Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 10 – Akhmed Zakayev,
who was a close aide to Dzhokhar Dudayev and who leads the anti-Moscow Chechens from London, says that Moscow’s suggestion
that Chechens were responsible for the murder of Russian opposition figure
Boris Nemtsov last week is “pure propaganda which has nothing in common with
reality.”
Any thinking person can see that
this is only the latest example of Vladimir Putin’s long-standing demonization
of the Chechens who fought for their own independence and who are now fighting
for that of Ukraine, actions Putin couldn’t forgive or fail to exploit in his propaganda
exercises (ru.krymr.com/content/article/26890173.html).
There is even evidence that some
close to the Kremlin are ashamed by the absurdity and brazenness of this
action: Kremlin-controlled television channels have not shown a single report
about Putin’s decorating of his Chechen, Ramzan Kadyrov, despite their penchant
for boosting everything the Kremlin leader does (echo.msk.ru/news/1508588-echo.html).
Perhaps some Kremlin propagandists
concluded that it was just too much to show Putin awarding the Chechen head,
who had called into question the very idea that there was “a Chechen link” in
the Nemtsov case, at the very same time that the Russian government was pedaling
the idea that Chechens were the shooters.
But they shouldn’t have been so
worried. Many of the reliable supporters of the Kremlin and indeed many others could
be counted on to ignore such self-evidence contradictions just as they have so
many other Putin duplicities and to swallow the increasingly Orwellian version
of reality now on offer in Moscow.
Unfortunately, there is an obvious
answer as to why, and it was provided more than half a century ago. When Governor Adlai Stevenson was running for
US president in 1956, one of his aides told him “Governor, all thinking people
support you,” to which Stevenson replied, “Yes, but I need a majority.”
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