Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler...
Posted: Fri May 16, 2014 4:20 am
Let me begin by stipulating that Vladimir Putin is not as bad as Adolf Hitler...
Vladimir Putin has not organized mass murder on an industrial assembly line scale, (as Hitler did) nor has he plunged the world into a war that left tens of millions dead...
However, " not as bad as Adolf Hitler" doesn't mean you can't still be very, very bad indeed...
(Hopefully, "not as bad as Adolf Hitler" hasn't become the standard for acceptable international behavior...)
All of that having been said, there are certainly some legitimate comparisons that can be made between Putin's behavior and that of Der Führer...(And perhaps more importantly, comparisons between the response of The West to Hitler, and its response to Putin)
(A lot of these comparisons have already been accurately made; the use of special forces to create a false impression of "ethnic repression", in turn used to justify military action, etc...)
Hitler, like Putin, was driven by a singular defining event; in Hitler's case it was Germany's defeat in The Great War, and The Treaty Of Versailles...which in his view, brought shame and humiliation to Germany that needed to be avenged...
In Putin's case, it was the Collapse of the Soviet Union...which in his view, brought shame and humiliation to Russia, that needed to be avenged...
The Western Powers of that era did not believe that Hitler was serious about the views he laid out in Mein Kampf, any more than The Western Powers of today believed Putin was serious when he described the Collapse Of The Soviet Union as " the greatest catastrophe of the 20th Century..." (Really? your own country lost 30 million people in WWII...hello?)
And now Putin, (again like Hitler) is enjoying the adulation of a people suffering from a sense of wounded national pride, (he would have been tossed out in the last vote had it been counted fairly, but the latest polls have him with a 80% approval rating) by restoring their sense of Russian Honor; acquiring territory without firing a shot...
Just as Hitler did in Austria, and The Sudetenland...
The time has come to deal with this mess
Vladimir Putin has not organized mass murder on an industrial assembly line scale, (as Hitler did) nor has he plunged the world into a war that left tens of millions dead...
However, " not as bad as Adolf Hitler" doesn't mean you can't still be very, very bad indeed...
(Hopefully, "not as bad as Adolf Hitler" hasn't become the standard for acceptable international behavior...)
All of that having been said, there are certainly some legitimate comparisons that can be made between Putin's behavior and that of Der Führer...(And perhaps more importantly, comparisons between the response of The West to Hitler, and its response to Putin)
(A lot of these comparisons have already been accurately made; the use of special forces to create a false impression of "ethnic repression", in turn used to justify military action, etc...)
Hitler, like Putin, was driven by a singular defining event; in Hitler's case it was Germany's defeat in The Great War, and The Treaty Of Versailles...which in his view, brought shame and humiliation to Germany that needed to be avenged...
In Putin's case, it was the Collapse of the Soviet Union...which in his view, brought shame and humiliation to Russia, that needed to be avenged...
The Western Powers of that era did not believe that Hitler was serious about the views he laid out in Mein Kampf, any more than The Western Powers of today believed Putin was serious when he described the Collapse Of The Soviet Union as " the greatest catastrophe of the 20th Century..." (Really? your own country lost 30 million people in WWII...hello?)
And now Putin, (again like Hitler) is enjoying the adulation of a people suffering from a sense of wounded national pride, (he would have been tossed out in the last vote had it been counted fairly, but the latest polls have him with a 80% approval rating) by restoring their sense of Russian Honor; acquiring territory without firing a shot...
Just as Hitler did in Austria, and The Sudetenland...
The time has come to deal with this mess