You don't miss the point entirely but this approach sought to influence and manipulate generations, yes, but did so by looking for weakness/hate/insecurity and developing that. Not just in adults/useful fools at specific points in time but more importantly entire youthful cohorts/generations and feed a narrative through impressionable years. It has been very effective.
I think the problem there is that every country, especially hostile countries, do that when they feel they need to or could get an advantage out of it.
The problem is not the influence, its the people causing the weakness that allows the influence to be applied - the people who refuse to do anything about growing inequality, those who actively foster division and resentment amongst the working class in order to preserve their own hold on power, the people who are clearly incompetent but refuse to get out of the way or to have their power challenged.
I mean look at Johnson - yes, he had funding from Russians and yes, there is this thing with Lebedev but that was not why he became an MP, not why he rose to prominence, not why he became PM, not why he won in 2019 and not why he was able to stay in power through rivers of sleaze, fabrication and malpractice. He was able to do that because he had bucketloads of help from the papers, from the Tories, and ultimately from most of the political-media class. They will even back him now, if they think they can get away with it (as in if Sunak fails or especially if he fixes a lot of the problems Johnson caused).
If people genuinely want to stop Russian influence operations, fix the problems in our society first.
bigthink.com
