EDITORIAL: Vladimir Putin, Mass Murderer

EDITORIAL

Vladimir Putin, Mass Murderer

Last week, we reported the appalling fact that in Vladimir Putin’s Russia the tuberculosis infection rate is ten times higher than in the United States, and the fatality rate from the horrible disease is nearly one hundred times higher.  Russia has been placed on a list of shame next to barbaric third world states like Zimbabwe, Uganda, Bangledesh and Pakistan as one of the 22 most dangerous places in the world for contracting and perishing from the disease, which has been liquidated in civilized countries like the USA and Western Europe.  Make no mistake: If you are a tourist in Russia, you are at risk just like the rest of the population.

What this means in simple terms is that over 100,000 people contract tuberculosis every year in Russia and over 15,000 of them lose their lives to the disease. Let us repeat that: Each and every year fifteen thousand Russians are killed by tuberculosis.  Many Russians called for the impeachment and jailing of Boris Yeltsin for “genocide” because of results like these during his term. Where are those calls in regard to Putin?

Indeed, it can be argued that Vladmir Putin killed each and every one of these victims of disease, as surely as if he had put a gun to their head, with his willful, intentional refusal to address the problem, instead squandering Russia’s precious resources on waging a new cold war with the West and crushing the life out of Russia’s civil society. Having ruled Russia for more than a decade, this blood is now indisputably on Putin’s hands.

If a foreign army killed even 15 Russians, much less 15,000, the people of Russia would be streaming through the streets with homicidal rage.  This is exactly what happened when the Georgian army killed a few dozen Russian soliders during the Ossetia conflict last August.  Vladimir Putin’s policies kill that many Russians each and every single day of the year:  forty one of them each day, day in and day out.

And yet the people of Russia do nothing.  They do not demand that he pay attention to this problem, instead they applaud wildly as he ignores it.  So they too have the blood of their own countrymen on their hands.

Putin recently made some of his typically insane statements, this time about Russia’s secret deal with Hitler during World War II, while visiting Poland.  He said that Russia’s deal with Hitler was no different than Britain’s deal to hand over Czechoslovakia to Hitler.  This was, of course, a double lie.  Britain did not get a slice of the territory it seeded to Hitler, but Russia did get its own chunk of territory, what Russia had lost in World War I.  And Britain’s deal is reviled by modern Britons, the man who made it (Neville Chamberlain) properly viewed as a traitor. Russia, to the contrary, still lionizes Josef Stalin.  Even many Russians scoff at this ridiculous perversion of history.

In another fit of neo-Soviet paranoia, Putin claimed the British deal was meant to “buy off Hitler and redirect his aggression towards Russia.”   So, he said, Russia had every right to do the same to Britain.   The only problem with this formulation is that there isn’t the slighest shred of evidence that it is true, and the man who spoke it was educated in the USSR and bought his thesis from a mill which plagiarized it.  This man simply doesn’t have the slightest basis for his statements, and he doesn’t care. He will tell any sort of ridiculous lie rather than embrace the need to tell the truth and reform.

This is why Russia does not rank in the top 130 nations of the world for adult lifespan. This is why Russians work for $3/hour.  This is why Russia is the butt of jokes all around the world, and it is why Russia has collapsed three times in the past century alone.

The fourth time is coming. Mark our words, Mr. Putin.