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About the author



Danielle Ryan is an Irish freelance writer based in Dublin. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Nation, Rethinking Russia, teleSUR, RBTH, The Calvert Journal and others. Follow her on Twitter @DanielleRyanJ

Corruption is in the Russian DNA. Sharing is not a Russian trait. The Russians are genetically driven to lie. In an increasingly politically-correct media landscape, "the Russians" are still fair game.Go on, try it. I promise, you can say nearly anything you want about the Ruskies without any repercussions at all. Take journalist Josh Barro - always my favorite example. On Twitter - a veritable cesspit of anti-Russian sentiment - he mused a few years ago that Russia has been a "dystopic shithole since the dawn of history" and offered that Russian national pride was a peculiarity, "given how little they have to be proud of."The latest offender is the Atlantic, with a long-read by Franklin Foer about how "Russian-style Kleptocracy" is "infiltrating" the United States - complete with shady red and black artwork intended to drive home the point: Russia is bad, bad, bad.The thrust of the piece is that the collapse of the Soviet Union and emergence of Russia in the 1990s demonstrated how the world's growing interconnectedness "could be deployed for ill." As corrupt Russians shoveled state money into private bank accounts across Europe and the US, innocent America watched in dismay.Congress told itself the "comforting story" that the corruption was not the norm, that "criminal outliers" and "rogue profiteers" were rushing to exploit the weakness of a new state and that good old American-style "democratic capitalist values" would win out in the end.In this rendition of history, the US almost unwittingly "allowed" itself to become an "accomplice" to plunder against its better nature. Foer writes of the era that it was a risky time when "Russian values" might be allowed to "infect" and weaken the "moral defense systems" of American politics and business. With such a corrupting influence, the US could never emerge "untainted."The article details how plundered Russian wealth easily found its way to New York, London, Los Angeles, and Miami and was welcomed with open arms by Americans who enriched themselves by enabling it, while everyone else heralded a globalist world "that would take on the best values of America."Of course, in reality, Russian influence was not infecting an otherwise moral system. Capitalism was simply feeding itself, as it does by its very nature.To be fair, the author of the Atlantic piece does acknowledge the corruptions which already existed in the US, where he says one NGO highlighted the fact that procuring a library card required "more identification in many states" than "creating an anonymous shell company." He admits that sanctimonious Americans, unscrupulous as anyone else, colluded with crooks of other nationalities to enrich themselves further. The process, he says, fuelled suspicions that"the whole idea of liberal capitalism is a hypocritical sham."Corruption does not have a nationality; corrupt elites are a class of their own who aid and abet each other in pursuit of greater wealth. Yet, the overarching narrative of the piece is that a once-moral US was corrupted by the foreign barbarians at the gate. Similar examples are endless. A recent New York Times article argued that corruption is in the Russian "DNA" and that sharing is "not the Russian way." Former US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has argued that Russians are genetically predisposed to lying and cheating.Even the Russian language has been almost criminalized. As though we were living in the 1950s, Cyrillic is again used and abused in the most ridiculous, nonsensical ways, its letters regularly misused by mainstream news shows, in magazines or on book covers, to imply the innate shadiness of something.The problem is almost as bad in Britain, where last year the BBC displayed a backdrop showing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as a Lenin-type figure standing in front of a reddened image of St. Basil's Cathedral - often used as a more recognizable replacement for the Kremlin, because, well, who cares? It's only Russia.It's easy to dismiss this kind of criticism as nitpicking, but words matter. Media framing is powerful. This anti-Russian xenophobia has become mainstream - and sometimes it seems the perpetrators don't even know they're engaging in it.We should keep pointing it out until they do.