SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: Corruption in the Western imagination is always somewhere else.

https://x.com/nxt888/status/2069483503675392030

Corruption in the Western imagination is always somewhere else.

It is the African official with the Swiss bank account. The Latin American strongman skimming from the infrastructure budget. The Asian bureaucrat with his envelope of cash.

It is never the defense contractor who writes the legislation that funds his own contracts.

It is never the pharmaceutical company that buys the regulatory agency that is supposed to contain it.

It is never the financial sector that crashed the global economy, received trillions in public money, prosecuted no one, paid its bonuses that year, and then funded the think tanks that wrote the papers explaining why this outcome was the correct one.

That is not called corruption in the Western taxonomy.

That is called lobbying.

That is called the revolving door.

That is called campaign finance.

That is called public-private partnership.

That is called the market correcting itself.

The terminology is doing everything.

Corruption requires a deviation from a norm.

When the plunder becomes the norm, when the extraction is the system rather than a violation of it, the word corruption no longer applies.

And that is precisely when the rot is most complete.

When you can no longer name what is happening to you because the people who control the language decided it doesn't have a name.