Читать книгу This World is Built on Lies - Vladimir Rojankovski - Страница 4

When I was younger, I never followed international political events, because I considered politics to be inferior to the economy and finance. I was addicted to learning about world markets and the economy, but the global tug of war has been intensifying and more and more overshadowing everything to the extent that today we can no longer see the world markets and the principles of free trade in their original formats. Today the global markets are driven by rhetoric and, sometimes, the actions of top politicians more than at any time before, let alone by fair valuations.

Yet another reason for the change in my holistic worldview is the sad story of my cross-continental relationship with my parents and younger brother who now live in Nevada, and to whom our annual Christmas family-unity visits were, until recently, a no-brainer. Whereas for many people with same cross-destinations, this issue might be mostly economical, in my situation, although the ruble, along with my ruble-expressed income, devalued by 50% since the beginning of 2014, this is not the main obstacle. The diplomatic wars instigated by governments and the overall atmosphere of growing mutual mistrust are.

My valued prospective reader will most likely raise at least three questions addressing the issues of this book: a) why I think I have something to say? b) given that, why is this book so short? c) assuming the far-flung conclusions, why is it so much country-specific?

“Why me” would be the most difficult question to tackle. I hope the evidence and concrete cases presented in this book will be very much intuitive and familiar to most of us, so my role here is not anything prominent, i.e. just to summarize stuff while avoiding, as much as possible, being opinionated. I feel eligible for this kind of work through my extensive periods of living and working in various countries around the world such as Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. I figured out that most people – even those who are fond of traveling – still prefer to settle somewhere to build their consistent careers assuming uninterrupted smooth CVs, but this is certainly not the case for me.

The reduced format of this book owes much to my own experience tackling finding time to read many masterpieces of various valuable authors. My Amazon Kindle app is stuffed with unfinished readings of books by Jeffrey Sachs, Thomas Palley, Madeleine Albright, Naomi Klein, Peter Schweiser and Stephen Roach. I feel upset with myself, but there is not much I can do about it: I hope to finish them when I am retired at the latest. So I have committed to respect the precious time of my respected readers, and not waste it for lengthy narration devoted to anything secondary beyond the essence. Since this is not a fiction book nor a biography per se, I will try to be as concise as I can, merely following a classic reporting approach – let’s say, using a British business school template (one of which, the University of Kent, I had the honor to attend): Define objective, find information sources, collect and analyze data, present support cases and draw a conclusion.

Finally, it is, indeed, very country-specific. This book should have included more case studies from the US – China and the US – Europe (particularly the US – the UK), but there are lots of more knowledgeable authors out there, so I yield to their more ad hoc expertise. I hope it will still suffice.

Wherever I had an opportunity to live and work – be it Lviv, Moscow, London, New York or Los Angeles – I have always had great people around me who became my multilingual and multinational friends. These friendships weren’t built on formal handshakes or by waving hands through the windows of limousines. One of my greatest friends was a young man Hassan from Damascus who used to study with me at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute (now the Moscow State Technical University). I feel compelled to say how much I value these relationships that I have kept sound and rewarding through many years and hundreds or thousands miles that separate us from each other – especially thanks to the contemporary social networks.