К 2001 году бессменный диктатор Мубарак правил Египтом 20 лет.
In a column published before the 9/11 attacks in Al-Ahram, the largest state-directed newspaper in Egypt, Mahmoud had described the nature of the deepest threat to civilization: “What exactly do the Jews want? Read what the Ninth Protocol of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ says: ‘We have limitless ambitions, inexhaustible greed, merciless vengeance and hatred beyond imagination. We are a secret army whose plans are impossible to understand by using honest methods.’” By the time of the attacks, Egypt had entered a state of civic decomposition. The people loathed their leaders, and the leaders feared their citizens. Ordinary Egyptians were impotent in the face of universal corruption and cynicism, periodic food shortages, political repression, and profound economic insecurity. In this climate, people who were legitimately flummoxed by the complexity of the modern world found in conspiracy thinking a comprehensible explanation for their unhappiness. Anti-Semitism, often manifesting itself in the form of the Protocols, a century-old Russian forgery that posited the existence of a Jewish plan for global domination, was one tool used by the powerful to direct anger away from the governments that failed them. Countries “where vicious anti-Semitism is rife are almost always backward and poor,” Walter Russell Mead once wrote. They aren’t backward and poor, he argued, because the Elders of Zion have conspired against them; they are backward and poor because they lack the ability to “see the world clearly and discern cause and effect relations in complex social settings.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/shadowland-introduction/610840/
Мубарак регулярно переизбирался на новый срок через несменяемую правящую партию, но в 2005 принял участие в прямых президентских выборах и набрал 89% голосов.
Начав с описания Египта, погрязшего в конспирологии в 2001, статья главного редактора The Atlantic Джеффри Голдберга заканчивается так:
Trump does not defend our democracy from the ruinous consequences of conspiracy thinking. Instead, he embraces such thinking. A conspiracy theory-birtherism-was his pathway to power, and, in office, he warns of the threat of the “deep state” with the ferocity of a QAnon disciple. He has even begun to question the official coronavirus death toll, which he sees as evidence of a dark plot against him. How is he different from Alex Jones, from the conspiracy manufacturers of Russia and the Middle East? He lives in the White House. That is one main difference. This improbable question-how did a person with a weakness for conspiratorial thinking achieve the presidency?-might be among the most consequential of the coming election, which is not merely a political contest, but a referendum on enlightenment values and on reality itself. Nonsense is nonsense, except when it kills. And conspiracy thinking, especially when advanced by the president of the United States, is an existential threat.
In a column published before the 9/11 attacks in Al-Ahram, the largest state-directed newspaper in Egypt, Mahmoud had described the nature of the deepest threat to civilization: “What exactly do the Jews want? Read what the Ninth Protocol of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ says: ‘We have limitless ambitions, inexhaustible greed, merciless vengeance and hatred beyond imagination. We are a secret army whose plans are impossible to understand by using honest methods.’”
By the time of the attacks, Egypt had entered a state of civic decomposition. The people loathed their leaders, and the leaders feared their citizens. Ordinary Egyptians were impotent in the face of universal corruption and cynicism, periodic food shortages, political repression, and profound economic insecurity. In this climate, people who were legitimately flummoxed by the complexity of the modern world found in conspiracy thinking a comprehensible explanation for their unhappiness. Anti-Semitism, often manifesting itself in the form of the Protocols, a century-old Russian forgery that posited the existence of a Jewish plan for global domination, was one tool used by the powerful to direct anger away from the governments that failed them. Countries “where vicious anti-Semitism is rife are almost always backward and poor,” Walter Russell Mead once wrote. They aren’t backward and poor, he argued, because the Elders of Zion have conspired against them; they are backward and poor because they lack the ability to “see the world clearly and discern cause and effect relations in complex social settings.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/shadowland-introduction/610840/
Мубарак регулярно переизбирался на новый срок через несменяемую правящую партию, но в 2005 принял участие в прямых президентских выборах и набрал 89% голосов.
Начав с описания Египта, погрязшего в конспирологии в 2001, статья главного редактора The Atlantic Джеффри Голдберга заканчивается так:
Trump does not defend our democracy from the ruinous consequences of conspiracy thinking. Instead, he embraces such thinking. A conspiracy theory-birtherism-was his pathway to power, and, in office, he warns of the threat of the “deep state” with the ferocity of a QAnon disciple. He has even begun to question the official coronavirus death toll, which he sees as evidence of a dark plot against him. How is he different from Alex Jones, from the conspiracy manufacturers of Russia and the Middle East?
He lives in the White House. That is one main difference.
This improbable question-how did a person with a weakness for conspiratorial thinking achieve the presidency?-might be among the most consequential of the coming election, which is not merely a political contest, but a referendum on enlightenment values and on reality itself.
Nonsense is nonsense, except when it kills. And conspiracy thinking, especially when advanced by the president of the United States, is an existential threat.
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