When I read the commentary of Russian liberals in the English-speaking press, I often wonder at the lack of depth in understanding of the United States that is reflected in their writing.  The latest example is a piece by Maxim Trudolyubov from Meduza – a Russian liberal opposition outlet which is based in Latvia. 

Trudolyubov implicitly holds up the United States (and the rest of the west) as some kind of paragon of normalcy and democracy:

“Faith in the inevitable democratization of all countries is a thing of the past — even in the West. American political scientists started to suspect a long time ago that they were looking at the world in a simplistic manner and that authoritarian regimes wouldn’t necessarily transform into liberal democracies.”

He goes on to lament how critics of Russia tie themselves in academic and journalistic knots trying to describe the Russian political-economic system since it’s supposedly so alien to any other.  Should Russia be called a kleptocracy?  A predatorial state?  How about a mafia state? 

It is asserted at one point, paraphrasing some Hungarian analysts, that none of the terms thrown around quite captures the Russian system because the nature of its corruption, bureaucratic disconnection from the public good, etc. is so profound and stubborn that attempts by supposedly normal and democratic countries to advise Russia and its post-Soviet kin countries on how to address these problems are doomed to failure:

“Based on this thesis, Magyar and Madlovics criticize the Western approach to fighting corruption in the post-communist world. When European countries apply sanctions against mafia states or give them lessons in how to fight corruption, they proceed from the assumptions that politicians in these countries want to resolve this problem but don’t know how to do so correctly. In actual fact, these politicians know how to fight corruption, but only the corruption that’s outside of their control and isn’t orchestrated by them.”

Trudolyubov goes on to suggest that there is a major discrepancy between how the Russian political class officially presents itself to the world and what really goes on behind the scenes:

“In recent years, academic work and investigative journalism have enriched our understanding of what lies behind the country’s official facade significantly. Public discussion about this dichotomy is long overdue. But those who are safer adhering to the official image of power and those who are aware of the magnitude of the gap between the facade and reality have no common space or common language for discussion.”

The implication throughout the article seems to be that the United States (and other western “democracies”) doesn’t have this kind of discrepancy in how it officially presents itself and how it really operates.  It’s always understood that the western democracies, particularly the United States, are the standard-bearers of honest and democratic government.  I often find myself wanting to ask these writers what information they are basing their assessments of the United States on because it doesn’t have much relationship to reality.

Let’s start with government corruption in the U.S.  At the federal level – and to a lesser degree at state and local levels – a system of legalized bribery is how politicians get elected to office.  It costs millions, even billions of dollars, to successfully run for federal public office.  Most of that money comes from corporations, the wealthy and their PAC’s.  Candidates who can’t compete in raising that kind of money don’t get elected and wealthy donors expect something in return for their investment.  This system has several legal justifications, starting with the legal idea in 19^th century jurisprudence that corporations have the same constitutional rights as human beings.  Then in 1976 a Supreme Court decision, Buckley v. Valeo, equated money with speech.  The Citizens United v. FEC decision in 2010 reinforced the worst aspects of the money-is-speech and corporations-are-people precedents.  The organization opensecrets.org maintains a database of who funds politicians.  It isn’t pretty.

As for managed democracy, not only do politicians not get elected if they can’t raise huge war chests full of money, candidates who don’t belong to either of the two major parties (Democrat and Republican) are effectively barred from participating in televised debates for the presidency due to the rules for qualification.  When third party candidates can’t participate in debates, then they can’t raise their profiles, leading to a self-reinforcing loop that keeps them from becoming viable.

Scholars from Princeton and Northwestern Universities documented in a 2014 paper that the United States is not a democracy but an oligarchy in which average citizens and organizations representing their interests have little to no influence over policy at the federal level.  Instead policy is influenced by the wealthy and corporations – i.e. the donors to the expensive political campaigns mentioned above.

A few more interesting facts that Russian liberals who gush over the United States might want to consider:

Civil asset forfeiture.  Think Russian bureaucrats and police are unique in getting money away from the average Ivan or Joe?  Think again.  Civil asset forfeiture in many states in the U.S. allow law enforcement officials to confiscate a person’s property, possessions, and money by claiming that the seized assets were involved in a crime or were the proceeds from a crime. Even if there is no conviction, it is often extremely difficult to get the money or property back.

Militarization of police.  The protests that filled streets in every major American city after the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 were the result of years of increasing militarization of police forces throughout the United States.  These militarization policies have been legalized through Supreme Court decisions and facilitated by the federal government’s giving military grade weapons to civilian police departments throughout the country and the Department of Justice’s subsidizing of training exchanges between U.S. police departments and the Israeli Defense Force. 

Death penalty.  The U.S. is one of a small minority of nations (along with Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, India, Taiwan and China) that still practice the death penalty.  In the past year, the federal government and at least one state have been attempting to bring back into practice barbaric methods of execution, including electrocution, gas, and firing squad. Sure to make any liberal feel warm and fuzzy, right?

Incarceration.  The U.S. incarcerates more of its population, over 2 million people, than any other nation in the world.

Poverty.  In relation to other OECD nations that are comparable in overall wealth, the U.S. has the worst poverty rate. 

Russia has many problems and Russian citizens have every right to be concerned about them.  However, many of the most prominent Russian liberal writers need to take off their rose-colored glasses about the United States.  This may also make it easier to put their own country’s problems in a more realistic perspective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBCZOh5FPcw

In this seminar from May 19th, Bruce Allyn applies insight from the fields of negotiation and mediation to define practical steps that both US and Russian sides can take today to realize both individual and shared interests in a relationship that has descended into bitter enmity. We will look at how to “zoom out” to big-picture strategy—realizing what is at stake—and how to “zoom in” to Vladimir Putin the negotiator: his formative years, his heroes, his psychology, his intentions and current aspirations. Allyn will examine practical steps to break the cycle of offense and revenge that has characterized U.S.-Russian relations over the past three decades since the exhilarating days when the Berlin Wall came down and the old Cold War ended. Allyn will suggest how both sides can “go to the balcony” and see what creative options exist today that might elude them in the heat of battle, referencing work laid out in a recent Foreign policy article, What Biden and Putin Can Agree On.SHOW LESS

A recent deepfake video of Tom Cruise has some analysts wondering if such technology has gotten so good that a deepfake video of a world leader could possibly lead to an inadvertent war. Below is an excerpt from one in depth article on the subject that was recently published by ABC Australia. Let me know in the comments below what you think – could this potentially threaten world peace and security or will societies be able to sufficiently rein in this technology in the near future?

By Mark Corcoran and Matt Henry, ABC Australia, 6/24/21

Weaponising deepfakes

It’s a possibility that keeps former CIA officer and disinformation specialist Matt Ferraro up at night.

When deepfake Tom started doing the rounds in Washington DC’s national security and intelligence community, some feared a dystopian future had taken one giant leap closer. Matt was one of them.

“I think that ‘terror’ is probably not too strong a word,” says Ferraro, who worked for America’s top spymaster, the director of National Intelligence, during the Bush and Obama administrations. 

“It’s because they realise how dangerous [deepfakes] are. It does seem like it’s really going to be a fundamental challenge to the information environment.”

When Ferraro started writing about deepfakes two years ago, most were easily detected by the naked eye. But that has changed dramatically in the past 18 months, he says. Today’s deepfakes have become “radically good” and now pose an imminent risk to the political system.

Early deepfakes, such as filmmaker and actor Jordan Peele’s 2018 Obama video — in which a synthesised likeness of the former president calls his successor a “total and complete dipshit” and then signs off with the straight-faced salutation “stay woke, bitches” — highlighted the potential for deepfakes to sow political chaos. But the visual sophistication was lacking, Ferraro says.

“It was mostly old video of Barack Obama with only his lips moving. You could tell that was fake. Now with the Tom Cruise deepfakes, it’s getting harder and harder”.

The spectre of a deepfaked political leader has already arisen in Africa, where a video of Gabon’s reclusive president looking odd triggered widespread allegations it was a deepfake. A week later the military attempted a coup.

In the lead-up to the 2020 US presidential election, deepfake parody TV commercials of Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin were commissioned by non-profit organisation RepresentUs to warn about the fragility of democracy. But RepresentUs says American TV networks refused to run the videos as they were too realistic.

For Ferraro, the nightmare scenario would be a deepfake video of US President Joe Biden declaring war on North Korea, potentially released at a time of heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula, with hackers posting the video on the White House Twitter account. Ferraro suggests such a video could create mass confusion in a matter of minutes, potentially triggering conflict and even casualties before it could be debunked.

“If the North Koreans are 80 per cent sure it’s him — maybe only 20 per cent sure it’s him — are they willing to just sit back and take a missile strike that will end their regime? Probably not.”

If one person with a computer and an internet connection can make a convincing Tom Cruise, Ferraro fears the risks the technology could pose in the hands of well-resourced actors.

Read full article here.

“The great curse of our press in the West is willingness to accept the official narrative. So many people in the American press who write about the world are merely stenographers.” – Stephen Kinzer, author, columnist for Boston Globe and former correspondent for New York Times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtIp5h4sXzk

Bartlett’s write-up based on her interview with Kinzer is available here.

After a summit that didn’t seem to offer much of substance a couple of weeks ago, I was hoping that maybe at least these sorts of vindictive and counterproductive stunts would be dialed back, if nothing else. But just days after the summit, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan announced that another round of sanctions regarding Alexey Navalny would be forthcoming against Russia. Now, earlier this week, the State Department issued an advisory warning Americans not to travel to Russia for any reason. The advisory stated that Americans risked possible unjust imprisonment, terrorism, and all manner of horrible actions that could befall them if they visited that vast hellacious land. I’m surprised the advisory didn’t include a warning about something my mom’s former neighbor said he heard about in Russia: that there is a trapdoor you open that leads into hell somewhere in the country.