Putin’s Second Lie Worse than First Because It Shows ‘Putin is the Hitler of Today,’ Skobov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 10 – Vladimir Putin’s Victory Day address contained “two bestial lies which in the crudest way falsify history,” Aleksandr Skobov says. Almost everyone took note of the first, his suggestion that "in the war with Hitler, the Soviet people was alone,” the kind of lie the Kremlin leader revels in and that both those abroad and those in Russia know is false.

            But Putin’s second lie, the Moscow commentator and frequent Putin critic says, is more dangerous because “it can hardly deceive anyone” but involves Putin’s mixing together and even equating anti-Semitism and ‘Russophobia,’” two phenomena the ruler doesn’t seem able to distinguish (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=6099333381B90).

            It is yet another confirmation that “Putin is the Hitler of today,” Skobov says, someone who believes the entire world revolves around Russia just as Hitler believed it must revolve around Germany and who is ready to go to war no matter how little justified in order to try to give substance to his vision.

             Skobov points out that the Nazis and their racial theories left no place in their New Order for the Jews and therefore carried out the Holocaust but they did allow places, albeit subordinate to Germans for other peoples including the Russians who were to work for the Third Reich after a German victory.

            These racial theories led to horrors large and small, he continues, and recalls that Hitler even sent a photographer along with the German delegation that came up with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to take pictures of Stalin’s ears to determine whether he had any “Jewish blood.” For Hitler such a discovery would have precluded an agreement.

            “Hitler really did not like Russia,” Skobov says. But his approach to Russia was “all the same pragmatic rather than an existential question. And it was hardly the main one.” For the German leader, the real competition was with the Anglo-Saxons; and it was against them that he sought to ensure his primacy.

            Today as his equation of Russophobia and anti-Semitism, “Putin is seeking to assert his primacy over Anglo-Saxon liberalism in the same way,” Skobov argues. “And to that end, he is rewriting history, portraying things as if Russia has always been the center of the universe and the world has done nothing but revolve around it.”

            “I don’t know how much he believes this,” the commentator concludes. “But he very much wants to. He wants the entire world to revolve around Russia. He wants to dictate his rules to it and mark out all kinds of lines to control it. He wants that the world constantly pays attention to him.”

            “For this, [Putin] constantly creates ever new threats of new wars. Speaking in general terms, this too is ‘a Hitler complex,’ and Putin is the Hitler of today.”