Michael Weiss: Conspiracy theory playbook
A portrait of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad sits on a table before a press conference by Buthaina Shaaban, special envoy of the President, in New Delhi, India, Friday, March 8, 2013.
It pays to remember that Syria’s intelligence, and most of its political elite, were trained in the Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Russia – and not just in how to torture and kill people. The IQ, consistency and logical cohesion of state-relayed propaganda in Damascus owes a great deal to prior tutelage in Moscow, as the latest developments in the Ukraine crisis have nicely demonstrated.
