The Tale of Two Georges
Filed under: Russia
It's almost like Vladimir Putin is intentionally trying to do everything he can think of to humiliate all the Russophiles who've argued so long that he wants to be friendly with the West and won't become a neo-Soviet madman, another Stalin, everything he can dream up to spur on the avalanche of cold war for which his frozen KGB heart lusts so greedily.
Simultaneously, Putin has conferred high Russian honors on an an American, George Koval, and a Briton, George Blake, who spied against their own countries for the USSR.
Putin's seething hated of all things Western is so frenzied he's failed to notice that by focusing the world's attention on Koval he's reminding everyone that the USSR only got an atomic bomb because it stole the plans from America, and by focusing on Blake he's helping us recall how Russia held Eastern Europe hostage behind the barbarity of the Berlin Wall. That's to say nothing, of course, of the fact that Putin himself is a proud KGB spy engaged in a massive military buildup, a civil rights and democracy crackdown, and a bloodthirsty imperial effort to reclaim the Soviet slave states. He seems to be aping Adolf Hitler, threatening a holocaust if we don't hand over Czechoslovakia (Georgia) and Poland (Ukraine).
It's classic Soviet self-destruction, from a neo-Soviet man. He's trying to convince NATO not to install a missile defense system in Europe, and his "strategy" is naked provocation, as if Russia, vastly out-manned, out-gunned and out-monied by NATO, can thump the ground and watch as NATO trembles in panic. It's the same attitude that motivated Nikita Krushchev to take off his shoe at the United Nations back in the day.
It's madness.
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