On the Benefits of US Investigations

The other day, U.S. prosecutors decided to declare themselves the supreme arbiter of international soccer affairs, right in line with the now nearly forgotten Komsomol slogan, “Everything is our business!”* Or as the sergeant might have said: if you really need to, it’s possible to find fault even with a pole.**

It’s an exciting, pertinent and multi-layered topic. Then you remember that in order to get the World Cup, Germany allowed arms deliveries to Saudi Arabia and shared technology with the Koreans. But is that really a crime? Do parties and factions in parliaments really not engage in horse trading? We make political concessions to you, and you give us a vote of confidence. If the political entities act within the confines of the law and generally accepted ethics, that’s what you call democracy.

Thanks to the Americans’ demarche, it’s been made clear that they view the mechanisms of democracy differently, confusing them with lobbying, i.e., institutionalized corruption. Each judges for himself what it’s called. But in reality, U.S. prosecutors have every right to investigate the circumstances surrounding the selection of the U.S. itself for the 1994 World Cup. By the way, the media made mention of the fact that the FBI had been gathering information for 24 years, that is, right before the 1994 World Cup began.

In general, corruption is very bad. There’s just one thing that’s even worse, and that’s when corrupt officials start to “fight corruption” for corrupt purposes. An example of such a fight by corrupt officials for the levers of power in Kiev is happening right before everyone’s eyes. There, as well, for a quarter of a century, the U.S. has paid off corrupt officials, supported them, and then decided to sacrifice their very own allies, using them as a battering ram to exacerbate the world situation.

Yet it’s more important that not only is everyone’s business their business, but their business is everyone else’s business too. So the other day, Kaspersky Lab, which neutralized a new and very expensive military computer virus, proposed an international democratic investigation of an unnamed government’s role in disseminating computer viruses and launching cyberattacks via vulnerabilities in the Microsoft operating system.

The coup in Kiev and the war crimes in the Donbass will also be the subject of an international judicial inquiry in accordance with the results of the investigations we’ve already begun. And likewise, without a doubt, there will be investigations by the international community not only into the crimes of Islamic State terrorists, but also into the facts of complicity, creation of conditions and even supplies directly provided by external forces.

And it might help to conduct an international investigation into the disappearance of film shot by the astronauts on the moon, or where the 880 lbs of lunar soil, no longer on view to the public, is hidden. No, we’re by no means saying they didn’t fly to the moon and just made a movie. But all of these scientific or perhaps cultural artifacts are mankind’s heritage, and their disappearance without a trace is our shared loss, as the investigation will show.

So, our American colleagues’ initiative, even if legally preposterous, may find quite a reasonable means to continue as part of a whole wave of international democratic investigations. And then it’s altogether possible that American ambassadors will stop dictating to heads of state and even to the Pope, how and what to do with Russia.

And international federations will stop changing the program of the Olympic Games or the rules if suddenly Russia wins again, even in new disciplines known only in America. The main thing is to keep up with our American partners by fully responding in kind to their actions.

*Editor’s note: the Komsomol was the youth organization controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

**Translator’s note: Here the author is likely referencing some variant of the joke in which a man who wishes to join the local police force is asked by a senior officer if he can find fault with a lamp post. When the man replies that he doesn’t understand, another officer demonstrates by approaching a lamp post and lambasting it for various absurd violations.