https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5049021

We’ve all had some ideas about what was happening, but Applebaum seems to have fleshed them out and made sense of them. She has identified the mechanisms as to how this new form of government/social organization has arisen and perpetuates itself. We could all see what was hoppening. Now we know how and why. We’ve ordered her book.

Listen to and/or read NPR’s interview. This is important.

I mean, there’s an interesting interesting conversation I had with a Ukrainian friend of mine recently, who described how kleptocracy, so ill-gotten gains, large amounts of money, leads inevitably to autocracy because people who have stolen money and who have used that money to retain power don’t want to give it up. And so, of course, when people start talking about transparency or the rule of law or there begin to be anti-corruption movements, they immediately push back on them. They – you know, first, they harass them, then they undermine them, then maybe they arrest them. And the need to create a police state comes from this need to protect the money. And that’s what happened in Russia. That’s actually what was happening in Ukraine up until 2014, when the Ukrainians organized a movement. The Ukrainian Revolution of 2014 was really an anti-corruption revolution. That was what motivated and inspired people. And anti-corruption and democracy were seen to be similar and compatible.

And that is exactly what they want to happen here.