EDITORIAL: Fewer and Fewer Russians

EDITORIAL

Fewer and Fewer Russians

“Every year there are fewer and fewer Russians, alcoholism, smoking, traffic accidents, the lack of availability of many medical technologies, and environmental problems take millions of lives. And the emerging rise in births has not compensated for our declining population.”

That’s one of our favorite Russophobes, raging.  Anyone can see from his remarks his unbridled contempt for Russia and the people of Russia, and most of all for Russian ruler Vladimir Putin, who after more than a decade in unrestricted power has left his nation on the verge of extinction.  He’s a real Russia-hating bastard for sure, this animal.  He ought to be jailed in Siberia right next to Khodorkovsky.  You know the one we’re talking about, right?

Sure.  Dima Medvedev.

It’s odd, of course, that though he wields the power to fire Putin and replace him with a leader who might actually be capable of doing something about the crisis he acknowledges, or at least of speaking as openly and honestly about it as Medvedev himself, no such thing has occurred. To the contrary, Medvedev continues to allow Putin to upstage him at will, and indeed to make a mockery of the Russian “presidency.”

In issuing his statement, Medvedev was merely agreeing with former first deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, who has been beating this drum for years now.  Little surprise, then, that Putin moved rapidly to confiscate tens of thousands of copies of Nemtsov’s latest installment in his “white paper” series, which contained a direct attack on the prime minister on demographic grounds in its second chapter (which we published in an original translation earlier this week, having fully translated all of the prior white paper efforts).

And Nemtsov himself was doing nothing more than continuing the work of expert demographer Murry Feshbach, who has been tirelessly recording Russia’s downward demographic spiral for years now.  In fact, as we report in today’s issue, many Russians other than Nemtsov and Medvedev, including many respected scholars, openly acknowledge Russia’s demographic crisis and reject Putin’s efforts to cover them up.

Yet Putin and his blind sycophants, like the infamous “Emperor” with his “new clothes,” stubbornly go on with those effforts. And why should they not, knowing that Medvedev will do nothing to inhibit them?

It would be awful, of course, if Medevedev were of the same mind as Putin and his horde of Russophile scum.  But maybe it’s worst that Medvedev, openly acknowledging the crisis, chooses to allow Putin and that horde to continue their outrages uninhibited.  We think it is.  The little burps of truth that sometimes escape the lips of Russia’s puppet president make it perfectly clear he knows full well that what he’s doing is wrong, yet because of weakness or corruption he chooses to go right on doing it.