Suicide Coup

Putin’s Russia was not an old-fashioned totalitarian state, isolated and autarkic. Nor was it a poor dictatorship, wholly dependent on foreign donors. Instead, it represented something new: a full-blown autocratic kleptocracy, a mafia state built and managed entirely for the purpose of enriching its leaders.

by the 1930s, Nazi propaganda would depict the mentally ill alongside modern art, offering their shared fractured faces as evidence of deep disturbance fit only for extinction. The degenerate would be the freak not just medicalized but eugenicized; the degenerate people and art deemed as such would be destroyed. Or auctioned off at a profit.

the cheapest option in Africa or Latin America. No democratic government should ever assume that arguments for democracy or for the rule of law are somehow obvious or self-evident. Authoritarian narratives are designed to undermine the innate appeal of those ideas, to characterize dictatorship as stable and democracy as chaotic. Democratic media,