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Before joining NATO, each country had to establish civilian control of its army. Before joining the European Union, each adopted laws on trade, judiciary, human rights. As a result, they became democracies. This was “democracy promotion” working as it never has before or since.

— Anne Applebaum The Myth of Russian Humiliation (2014)

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Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity [...].

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The archival record backs up the testimony of the survivors. Neither crop failure nor bad weather caused the famine in Ukraine.

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The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to China, Russia, and other autocracies is very long.

Putin’s overt attempt to destroy a political opponent has a logic: If [Alexei] Navalny is showing his countrymen how to be courageous, Putin wants to show them that courage is useless.

If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Anne Applebaum (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.