Comment: Some background on Khodorovsky:
- Psychopathic criminal and former oligarch Khodorkovsky wants to lead Russia's opposition movement against Putin leadership
- Khodorkovsky created the myth that he is Putin's political opponent AFTER he was sent to prison for being a corporate thief
- Irish court names Mikhail Khodorkovsky potential suspect in €100mn fraud
There's a lot about this report which is rather disturbing, but as someone who studies Russian history for a living this particular recommendation stood out for me. History and culture are the foundations of study of any society. If you want to know a foreign country, you have for a start to learn its language, which means reading its literature. You then need to know its history to be able to put things in the right context. But there are some, it seems, who don't want people to understand context. They know the truth, and anything which might challenge it needs to be censored.
In any case, according to the argument put forward by report's author, Kateryna Smagliy, those who don't agree with her deserved to be silenced. Why? Because they are agents of the Kremlin. She urges Western governments to 'step up efforts to expose Russia's network of agents within Western academia'. 'The Russian government pursues a coherent and well-coordinated "knowledge weaponization" strategy,' she says. This strategy
led to the rise of the new phenomenon of 'hybrid analytica', which we define here as the process of design, development and promotion of various pseudo-academic narratives by duped or manipulated bona-fide intellectuals, academics and think-tank experts of political 'lobbyists in disguise', whose vested interests have been recruited through the global network of the Kremlin-linked operatives.
Comment: From the perspective of the deep state, nothing must be allowed to undermine the narrative of Russia as a belligerent and dangerous enemy of the West and thus threaten the existence of the defense industry.