This Monkey’s Gone to Heaven

“The aggressor must be aware that retaliation is inevitable, that they will be destroyed. And we, the victims of aggression, as martyrs, will go to heaven, while they will just die, because they will not even have time to repent,” Putin said.

While there was obviously nothing to like about Vladimir Putin in his earlier incarnations as KGB officer, deputy mayor of Petersburg, FSB head, interim prime minister who relaunched the Chechen War, and Russia’s newly minted, apparently sober second president, it is clear that twenty years in office have now made him a stark raving lunatic.

I wish that Russians in their millions, frightened into action by what their nominal national leader said the other day, would rise to save the world from this menace. In reality, too many Russians have either bought the new party line hook, line, and sinker or disappeared into various modes of actual and internal emigration.

The much smaller groups of Russians who bravely try and combat Putinism and its cancers are badly outnumbered and increasingly embattled. Just read this website from time to time to find out what I mean.

Maybe I am exaggerating a little, but not as much as even I would like to think.

I apologize for this outburst, because mine is supposed to be a website about other Russias and other Russians. It would be sheer escapism, however, to claim that even the freest, boldest hearts in the world’s largest country are not affected by the regime’s downward spiral into a fascist, militarist, police-state abyss. {TRR}