Tom Paine 1949
Diamond Member
- Mar 15, 2020
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Here is an excerpt of an article by an independent South African newspaper publisher criticizing his own government’s support to Vladimir Putin. It deals with one terrible and truly insane aspect of the mad “history lesson” Putin recently gave to our own rightwing “infotainer” Tucker Carlson. I reproduce a short part of it here hoping it will help some of our own Putin apologists to calmly reconsider where their infatuation with strongman authoritarian “Putinism” is actually leading them.
***
Our government’s great friend Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is no ordinary politician.
He is a product — and seemingly still a prisoner — of the Cold War. In his Soviet years, history was something to reimagine and rewrite according to the current needs and ideologies.
So when he referred to the events of September 1939, with [Tucker] Carlson sporting his trademark clueless face, he did not talk about the inconvenience of the Soviet Union invading the very same “stubborn” Poland from the east, just 16 days after Hitler’s forces did.
He did not say anything about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which aligned Stalin’s Soviet Union with Hitler’s Nazi Germany and was signed on 23 August 1939; it led to the occupation of Poland by both Germany and USSR …
He did not talk about the 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war murdered in the Katyn forest by the Soviet army [in April-May, 1940].
(Eventually, some 20-27 million Soviet people died in the war — including Putin’s elder brother — after Hitler attacked the USSR on 22 June 1941. Together with 6 million Poles and an estimated 6 million Jews across different countries, between 70 and 85 million people perished in those six years of madness.)
Today, Putin is happy to rewrite history, incomprehensibly accuse Ukraine and Poland of being heirs to Nazism, and invest billions into his state propaganda machinery to make his fiction permanent.
Two years after he attacked Ukraine, he can still count on South Africa as a steady and loyal ally. We’ve helped the Russians in every way possible, including causing possibly lasting damage to our international reputation within the circle of the world’s democracies.
Our government has been a friend where many a more circumspect country would have given up.
Putin justified Hitler’s invasion of Poland; South Africa must denounce him
***
Our government’s great friend Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is no ordinary politician.
He is a product — and seemingly still a prisoner — of the Cold War. In his Soviet years, history was something to reimagine and rewrite according to the current needs and ideologies.
So when he referred to the events of September 1939, with [Tucker] Carlson sporting his trademark clueless face, he did not talk about the inconvenience of the Soviet Union invading the very same “stubborn” Poland from the east, just 16 days after Hitler’s forces did.
He did not say anything about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which aligned Stalin’s Soviet Union with Hitler’s Nazi Germany and was signed on 23 August 1939; it led to the occupation of Poland by both Germany and USSR …
He did not talk about the 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war murdered in the Katyn forest by the Soviet army [in April-May, 1940].
(Eventually, some 20-27 million Soviet people died in the war — including Putin’s elder brother — after Hitler attacked the USSR on 22 June 1941. Together with 6 million Poles and an estimated 6 million Jews across different countries, between 70 and 85 million people perished in those six years of madness.)
Today, Putin is happy to rewrite history, incomprehensibly accuse Ukraine and Poland of being heirs to Nazism, and invest billions into his state propaganda machinery to make his fiction permanent.
Two years after he attacked Ukraine, he can still count on South Africa as a steady and loyal ally. We’ve helped the Russians in every way possible, including causing possibly lasting damage to our international reputation within the circle of the world’s democracies.
Our government has been a friend where many a more circumspect country would have given up.
Putin justified Hitler’s invasion of Poland; South Africa must denounce him
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