of like the ring of “nation of immigrants,” though. This is reaching, but maybe it’s a common ancestry if you’re vague enough about it, considering all stories of the form “we (or our ancestors) came from somewhere else and ended up here” to have something in common? Even many Native Americans had to move.
The title needs to be changed. The original article title is simply:
Note the lack of “US”