"The media squabble over Shchepotin’s final day at the Cancer Institute, and the doubts it raised over the motivation of all concerned, were appropriate, because the most corrosive aspect of corruption is the way that it undermines trust. When corruption is widespread, it becomes impossible to know whom to believe, since the money infects every aspect of state and society. Every newspaper article can be criticized as paid for, every politician can be called corrupt, every court decision can be called into question. Charities are set up by oligarchs to lobby for their interests, and those then provoke doubts about every other non-governmental organization. If even doctors are on the take, can you trust their diagnoses? Are they claiming a patient needs treatment only because that would be to their profit? If policemen are crooked, and courts are paid for, are criminals really criminals? Or are they honest people who interfered in criminals’ business? Not knowing whom to believe, you retreat into trusting only those closest to you—your oldest friends, and your relatives—and that reinforces the divisions in society that corruption thrives on. It is impossible to build a thriving economy, or a healthy democracy, without a society whose members fundamentally trust each other. If you take that away, you are left with something far darker and more mercenary."
n R It was not the torture that shocked Israel. It was the fact that someone leaked it. Welcome to Sde Teiman — the desert detention camp that became a mirror to Israel’s moral decay, and to the world’s selective blindness. The Scene of the Crime The story begins, like most horror stories do these days, with a camera. On July 5, 2024, security footage inside the Sde Teiman military base caught what it was never meant to record: a Palestinian prisoner, blindfolded, bound, and dragged across the floor by Israeli soldiers. Moments later, the soldiers raised shields to block the camera — and behind that human wall, the real Israel revealed itself. When the shields dropped , the man lay broken: seven fractured ribs, a punctured lung, and a torn rectum so severe it required surgery and a colostomy. The anatomy of cruelty was complete. The Scandal That Wasn’t You would think such a crime would set off national outrage. But in Israel’s political universe , torture is an...
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