The most recent issue of The New Yorker has a story about Russian intelligence's rising deployment of "single use agents" to carry out minor acts of disruption and sabotage around Europe. Specifically this entails finding disaffected people -- often underemployed, undereducated stateless young men -- to do this kind of stuff for $500, $1000, $2000. A napalm bomb at an IKEA in Vilnius. Something left on some railroad tracks in Germany. Etc. The idea is to create low-level anxiety and dread and a sense that things are out of control. Russia's security organs keep themselves separated from the single-use agents by using secure messaging apps and contracting out through multiple layers, with ultimate handlers being organized crime.
The population from which they recruit the agents has a lot in common with the population from which Trump's ICE hails: guys who feel like they don't have a chance in society and have been wronged. Guys who have been long-since been severed from any set of traditional democratic ideals like rule of law, separation of powers, justice, etc. That all must sound like science fiction to this population.
My mind races back quickly to the loss of authority that figures like Walter Cronkite used to have in the time of three major networks and a couple of wire services. That was all shattered first in the era of 57 channels and nothing on, followed by the internet and the ossification of aging Boomers into Fox News or CNN/MSNBC people. Followed by Joe Rogan, YouTube, Mr Beast... we all know the story, having lived it. An era in which each gets to pick "my personal morality," and few even have the discipline to do that consciously, is fertile soil for both recruiting both single use agents and ICE thugs.
1 comment:
Now that I'm older, let me say how much I miss respectability and hypocrisy. Tens of millions of people may have been "imitating decency" but it sure beats whatever they are imitating today.
Post a Comment