The Unthinkable has Become Possible in Putin’s Russia Just as in Hitler’s Germany, Morozov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 19 – In the course of only three years, what was unthinkable for most Russians, even the most thoughtful, has become possible because of the constant repetition of the media. As a result, Russians today accept ideas about Ukraine that they would have dismissed as absurd or impossible only a brief time ago, according to Aleksandr Morozov.

            What is most important here, he says, is not any moves toward “’re-Stalinization’” but rather the willingness of Russians to go along with such nonsense as the notion that Ukraine “’doesn’t exist,’” that it is ruled by a junta, that Kyiv is destroying itself, and that it has “lost the ability to recognize its incompleteness” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5948119B0A5FF).

            In 2014, almost every Russian would have denied what today almost every Russian now accepts as “self-evident facts,” the Moscow commentator points out, noting that exactly the same thing happened in Germany in the 1930s when under the impact of Hitler’s propaganda, Germans were transformed into “political anti-Semites” who backed the Holocaust.

            Eighty years ago, the unthinkable became possible in Hitler’s Germany; now, something equally unthinkable has become a reality in Putin’s Russia, testimony to the power of propaganda and group think and the inability of many to stand up to this wave of hatred and duplicity.