Putinland

A despicable act is particularly reprehensible when the perpetrators have had every chance to know better. In the 21st century, behaving like barbarians wanting to resurrect the evils of the past is especially vile.

My opinion has long been that Putin is a psychopathic gangster boss with a corrupt state under his brutal control; yet another despot who murdered anyone perceived as a threat, perverted any justice in government institutions, deceived his people, and stole from his country, like all these types of thugs do. My surprise lately is that he has also shown himself to be colossally stupid. He will lose, the only uncertainty is the amount of destruction he will cause the world in his downfall.

I remember once being in a London restaurant with three Russian women (a long story), when one of them proudly told me that her father was an ex-KGB officer, as if it were a laudable signal of status for her family. What shocked me was that it didn’t seem to cross any of their minds that I equate that bunch of killers with the Gestapo; that I think of it as a violent instrument of the depraved monsters in power that subjugated, tortured and murdered so many people. The reality of the fact seemed to be completely inverted by them away from the appropriate emotions of shame and regret.

Russia, after over thirty years since the collapse of the horrific soviet empire, with all its vast natural resources at its disposal, should not have a tiny, rotten economy, with a GDP per head of an impoverished country. Putinland’s main exports have been weapons and the planet-killing fuels extracted from within its own borders; it creates nothing, except the miseries of war.