In Authoritarian Regimes, Incompetence is a Feature, not a Bug
When AZAL 8243 crashed in Kazakhstan, the cover stories were immediate…and immediately strained the bounds of credulity.
Fog!
Bird strike!
🙄
The only surprise, when photos emerged of shrapnel damage inside the fuselage, was that someone survived long enough on that plane to send pics to someone on the ground. Usually, civilian planes struck by military hardware don’t get very far. While this one did, it had to make it very far indeed, because all the nearby airports, coincidentally, refused to let the stricken plane land.
Awful institutions, like the administration of Chechnya and the entire apparatus of the Russian Federation it’s nested in (a regular matryoshka doll of awful, if ever there was one), are bad at the seemingly important stuff, like, you know, coordinating air defense with civilian air traffic control, but really good at other stuff. Having shot down the passenger airplane of an ostensible ally, someone in the bumbling military forces in Chechnya suddenly got very good at coordinating with the airports in Makhachkala and Mineralnye Vodi. Nope, sorry, can’t land here — ostensibly due to weather.
It might seem as if employing soldiers who shoot first and cover things up later is strategically dumb. Pretending to be V. V. Putin or Kadyrov (the living one or dead — it’s all the same), shouldn’t you want people who know how to spot the difference between unfriendly drones and friendly planes?
In a word, no, and that’s a lesson people in America had better learn, if they hope to understand how the rules are about to change here. See, we’re used to competence. We’re used to believing our people are the best at accomplishing things. Even our new overlord claims to have the “best people,” but he means it differently.
Most systems are built on power. Let’s not pretend that they’re not. Some, however, at least pay lip service to that power being in service of something other than itself. In the US, our laws are meant to be implemented by experts who have the technical knowledge to follow empirical evidence in furtherance of goals someone in power has said we want. That goes for the military and FAA alike.
In Russia and soon here in the US, there is a different logic. Raw power and force are the primary laws. Individual control doesn’t exist within the system — it is the system. Everything that doesn’t support that control is a threat.
And that includes competence.
People who are competent believe in something that is not the whim of power. They believe in processes and procedures designed to achieve an outcome. People like that are dangerous to a Kadyrov, a Putin, and yes, a Trump.
For Russian society as currently constructed, it worked perfectly fine to have a group of trigger-happy imbeciles in charge of Grozny air defense. Pretending to shoot down enemy drones (if there even ever were any) is infinitely more valuable than not shooting down civilian planes. It tells everyone in Chechnya the rules of the game and who’s in charge. When they do inevitably fuck a few things up (like a civilian plane), their value is only enhanced by telling the clumsiest, most bald-faced lies.
Being bad at shit is just another way of saying: we don’t have to be good at things. Being powerful means never having to get things right. Telling a believable cover story would also seem to imply: we have some compunction, so we feel the need to convincingly lie.
No, they don’t. Here, let’s tell people it was a (giggles uncontrollably) a bird strike! For good measure, let’s add “fog.” Nothing gives the lie to your lie like telling two at once.
Don’t feel too bad for Azerbaijan. Their leader knows how the game is played. While he may seem righteously indignant at Russia for the time being, he’s already cribbing from their own playbook. He’s calling Armenia fascist, the invader’s favoite pretext. His public castigation of Russia is probably meant mostly to disarm any instinct they might have of stepping between his country and the adjoining punching bag.
In the US, we’re not used to this sort of thing. The coverups around here have usually been pretty airtight. Maybe there’ll even be an NDA that gets signed. That’s all coming to an end, though, because presidents have now been declared immune from almost all consequence. Our incoming president has already said he prizes loyalty above all else. His cabinet picks show his disdain for competence: a drunk for defense secretary, an (alleged) double agent in charge of intelligence, a criminal for attorney general. Most importantly, let’s not forget the person in charge of human health, who believes (certain) vaccines are a hoax and who wants to point our valuable energy towards relitigating other settled science as superstition (i.e.: the scourge of fluoride instead of rotting teeth).
It’s not so much which way the wind is blowing as the way it smells: like a rancid fart, let out by someone sitting on your face.
The only thing people like this understand is force. Can they get their way? It used to be that competent people swore an oath to something they believed in and then — when asked to violate that oath — threatened to resign rather than carry out an unlawful command. That only works, if everyone is prepared to do it. All it takes to undermine even something as seemingly inviolable as the Constitution is enough people ready to play along.
Russia has plenty of those. People learn things after a quarter century of watching the obsequious get ahead and the principled get poisoned and/or thrown in jail and/or dropped out a window and/or gunned down behind a garbage truck on a downtown bridge.
In the US, for now, it’ll be hirings and firings; but the message will be much the same. You don’t have to be good to get a whole lot of attention. In fact, the worse you are, the more valuable you will be. Don’t be surprised if the enforcement of that gets more corporeal. Folks on the fringe have attacked before (Jan. 6th), and they’re about to be told in no uncertain terms that that was perfectly okay.
We pride ourselves on being a nation of independent non-conformists who are really good at building things, but we also fear being labeled a loser and losing influence. Just ask poor Zuckerberg. Despite being a billionaire in his own right, he’s already kowtowing to the veiled meaning of “free speech” and following in Elon’s footsteps to the new capital of the US: Texas.
It doesn’t bode well for us passing our upcoming pop quiz.
