D-Day 80 Years On
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ALEX’S WEEKLY RANT
I will admit I got rather emotional watching the ceremonies commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day. The Greatest Generation fought, and many of them died, for something many people today are willing to throw away: freedom and democracy.
We throw those words around without much thought, but I’ve been to places that don’t have freedom and democracy. You don’t want to lose them.
I would like to highlight this passage from US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s speech:
“We still seek a world where aggression is a sin and human rights are sacred and all people can live in freedom. So, we must rally again to defend the open, postwar world of rules, rights and responsibilities. Those rules protect us. Those rights define us. And those responsibilities summon us once more. …We must again stand against aggression and tyranny. You saved the world. And we must only defend it."
Too many people today disagree that a similar tyranny is the enemy. Many of our political leaders like that tyranny. Many ordinary people do, too.
In Europe, there is palpable fear about the November election, that America is gone just as another tyrannical enemy is at the gates. As McKay Coppins wrote in The Atlantic, the word that keeps coming up is “existential.” I’ve heard it, too, in conversations with friends across Europe, anxiety that America won’t lift a finger to help Europe should Russia expand its war.
In fact, Russia has already expanded the war. The information war is warping reality and the very notion of truth (for more, see my Foreign Influence Operations course). And, as I’ve written previously, Russian sabotage operations are on the rise across the continent.
This week, French police arrested a Russian-Ukrainian man on bomb-making charges. He was found with guns, false passports, and bomb-making equipment. One theory is that he planned to blow up French military equipment bound for Ukraine. Yet another sign of increased Russian-fueled and Russian-funded violence coming our way.
Meanwhile, as the Financial Time wrote, Europe is struggling to respond to Russia’s hybrid attacks, which are also getting increasingly dangerous as Russia outsources such operations to criminal organizations, since so many Russian intelligence officers have been kicked out of Europe.
Today’s is a different kind of war than that of 80 years ago, but it is a war against tyranny. I wish more of our political leaders took today’s fight as seriously as the men and women who saved the world 80 years ago.
THE WEEK’S LINKS
A roundup of things you should be reading
RUSSIAN INFLUENCE OPERATIONS
Revealed: Russian legal foundation linked to Kremlin activities in Europe (The Guardian)
RUSSIAN MONEY LAUNDERING
Russians bought up $6.3B in Dubai property after 2022 Ukraine invasion (ICIJ)
RUSSIAN WEDDINGS
Rupert Murdoch marries Roman Abramovich’s former mother-in-law (BBC)
Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. She writes and teaches about terrorism, disinformation / covert influence, and oligarch yachts. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Reductress, Funny or Die, POLITICO, The Center for Public Integrity, and other publications. She has spoken to the BBC, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, France24, and numerous other media outlets. She was also invited once to speak at Harvard, which she now tells everyone within the first ten seconds of meeting them. She is the author of the Victor Caro series, satirical novels about the CIA. Before joining the CIA, Alex was a journalist, covering Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy. She reported on issues related to national security, intelligence, and homeland security. Did she mention she was invited to speak at Harvard?
The cavalier attitude of today's Canadian and American "political generation" is disheartening. While I support environmental concerns which seem to be at the top of the 'agenda', I believe we have to realize that if we don't deal with the greater external and internal threat to our security, environment won't matter. Now is the time to build back our security infrastructures to meet the external challenges of Putin, Modi and Xi and potentially the internal security threats in America. This may mean temporarily moving resources from other government priorities to the defense of our democratic institutions.
For example the Canadian Government has recently revealed that some politicians who won office in the last election were knowingly and with forethought working on behalf of off shore "clients". For this they were rewarded. And yet they continue to participate in the democratic process that they would see dismantled or at a minimum disrupted. Stunningly insane!!