Russia and the Threat to Liberal Democracy

[applegrove]

by Larry Diamond at the Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/12/russia-liberal-democracy/510011/

"SNIP............


Meanwhile, the damage to liberalism in Europe was also being driven by a more brutal form of Russian intervention—in Syria. Russia’s bombing campaign there has not only tilted the war in favor of the dictator, Bashar al-Assad, who along with his allies has killed more civilians than either ISIS fighters or rebels, but it also dramatically accelerated the flow of Syrian refugees (now nearing 5 million) into other countries, including European ones. While Europe’s refugee crisis has many sources and causes, roughly 30 percent of European asylum-seekers last year were Syrian refugees, and the human exodus from that civil war has incidentally further helped to feed right-wing (pro-Putin) populist parties and movements across Europe, while undermining liberal leaders like Angela Merkel of Germany.

The destabilizing effects of the refugee crisis in Europe have been a kind of dividend of Putin’s campaign to defend his Middle East ally. But Putin has also attempted to destabilize democracies directly through methods more reminiscent of the Cold War. After Montenegro’s parliamentary elections on October 16 (which saw Putin pouring money into the pro-Russian opposition party and sympathetic media and NGOs, in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat the pro-NATO prime minister), evidence emerged of a plot involving three Russian citizens (alleged in the Montenegrin news media to be agents of the GRU, Russian military intelligence) and some 20 right-wing Serbian nationalists. Montenegrin authorities now allege they planned to stage a terrorist attack that would discredit the election outcome, assassinate the pro-Western prime minister, and topple his government.


As these political dramas and tensions have unfolded in democratic Europe, Putin’s Russia has made brilliant use of old and new forms of propaganda to exploit political divisions. The leading element of this has been RT (Russia Today) which is not only one of the most widely watched (and heavily subsidized) global sources of state television propaganda—and which claims 70 million weekly viewers and 35 million daily— but a vast social-media machinery as well. Added to this is the hidden influence of a vast network of Russian trolls—agents paid to spread disinformation and Russian propaganda points by posing as authentic and spontaneous commentators.

What began as a somewhat preposterous effusion of fake news reports spreading panic, for example, about an Ebola outbreak in the U.S., morphed into something more sinister, sophisticated, and profoundly consequential: a dedicated campaign to discredit Hillary Clinton and tilt the U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump. The army of Russian trolls started infiltrating U.S. media with conservative commentaries, playing up Clinton’s scandals and weaknesses, and widely diffusing other right-wing narratives against Clinton. The Russian government (America’s own intelligence agencies believe) hacked into the emails of the Democratic Party and of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and passed them on to Wikileaks to dispense in a devastating drip-drip-drip of divisive and unflattering revelations. In The Washington Post’s words, the campaign portrayed “Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers.” All of this gave Trump significantly more political traction while dispiriting and discouraging possible Clinton voters (many of whom simply stayed home in disgust). Given how close the U.S. election outcome was, it is easy to imagine that this intervention might have provided Trump with his margin of victory in the Electoral College.


...............SNIP"