Of special interest: Perun on how corruption, politics, and lies destroy armies [I would add: and republics, bureaucracies, corporations]

Am I the last person in the blogosphere to have noticed the enigmatic Australian vlogger “Perun“?

Originally he was a strategy gaming blogger — Perun is the chief idol of the ancient Slavic pagan pantheon — but since the beginning of the Ukraine war he’s been posting some very astute commentary.

And the following videos are of great interest not just for the Ukraine war, and not just for armchair strategists — but for anyone trying to understand the dynamics of large organizations, especially once they become corrupt and/or riven by power games.

The three videos are an hour long each, but are essentially thoughtful lectures that by an large can be listened to like podcasts — the sort of thing I do when taking care of stuff around the house, or exercising.

Links below since embedding seems to be disabled:

How politics destroys armies.

How corruption destroys armies.

How [a culture of] lies destroys armies.

I will try to blog TL;DR summaries later. There’s a ton to unpack there. Just a few keywords as a jumpoff point:

• polycracy: multiple competing agencies or armies with overlapping responsibilities — either grew organically or (in the Third Reich and in Putin’s Russia) a situation deliberately engineered to ensure nobody can compete with “Dear Leader”
• vranyo: you are talking BS, everybody knows you’re talking BS, you know that everybody knows, everybody knows that you know… but everybody pretends to believe it.
• corruption at all levels — and lower-level people being corrupted by what they see at higher echelons. (“Why should we peons suffer while the fat cats enrich themselves?”)
• the traits that are most productive for survival in political competition are not the same as those for competency at the job. It’s not that the system selects for incompetence — somebody who’s truly disastrous may lose their power base — but while high competence is a “nice to have”, great skill at political maneuvering is “essential” for political survival in such systems.
• “Grey corruption” (what I generally call “sleaze”) as a term for forms of corruption, influence peddling, and quid-pro-quo (“mutual back-scratching”) that aren’t technically illegal in the system where one is working.[*]

[*] I regard, for example, our “Case 4000“, where PM Netanyahu allegedly offered favorable regulatory changes to a media magnate in exchange for more favorable coverage of him, as classic “grey corruption” — likely, no law was broken here since no money or goods exchanged hands, but it sure as heck was sleazy.