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It is by now common knowledge that Russian intelligence very nearly took over Deutsche Bank without anyone in the German government even knowing (or caring), and while pressuring the German financial regulator into pursuing a criminal investigation into the Financial Times' journalists trying to figure out why it didn't make sense.
What is less commonly understood (and in part only now being revealed) is what a combination of hilarious disaster and glorious victory the Russian intelligence operation in question was. Having stumbled onto Jan Marsalek, the co-founder of Wirecard (a longstanding fraudulent German fake payments startup), an autistic Austrian-Czech who was obsessed with secret agents and James Bond, while he was abortively attempting to extend his scam to Russia, Russian intelligence compromised him with the help of an ex-pornographic Russian actress and several "retired" FSB officials.
Over the years, Wirecard helped move (with Marsalek's full approval) the funds of sanctioned Chechens, questionable Libyans, and shady Russian-Israelis between East and West, with the help of ex-KGB fixer Stanislav Petlinsky and his Israeli financier son. They had under their control the darling of the entire German tech industry, a man praised by Merkel, and a company so overvalued it was genuinely attempting to buy Deutsche Bank. They had thoroughly taken control of Austria's intelligence apparatus, which meant they had unlimited access to classified intelligence from Western allies, the entire European border entry database and so on. And then it failed, because it could not locate 1.9bn Euros.
It turned out that a great deal of the FSB program, as it happened, had only tangentially to do with what one might consider the interests of 'Russia' the nation. Much of it - including large elements of the assassination program - had to do with the grift, the transferring of money, the profiting of various senior officials, and the fear that MI6 or the CIA would buy the information on who was making money in Russia (and how) from defectors like Skripal and Litvinenko. A competent FSB would have furnished Wirecard with the money needed for KPMG to sign off its audit (something well-paid accountants are always desperate to do) by showing proof of the 'missing' 1.9bn euros. But when it came to it, the FSB could not do this. The Russians, for all their immense capability and cunning, were so addicted to the grift that they were unable to salvage their own intelligence operation because they were too busy enriching themselves.
A tragic tale. Marsalek is now an Orthodox priest in hiding deep in Russia. Its inhabitants, that great people of so many contradictions, live to fight another day. I'm excited to see what they come up with next.
This story is a great encapsulation of two important phenomena:
These two points are circular. A complacent and lazy Europe leads to a complacent and lazy Russia where the priority is people enriching themselves instead of furthering national goals. That's why recent events are such a disaster for the west. Russia is adapting to foreign pressure, which means this kind of corruption is decreasing as a necessity lest they lose to the US and get color revolutioned into a failed state.
Russia is transitioning from authoritarianism to totalitarianism, which typically increases corruption, not decreases it. At the same time, Russia is devoting more resources to fighting the West, so it's entirely plausible that it's becoming both more dangerous and more corrupt simultaneously.
I don't really see any evidence that authoritarianism is the sole variable when it comes to corruption. It can be a factor but on the other hand the west is nominally democratic and it's ruling classes central ideology, DEI, is an ideology that exists entirely to enable grift. Lots of things can lead to corruption. In Russia's case the necessity of winning the war now that things have gone hot is reducing corruption. Can't win a war if your bombs are full of water and your intelligence gathering agencies are lying to you.
I would say that this 'being under pressure' is the bigger underlying factor when it comes to corruption. At least corruption that doesn't get caught quick and exists long term. That's basically the way that democracy and capitalism combat corruption when they actually function properly. If you're a corrupt business or politician you are going to have unhappy constituents or products that aren't competitive, they vote you out / don't buy your stuff. Authoritarianism is kinda like Monopoly where this pressure is removed. Though I think people overestimate the amount of power and freedom to act that authoritarians have, people still have the power to 'vote' via violence, but the stakes are a lot higher and coordination issues mean that this 'vote' is rarely exercised.
In the textbook definition of authoritarianism where one entity does have sole power to do whatever, like if a god came down to earth or something, this pressure is entirely removed though. This probably ties in with the idea that ,"Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times."
It's easily one of the biggest factors, if not the single biggest factor period. Look at the corruptions perception index, and notice how many of the least corrupt countries are democratic, while many of the most corrupt are authoritarian or totalitarian. Look at the differences between Taiwan and China, or between the two Koreas. Same cultures, but different governing styles make a huge amount of difference. Look at Post-Soviet states that escaped Russia's orbit vs those that didn't, like Poland vs Belarus. The entire Ukraine conflict that's been going on since 2014 is in large part because Ukrainians want to be more like Poland than Belarus. DEI, while being a terrible ideology, is worlds apart from actual dictatorships like Russia or Venezuela or North Korea.
Dictators are never entirely secure, and totalitarian dictators can freely devote more of the state's resources towards maintaining their own positions than authoritarian ones can. They accomplish this largely through corruption.
This is just a right-wing version of whig history, and relies just as much on cherrypicking historical datapoints as liberal whig history does.
Link just seems to be to a globalist ngo that ranks globalist countries positively?
WEF and World Bank? really?
Just write your own list of countries you don't like and it'd have as much credibility.
Plenty of researchers use corruption perceptions in their research on country outcomes. Do you have a better metric you'd like to use?
If we can't agree on some underlying data then there's no point in continuing this conversation.
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They're also geographically and/or culturally clustered together indicating that them all being democracies is a historical coincidence more than anything else. Also Nordics/Protestants being stuck up by-the-book types was a stereotype well before Europe started moving towards democracy.
Less decisive historical observation than one may think, as the confound of comparatively democratic power structures in the Nordics goes all the way back before the French revolution. Things were meetings of free men since before the middle ages. When the Swedish realm adopted European style Riksdag of estates, they had a fourth estate of free land-owning peasants.
If states with elections can be authoritarian, and various forms of mnarchy, from feudalism to absolutism can be democratic, it's starting to sound like democracy is just the friends we made along the way.
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The east Asian democracies are quite far from the Western democracies, and many have similar cultures to eastern autocracies, yet the corruption of the autocracies is far, far worse. Again, look at South Korea vs North Korea, or Taiwan vs China.
That's communism vs. Non-communism, if anything (a system that pretends to be democratic, I might add), you even see it's echoes in the democratic Europe. There's also no shortage of corrupt democracies you're ignoring, and like I said, the lack of historical comparisons to when the non-corrupt countries weren't democratic makes this very low quality evidence.
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