Forbes Russia reported that Volodin installed in his office a custom-designed computer terminal loaded with a system called Prism, which monitored public sentiment online using 60 million sources. According to the website of its manufacturer, Prism “actively tracks the social media activities that result in increased social tension, disorderly conduct, protest sentiments and extremism.” Or, as Forbes put it, “Prism sees social media as a battlefield.”
.. Putin gave ideological cover to the crackdown by calling the entire Internet a “C.I.A. project,” one that Russia needed to be protected from.
.. All of this has contributed to a dawning sense, among the Russian journalists and activists I spoke with, that the Internet is no longer a natural medium for political opposition.
.. Also, by working every day to spread Kremlin propaganda, the paid trolls have made it impossible for the normal Internet user to separate truth from fiction.
.. During the protests, a favorite tactic of the opposition was making anti-Putin hashtags trend on Twitter. Today, waves of trolls and bots regularly promote pro-Putin hashtags. What once was an exhilarating act of popular defiance now feels empty. “It kind of discredited the idea of political hashtags ..
Why We’d Be Better Off if Napoleon Never Lost at Waterloo
Hundreds of thousands of historians have pored over the questions of why he attacked when, where and how he attacked. Yet 200 years after the fact, a different question must be asked: Why was the Battle of Waterloo even fought? Was it really necessary to secure the peace and security of Europe?
.. Yet he said he would be remembered not for his military victories, but for his domestic reforms, especially the Code Napoleon, that brilliant distillation of 42 competing and often contradictory legal codes into a single, easily comprehensible body of French law.
.. But the French averted war with the United States over its inevitable expansion westward, and the 80 million francs they received allowed Napoleon to rebuild France, especially its army.
.. Napoleon started none of those wars, but he won all of them.
.. in 1812 he responded to France’s being cut out of Russian markets—in violation of the Tilsit terms—by invading Russia.
How Russians Lost the War
The baseness of Russia’s rulers lies in the way they have always taken advantage of this remarkable human emotion: the love of homeland and the willingness to sacrifice everything for it.
.. He was still a boy when he went to sea, in constant terror of drowning in that steel coffin. He ended up protecting the regime that killed his father.
.. Of course, I wish my homeland victory. But what would constitute a victory for my country? Each one of Hitler’s victories was a defeat for the German people. And the final rout of Nazi Germany was a victory for the Germans themselves, who demonstrated how a nation can rise up and live like human beings without the delirium of war in their heads.
Today, though, Victory Day has nothing to do with the people’s victory or my father’s victory. It is not a day of peace and remembrance for the victims. It is a day for rattling swords, a day of zinc coffins, a day of aggression, a day of great hypocrisy and great baseness.
Great patriotic war, again
To avoid reminding people of the staggering losses, the limbless veterans who once dotted Moscow’s streets were shipped off to a former monastery on an island. Stalin feared victory celebrations would enhance the popularity of Soviet military commanders such as Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who signed Germany’s surrender along with the allies.
..The Soviet leaders who came to power as a result of the coup against Khrushchev used Victory Day to boost their legitimacy. It was the only unifying Soviet holiday that caused no disagreements between the people and their leaders.
.. For much of Ukraine’s post-Soviet history these divides were dormant. But the failure of the Ukrainian government in the past quarter-century to build a nation-state has allowed the Kremlin to use history as a weapon.
Russian state television described the modern pro-European Ukrainians who ousted their corrupt and authoritarian president Viktor Yanukovych as nationalists and Nazi collaborators, planning to annihilate Russians in Crimea. It planted fake stories about Ukrainians crucifying children, while showing a Russian soldier in Crimea holding a small child in his arms—a reference to the giant statue of the Soviet Liberator Soldier erected in Berlin in 1949.
.. Russia’s virtual wargames have real consequences. Alexei Levinson, a sociologist, writes that “under this light moral anaesthetic, the country is getting used to actions which only a short while ago seemed unthinkable and impossible.” Opinion polls show that 90% of Russians are prepared to discuss the possibility of nuclear war. While 57% of older Russians say that such a war cannot have any winners, 40% of younger people are convinced that Russia would defeat America and NATO. As Mr Levinson puts it, “A real war starts to look like a TV show or a computer game in which you have ten lives in reserve.”