(The Daily Beast)
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s domestic propaganda campaign has been telling people to hunker down, that they need to find ways to wall off the country from the West.
They need to protect their internet by cutting it off from the global web, the Kremlin suggests, otherwise Russia’s enemies might exploit social media to undermine the state. (The irony of such proclamations will not be lost on American readers.) And now Putin is talking about a really ominous sounding threat—to the very DNA of the Russian people.
The new buzzword among Russian authorities is “biodefense,” which at its most benign may mean taking a lead in the highly lucrative development of genetic editing techniques to cure diseases, grow better crops, and the like. But at its most sinister it takes on the coloration of eugenics, the discredited “science” of the 19th and early 20th centuries that promised to create superior humans based on racial and ethnic stereotypes. Read more