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December 06, 2005
Russia's No-Go NGOs
It is a classic technique of brickbat negotiation to announce an outrageous and unilateral measure and then allow oneself to be talked down from the precipice by partners whose panic is so complete that a few tiptoes' backpedaling is sufficient to win gasps and adulations of relief.
Though as yet the panicked register but a murmur ("For Liberal Parties, a Win of Sorts in Moscow"), Putin's anti-NGO plan in Russia, staked as it's been as far out on the scale of free society as one can get without dropping into closed society, is on the mannered retreat of staged compromise.
But in an eyebrow-raising parallel action, we learn from the Moscow Times of plans "in the works to set up a Washington-based think tank that would be funded with Russian money and combat the U.S. perception of Russia 'as a bad pupil.'" The Nixon center, contrary to rumor, is not involved in any such project. [Corrected in accordance with Dec. 5 press release.] Regardless, before we being hurling stones across time zones at state-sponsored private-sector advocacy, we should take care not to heft by accident evidence of our own public-private collusive absurdities -- state-enforced digital television...
Posted by James G. Poulos at December 6, 2005 12:09 PM
