{"id":6764,"date":"2011-09-30T11:00:12","date_gmt":"2011-09-30T10:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=6764"},"modified":"2011-09-30T11:02:10","modified_gmt":"2011-09-30T10:02:10","slug":"ever-heard-of-a-potemkin-village","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=6764","title":{"rendered":"Ever heard of a Potemkin village?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week, I attend a meeting of a Board on which I serve and on this occasion we were addressed by a very senior civil servant. At one point, he used the term &#8220;a Potemkin village&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>I have never heard the term before. Once the civil servant had departed, I inquired of my colleagues and none of them was familiar with the term either.<\/p>\n<p>As so often, Wikipedia comes to the rescue with <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Potemkin_village\">this explanation<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>So now I know that the term is a reference to &#8220;fake settlements purportedly erected at the direction of Russian minister Grigory Potemkin to fool Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787&#8221;. Except that the subterfuge may never have happened. Fascinating &#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week, I attend a meeting of a Board on which I serve and on this occasion we were addressed by a very senior civil servant. At one point, he used the term &#8220;a Potemkin village&#8221;. I have never heard the term before. Once the civil servant had departed, I inquired of my colleagues and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6764"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6769,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6764\/revisions\/6769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}