"Icarus" - watch this movie this weekend. (Brookings: "To understand Russian election interference")

[american_ideals]

To Understand Russian Election Interference, Start with this Movie About Doping

https://www.lawfareblog.com/understand-russian-election-interference-start-movie-about-doping

Some spoilers below. I recommend watching the movie first.

Icarus is not about L’Affaire Russe or Russian intererence with the 2016 election. But if you want to understand L’Affaire Russe, you should watch it. Because Icarus is the story of the Russian government’s corruption of the integrity of supposedly neutral international processes and its use of covert action to tamper with those processes. If that sounds a little familiar, it should. It is easy to substitute in one’s mind as one watches this film a foreign country’s electoral system for the elaborate anti-doping testing regime whose systematic circumvention and undermining Icarus portrays. The corruption of process is similar. The motivation—the elevation of Russian national pride—significantly overlaps. The lies about it in the face of evidence are indistinguishable. And the result in both cases is a legitimacy crisis, of Olympic medals in one case and of a presidential election in another—a crisis which produces investigation and scandal.

Icarus is too good a film to make such a heavy-handed comparison explicitly. The film actually doesn’t offer any direct evidence that Fogel was even thinking about it. But if he wasn’t, the movie’s release in the middle of L’Affaire Russe is an extraordinarily well-timed thematic coincidence. Into the scandal and legitimacy crisis caused by Russian covert tampering in one complex system, Fogel drops an exquisitely well-told story of Russian tampering in another—and the scandal and fallout from it.

Trailer: