The Folly and the Glory Quotes

“On October 20, 2011, the rebels overran Qaddafi’s last stronghold, found him hiding in a drainpipe, sodomized him with a bayonet, and killed him, capturing his last moments on video. Putin watched that tape over and over again, probably thinking that this was what happened when America wanted to change a regime—Milošević dead in a prison cell, Saddam with a noose around his neck, Qaddafi on the wrong end of a spear.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“Putin had launched “a new form of warfare” in which the human mind was the main battlefront, a comprehensive assessment by the Modern War Institute at West Point concluded a decade later. Using disinformation and deception, “Russia created the time and space to shape the international narrative in the critical early days of the conflict.” The West Point study saw four essential elements of Russian information warfare on display in Georgia and thereafter: “First, and most benignly, it aims to put the best spin it can on ordinary news; second, it incites a population with fake information in order to prep a battlefield; third, it uses disinformation or creates enough ambiguity to confuse people on the battlefield; and fourth, it outright lies.” The overarching Russian strategy was “to degrade trust in institutions across the world.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“Georgia. Human rights groups launched investigations into Russia’s reports of pitiless atrocities. It was fake news, but it took time to prove its falsity, and while the fact-checkers tried to disprove one story, the Kremlin put out two more. Russia proved that it could use television and the internet as weapons, launching barrages of disinformation and demonization—aiming, as one analyst put it, to “dismiss the critic, distort the facts, distract from the main issue, and dismay the audience.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“The IRA’s Black front was by many measures its biggest. “No single group of Americans was targeted by IRA information operatives more than African-Americans,” the Senate Intelligence Committee found in 2019. “By far, race and related issues were the preferred target of the information warfare campaign designed to divide the country.” The IRA’s messages to the black community sometimes lobbied for Stein, but far more often argued for boycotting the election entirely. The voter suppression drive aimed at dozens of cities, especially communities where the killings of black citizens by white police officers created flash points for the Black Lives Matter movement. The Black front made an overwhelming effort to keep African Americans away from the ballot boxes with messages like “Our Votes Don’t Matter,” “Don’t Vote for Hillary Clinton,” and “Don’t Vote at All.” Its “Woke Blacks” Instagram account argued that “a particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“RT had paid him $45,000 for his appearance. His colleagues had warned him that taking Kremlin gold would fatally compromise him, and they also thought that he didn’t care. (Flynn’s twenty-seven-day stint as Trump’s White House national security adviser ended after he lied to the FBI about his conversations with the Russians.) Stein said her campaign paid for her trip to Moscow, but RT paid her back. It ran more than one hundred stories on its American channel supporting her bid for the White House, amplifying her positions—“a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war”—which reliably corresponded with the party line of the Internet Research Agency. “She’s a Russian asset—I mean, totally,” Clinton said three years after the election, an intriguing and incendiary charge.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“Their campaign was “a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood,” the Senate Intelligence Committee reported in October 2019. The IRA reached tens of millions of voters. It connected with at least 126 million Americans on Facebook, 20 million people on Instagram, and 1.4 million on Twitter. This generated 76 million interactions on Facebook and 187 million engagements on Instagram; its Twitter accounts were retweeted by Trump, his sons, and his closest aides, among countless others, including some forty American journalists. The IRA’s posts and ripostes to support Trump—2,563 on Facebook, 13,106 on Instagram, 430,185 on Twitter—far exceeded its messages against his rivals. It uploaded more than a thousand videos to YouTube. It spent roughly $15 million all told, and it paid about one hundred Americans who organized forty different political protests across the United States.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“Larry Diamond, a prominent American political sociologist, wrote in January 2015. “There is a growing sense, both domestically and internationally, that democracy in the United States has not been functioning effectively.” Voter turnouts were sinking. The cost of election campaigns was crushing. The role of dark money in politics was surging. Public trust in government was fading. Comity, courtesy, the consideration that the other person might have a point, were dying. Conspiracy theories were trending. Talking heads were shouting. Everyone was arguing with everybody”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“As a report released by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee put it, the Russians sought to “blur the lines between reality and fiction, erode our trust in media entities and the information environment, in government, in each other, and in democracy itself.” It took years before Americans understood this.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“The IRA studied Americans to understand what made them angry, to learn how to think and speak and write like them and, in the fullness of time, to spearhead a new kind of political warfare against the United States. “Our task,” one of the Saint Petersburg trolls later told a Russian reporter, “was to set Americans against their own government: to provoke unrest and discontent.” From the outset, the mission was to incite a civil war within the American political system.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“The IRA created a new branch: the American Desk, also known as the Translator Department. It vetted its new hires for their fluency in American English, which was often slightly imperfect, and their feel for the nuances of American political discourse, which was usually quite impressive. It trained its internet-savvy young employees to understand the issues that divided Americans—gun rights, gay rights, immigration, the Confederate flag and its racist connotations. They learned how to argue online in ways that could”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“Marat Mindiyarov, an unemployed teacher who lasted four months at the IRA, said the job required him “to write that white is black and black is white. Your first feeling, when you ended up there, was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“The United States did little in direct response to Putin’s war on truth. “We had a massive information gap,” Ambassador Nuland said. “We didn’t have the kind of intelligence assets where we could prove that he was lying about Russian involvement.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“As Kennan had written in the Long Telegram back in February 1946: “The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth—indeed, their disbelief in its existence—leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another.” Now the internet could magnify their clandestine ambitions a millionfold.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“On September 4, General Philip Breedlove, NATO’s top military commander, said this cascade of lies was an aspect of “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen.” The message from the Kremlin was that reality could be bent to its will, because objective truth did not exist, and thus falsehoods could trump facts.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“On July 17, Putin’s troops shot down a civilian plane, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17, bound from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, over southeastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. He insisted Russia had nothing to do with it. “Of course not!” he said indignantly. To counter the harsh facts, the Kremlin put a conspiracy theory out on the internet. “I saw people claiming the CIA had put dead bodies inside a plane and purposely shot it down to create propaganda against the Russian government,” said Sri Preston Kulkarni, the campaign director for the Ukraine Communications Task Force. “People were repeating that story again and again.… And I realized we had gone through the looking glass at that point and that if people could believe that, they could believe almost anything.” It took more than three years before the Dutch and Australian governments published an official report holding Russia responsible for shooting down the aircraft.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“Putin summoned Yanukovych to his home and ordered him to sign a backdated letter asking Russia to invade Ukraine. On March 18, he walked into the Kremlin and announced to thundering applause that Crimea was reunified with Russia. Putin had broken the rules, treaties, and understandings about the sovereignty of nations and the inviolability of borders that had kept the peace in Europe since World War II. No nation on earth had taken another’s land like this since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. And the Russians hadn’t fired a shot. Cyberwarfare, media manipulation, and psyops had done the trick. It was twenty-first-century political warfare at its most potent.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“As Yanukovych went underground, Putin led the closing ceremonies in Sochi and ordered Russian special-operations forces and troops based at the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet to seize Crimea’s airfields and its regional parliament. Thousands of Russian soldiers, their uniforms bearing no insignia, took control of the peninsula. Putin insisted that they were local militias. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu denied that Russian troops were in Crimea even as Ukrainian soldiers surrendered to them. The Ukrainians started calling the invaders “little green men,” evidently from outer space.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“Firtash was the Ukrainian middleman for Gazprom, the Russian state-run natural gas giant. Putin used the company as an instrument of statecraft and an engine of corruption. Firtash bought gas from Gazprom at a steep discount. He marked it up threefold when he sold it to Ukraine, pocketing $3 billion and paying pro-Russian politicians, chiefly Yanukovych, to do the Kremlin’s bidding. Through the oligarch’s largesse, the president paid Manafort his millions.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“The Ukrainian people would soon find out how ironclad these assurances were. The corrupt Viktor Yanukovych had returned to power in the last election, thanks to the efforts of the equally crooked political consultant Paul Manafort, whose office manager in Kyiv, Konstantin Kilimnik, had deep ties to Russian intelligence. Their paymasters included tycoons enmeshed with both organized crime and the Kremlin. Manafort collected many millions in fees from Yanukovych, laundering them in offshore accounts, and attracting the attention of the FBI, which began wiretapping him in a foreign intelligence investigation. Manafort also cut business deals with the country’s richest and most odious oligarchs, including Dmytro Firtash, a Putin crony and a prominent associate of Russian organized crime indicted on federal corruption charges in Chicago in October 2013.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“Shortly after Putin began his third term, a shadowy organization called the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm in Saint Petersburg financed by a Kremlin oligarch, began planning to target American voters, using techniques of disinformation and deception that it was already testing on Russian citizens and their neighbors in Eastern Europe.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“He saw “new propaganda” emerging, and he said its goal was “not to convince or persuade, but to keep the viewer hooked and distracted, passive and paranoid.” RT, which received more than $1 billion a year from the Kremlin, began to fine-tune its English-language shows, targeting the fringes of the American political spectrum on the right and the left.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“America had not done that. Its influence had fallen to a seventy-year ebb under Bush, and the inspirational rhetoric of Obama could not revive it. Promoting democracy and pushing back against Putin were not in the first rank of the new president’s priorities. He now was in charge of the war machinery of the Pentagon and the CIA, the lethal weapons of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, and as Obama sent more troops into Afghanistan and deployed a barrage of Predators and special-operations forces to hunt and kill America’s enemies abroad, the greatest part of the foreign policy of the United States was not executed by diplomats and democracy advocates but by soldiers and spies.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“No president ever had been left a more dismal legacy by his predecessor. Untamed fire had scorched the earth at home and abroad. Obama inherited a howling recession that wiped out millions of Americans’ jobs and savings; two wars, with 161,000 American troops in Iraq and 38,000 more in Afghanistan, some on their third and fourth tours of duty, their commanders with no clear goal in sight nor any glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel; and an American political warfare machine that now resembled a rusting 1948 Cadillac resting on cinder blocks. Bush had run it off the road.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“Georgia was hit with a massive coordinated cyberattack in the first minutes of the war. It immediately struck fifty-four websites in the capital of Tbilisi, obliterating news and information. In a few hours, one-third of the nation’s computer networks went down, including the official sites of Saakashvili, his government, and his ministries of defense and foreign affairs.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“On July 29, 2008, paramilitary forces in South Ossetia began shelling Georgian villages. On the night of August 7, the government panicked. The Georgian military launched artillery into the enclave’s provincial capital. And then the Russians struck after midnight. Putin’s tanks and troops rolled south, the first Russian military invasion of a sovereign nation in nearly thirty years,”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“The greatest lesson was this: “What they do to us we cannot do to them,” said Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the president of Estonia from 2006 to 2016. “Liberal democracies with a free press and free and fair elections are at an asymmetric disadvantage.… The tools of their democratic and free speech can be used against them.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“By 2006, they had created an international exemplar of interconnectedness. Estonian software engineers had not only created Skype; they were helping to build a new society, where the only rituals requiring you to show up in person and present a document were marriage, divorce, and buying property. Everything else was online—government, banking, finance, insurance, communications, broadcast and print media, the balloting for elections. Wi-Fi was strong, ever present, and free. People began to call their homeland e-Estonia. They had created the first country whose political and social architectures were framed by an internet infrastructure—and perhaps the most technologically sophisticated nation on earth. In April 2007, the authorities in Tallinn decided to move the Bronze Soldier from its pedestal to a military cemetery. Estonian patriots found it offensive, Russian nationalists came to Estonia to rally around it, and the statue became a flash point of confrontation. Russia’s foreign affairs minister, Sergey Lavrov, called the decision disgusting; he warned of serious consequences for Estonia. An angry mob of Russians ran riot in the capital. In Moscow, young thugs laid siege to the Estonian embassy and forced it to shut down. And then Putin waged political warfare in a way that made Estonia’s strength its weakness.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“On June 4, a secret cable from the American embassy in Estonia reported an epochal event with an eye-popping headline: “WORLD’S FIRST VIRTUAL ATTACK AGAINST NATION STATE.” “Estonia has been the victim of the world’s first coordinated cyberattacks against a nation state and its political and economic infrastructure,” the embassy report began. “For over a month, government, banking, media, and other Estonian websites, servers, and routers came under a barrage of cyberattacks.… Experts cite the nature and sophistication of the attacks as proof of Russian government complicity”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“Putin started spending hundreds of millions of dollars creating and running government-funded think tanks, foundations, and thinly disguised nongovernmental organizations, establishing branch offices for information warfare throughout Europe, seeking to shape public opinion and to co-opt Western experts, academics, and politicians. The Kremlin began cultivating relationships with right-wing political activists in Austria, Hungary, Italy, France, Germany, Britain, and across the Atlantic in America. It would support the far right and the far left simultaneously, so long as they were fighting one another or attacking a common enemy. To divide and conquer was a glorious goal—but to divide would do.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020

“Nations that had spent a thousand years under tyrants did not transform into free republics overnight because the United States wished them to do so. Elections alone did not a democracy make; they could bring strongmen to power and keep them there. Democracy, as it developed, could not be easily exported; it was not a commodity like soybeans or sneakers but an ideal that lived in the mind.”
― Tim Weiner, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020