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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1406767
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1406767
And all in Poland remember the Katyn Forest.
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Right.
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They also remember that Putin’s KGB was the direct lineal descendant of the NKVD that perpetrated that massacre, and others.
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In a normal reality, the person elected President of the United States in 2016 would NOT be someone who was an ally of such a man. There was ample evidence that this was the case
The blame goes to him, his minions, the GOP, the people who gave him free advertisement and those who failed to vote against him (by way of voting for him or abstaining).
Anything else is BothSider-ist double-talk
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This monument to Katyn Forest is right down the street from me in Toronto.I have a constant reminder.
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Thinking of the International Court of Justice in the Hague, I believe at this point, a charge of “Crimes Against Humanity” against Putin and his facilitators would also be appropriate.
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It’s the classic “I have to kill you for your own good, because I love you so much!”.
I say we show him some of that love. If ever there were an exception to not killing a foreign leader, this is it.
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I’m mostly concerned about what kind of classified intel Trump gave Putin, how much it pertains to the present situation, and whether we’ve had enough time to neutralize the worst of it, e.g. changing encryption methods and codes, scrambling nuke missile sub routes, altering various protocols, etc. Whatever was in place on 1/20/21 cannot be considered to be in any way safe, on a DEFCON 2 or even 1 level. I sincerely hope this is the case.
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I’ve been following the Holocaust scholar and Russian (and Polish and German and, maybe, Ukrainian) speaker Timothy Snyder on substack. He argues Putin is consciously working to empty terms like “Nazi,” “war crime,” or “genocide” of their meaning, precisely, as Prof Shkandrij points out, so that he may behave like the Nazis and commit war crimes with impunity. In this it seems to me the American authoritarian right is closest to Putin. If Dr. Fauci is another Josef Mengele, then Mengele was no big deal, doesn’t stand out. If the 2020 election was rigged and corrupt, then all elections are corrupt, and it’s just a matter of who you want in power. If Democrats are tyrants, then all leaders are tyrants, and it’s just a matter of making sure that your tyrant is in charge.
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Such subversion of language long preceded both Putin and Trump and has been going on for at least a century. They just chose to employ it. But I’m less concerned about words than acts right now. Words kill but over time. Nukes kill instantly.
Oh, sorry, wrong thread. Yeah, the abuse of language is war by other means.
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If it ever gets to the point of Putie being dragged in front of the ICJ, I wonder if he’ll flip on TFG to get a lighter sentence?
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They also remember what happened in the German occupation. It was the execution of the Polish intelligentsia basically; 60,000 of the most educated and influential Poles were executed by the Nazis during the first few years of German occupation. Poles were treated as serfs and chattle. This isn’t just about Russia, but also about the rhetoric that the Nazis used to justify their invasion AND occupation of Poland that resulted in millions of Poles dying. This is the >exact same rhetoric< that Putin has been using to justify his current invasion of Ukraine.
To Putin’s and his high commands’ credit so far, it seems that he has not made any significant military moves towards the western part of Ukraine so far. A significant part of western Ukraine was once part of Poland, prior to the Russian occupation in 1939-40. Moving Russian troops back into this area would remind the Poles and NATO even more about the Russian betrayal in 1939…and so far, afaik, there haven’t been any Russian troops sent to that region as occupiers.
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Stalin may have died an old man in his bed, but I doubt he slept a sound night’s sleep absent heavy sedation from the mid-30’s onward. So even the exception to the rule that ruthless dictators tend to die unnatural deaths isn’t a full exception. His betrayal of Poland and other countries was hardly his only crime against humanity.
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ICJ isn’t going to give a tinker’s damn about what Putin did or didn’t do with our elections; they’ll quite rightly consider that a domestic problem for us to solve, or not. Their remit is international stuff, Nuremberg stuff, Crimes Against Peace, that kind of thing.
The TFG part is all on us, and I would not bet against Liz Cheney. Or Adam Schiff either.
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Slowly, too.
Really Bad Idea no matter how you slice it.
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Both.
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I am reminded that politics, international relations, and war, all seem a lot funnier, when one does not have children, and grand children.
I mean, man, I picked the wrong damned week to give up sniffing glue.
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Ukrainians also have not forgotten the Holodomor, Stalin’s intentional weaponization of famine which starved to death something like four million Ukrainians. Stalin literally stole all the food he could in Ukrainian, and shipped it east.
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