[b]Masha Gessen
In the middle to late 1970s, when Putin joined the KGB, the secret police, like all Soviet institutions, was undergoing a phase of extreme bloating. Its growing number of directorates and departments were producing mountains of information that had no clear purpose, application, or meaning. An entire army of men and a few women spent their lives compiling newspaper clippings, transcripts of tapped telephone conversations, reports of people followed and trivia learned, and all of this made its way to the top of the KGB pyramid, and then to the leadership of the Communist Party, largely unprocessed and virtually unanalyzed.[/b]
Okay, so what explains Trump?
Putin wanted to rule the world, or a part of it, from the shadows.
Cue the hackers. And Don of course.
They are just doing their jobs, said Putin, meaning that protesters were working for money—state television channels had by this time aired a series of reports claiming that the protests were bankrolled by the U.S. State Department.
Really, don’t be surprised if this is actually true.
There was a game called “Work.” and on of the most-often-repeated Soviet jokes described it perfectly: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us”.
Tell that to some government workers here.
…every totalitarian regime forms a type of human being on whom it relies for its stability. The shaping of the New Man is the regime’s explicit project, but its product is not so much a vessel for the regime’s ideology as it is a person best equipped to survive in a given society. The regime, in turn, comes to depend on this newly shaped type of person for its continued survival.
And around and around they go. And not just there.
Science gradually yielded to propaganda, and as a result propaganda tended more and more to represent itself as science.
And around and around they go. And not just there.