EDITORIAL: We Told you So

EDITORIAL

We Told you So

On September 28, 2011, a perfect metaphor for the horror that is Vladimir Putin’s Russia appeared in The Independent, which has over the years been responsible for some of the toughest and most insightful reporting on Russia (hat tip: Streetwise Professor).

The paper wrote about how thousands upon thousands of stray dogs roam the streets of Moscow, how they have killed Muscovites in packs and how they pose all manner of serious health concerns, to say nothing of betraying Russia’s eternal poverty regardless of the propaganda the state may churn out.  Yet Russians, idiots that they are, are fighting to keep these dogs on the streets, and do what they can to care for them.

Similarly Josef Stalin is beloved by Russians, even though he murdered more of them than any other person who ever lived.

And similarly, the proud KGB spy and murderer of Starovoitova, of Litvinenko, of Politikovskaya, of Yushenkov, of Shchekochikhin, of Girenko, of Klebnikov, of Kozlov, of Estemirova, of Markelov and of so very many others, known as Vladimir Putin, is being embraced as he declares himself president for life. Lenin, Stalin, Putin.

On April 2, 2006, we warned the world that it would be so.

We formed this blog, and for the next five years, five months and twenty-two days, we warned that Putin would never leave power, that he would consistently reduce Russian democracy and increase its neo-Soviet character until Russia was a fully realized neo-Soviet dictatorship. On September 24, 2011, we were proved finally, horribly, undeniably right.

There were those who said Russia could “never go back” to the dark days of the Soviet past. There were those who said Putin would never return to power, that he would fade into the background and allow Dima Medvedev and his successors to build a civilized democratic state.

They were lying. It was La Russophobe that was telling the truth, all along.

Russians will fight to keep stray dogs on the streets of their capital city, dogs which maul and brutalize them, but they will not fight to keep Putin out of power. That really says all you need to know about the Russian people of the new millennium.  They are, as Robert H. Boyle of Sports Illustrated magazine once called them, “desperately screwed up.”

We are not the only ones to have made this prediction, of course.  The brilliant Jeffrey Taylor of The Altantic magazine beat us to it by several years when he called Putin’s Russia “Zaire with permafrost” and “finished” in May 2001.  The world didn’t listen to him, either.

But nobody else in the world has put out this message so consistently and constantly as this blog, La Russophobe, founded by Kim Zigfeld as a response to the nonsensical propaganda put out by the Putin regime regarding its democratic intentions.

Since then, we have watched neo-Soviet tanks roll into tiny Georgia, seen even smaller Estonia besieged by the Kremlin’s computer hackers, watched the president of Ukraine brutally poisoned, and gasped in horror as Russian brutality spread throughout the Caucasus region.  We have seen malignant Russian influence support maniac after maniac across the globe, from Libya to North Korea, from Cuba to Venezuela.

We have seen newspapers closed, reporters murdered, opposition political leaders jailed. Foreign journalists have come in for the same horrifyingly barbaric torture. Over and over, international courts have convicted Russia of state-sponsored barbarism. We have seen the neo-Soviet state we predicted come to horrifying life, and we are not happy about being right. Indeed, nobody could be more unhappy.

But we are proud of our achievement. We have documented this international crisis, and we have given the world fair warning, a chance to avoid the mistakes of the past when the Soviet toxin was allowed to spread and torment the world for decades.  We call upon the leaders of the civilized world to rise now, stand up to neo-Soviet Russia, and end this atrocity before history once again repeat itself to the lasting  detriment of the world and, most of all, the sorry, pathetic and benighted people of Russia who have brought this terror on themselves.