Official: Russia is a Nazi state

Three days before the invasion of the Ukraine Putin made a speech declaring war on the West. Yesterday he made another speech declaring war on his own people.

I wish I had read the first speech on 21 February, when Putin made it. Then I would have had no doubt that Putin’s bandit raid on the Ukraine was coming within days – and, moreover, that the Ukraine was only a step along the way.

Without boring you with long quotes, I’ll just give you the gist.

The West in general and the US in particular are planning to destroy Russia by a nuclear attack, thereby fulfilling their historical objective going back centuries before such weapons were even developed.

To that end they have set up military bases in the Ukraine (meaning training camps for Ukrainian soldiers) and are helping those Ukie fascists develop their own WMDs, to be used on Moscow.

This, after the West made a solemn promise never to expand Nato eastwards. “I quote,” added Putin, though the transcript of his speech doesn’t feature the requisite quotation marks. That stands to reason, for in the very next sentence Putin explained that he was referring to “verbal agreements”.

(He should have asked his loyal stooge for help. Hitchens regularly refers to “piles of documents” chiselling that promise in stone, which he could quote but for some inexplicable reason never does.)

Hence Russia has no alternative but to stamp the threat out, continued Putin. Nobody threatens the very existence of a sovereign Russian state and gets away with it.

Since the Ukraine is an American puppet, it’s the immediate threat to Russia’s survival. But the ultimate enemy isn’t the puppet but the wire-puller: the West.

All that was eerily reminiscent of similar speeches made by Hitler in the run-up to the Second World War. For the Ukraine, read Poland, which was supposedly preparing to attack Germany and destroy both her sovereignty and Kultur. For the West, read the plutocratic Anglo-Saxons and the Jewish bankers of Wall Street and the City.

But Hitler didn’t just rant about foreign enemies. He also talked about ‘national traitors’, those bacilli gnawing on Germany’s healthy body from within.

To eliminate the vestigial doubts anyone might still harbour about Putin’s role models, yesterday he repeated those diatribes almost verbatim, even using the same term, ‘national traitors’.

Just like der Führer, Vlad didn’t pull back. Describing those national traitors as “scum”, he compared them to a midge getting into one’s mouth. Russia is going to spit those national traitors out, promised Putin, at first without specifying whom exactly he meant by those metaphorical insects.

The oversight was quickly corrected. Those scum traitors are the fifth column working in cahoots with “the collective West trying to splinter our society, speculating on military losses and on socioeconomic effects of sanctions in order to provoke a popular rebellion in Russia…”

And then came the translation from the metaphorical language of “spitting out” into one every Russian can instantly understand: “I am certain that this necessary and natural self-purging of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, togetherness, and our readiness to answer any calls to action.”

Do you detect the turnaround in the vector? The pre-invasion speech was directed outwards, transparently hinting at Russia’s intention to eradicate her external enemies — starting with those Judaeo-Banderite Ukie Nazis, then moving on to their Western masters.

Yesterday’s speech switched the accent to the enemies within, which again followed Hitler’s model. But der Führer didn’t talk in vague generalities. He didn’t withhold from his adulating audiences the identity of those internal enemies: Jews, abetted by Gypsies, retards and sexual deviants.

So inspired, Vlad decided to be specific too. First, he magnanimously excluded from the list of traitors to be purged, “those with villas in Miami or the French Riviera” or those “who cannot live without foie gras and oysters…”

In other words he isn’t going to purge Russia’s entire ruling elite (starting with himself) who all show affection for such paraphernalia of Western decadence. Yet they are only off the hook if they are “mentally with Russia” – even if they are physically in London or Nice.

“The problem does not lie in [mansions in Miami, foie gras and oysters], but I repeat, the fact that many of these people inwardly, mentally live elsewhere and not here with us, with our people, with Russia.”

No Russian will fail to get the sinister message. Targetted for purging aren’t Putin’s fellow gangsters, who alone can afford “villas in Miami or the French Riviera”, but all Russians leaning towards the West culturally and spiritually.

They all are to be cast in the role of Hitler’s Jews, traitors to Putin’s version of Russia as a Nazi state standing alone against a hostile world. Their fate is to be gruesome, make no mistake about that.

The word ‘purge’ used by Putin isn’t just significant in its denotation, but also evocative in its connotation. It evokes the cordite stench of Lubyanka cellars, torture, barbed wire fences herding together skeletal inmates of the Gulag, shrill campaigns against ‘enemies of the people’, a whole population bullied into silence and blind obedience.

Yet the version implied by Putin’s speech is more Hitlerite than Stalinist, or rather early Stalinist. In his last years, Stalin too expanded his accent from traitors to the communist ideals to those betraying Russian national values.

After the war Stalin began to see in his mind’s eye the ideal of a Nazi Russia modelled on Hitler’s Germany (complete with a comprehensive Jewish pogrom), but death stopped him in the nick of time. Putin, alas, is still alive, and so far he hasn’t zeroed in on the Jews.

Instead, at least initially, he equates national treason with any preference for civil liberties over dictatorship, and free speech over jammed radio stations, TV channels spewing out nothing but propaganda, closed-down newspapers and blocked Internet.

It’s such preferences, rather than a taste for foie gras and oysters, that constitute treason to be purged. This is bad news for everybody I know in Russia, who are all national traitors at heart. And the news for the West in 2022 isn’t much better than it was in 1938.

We desperately need our Churchills and de Gaulles. Instead we get Chamberlains and Daladiers, but without the intellect and integrity.

P.S. Tony ‘Anthony’ Blair helpfully illustrated my last point yesterday. He wrote: “More than two decades ago I met Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg. Back then, he was a Western-oriented leader, wanting to reform Russia.”

It appears that Putin only ever turns bad when his friends, such as Blair and Trump, leave office. Yet those two gentlemen should agree on a common chronology to avoid confusion.

Blair left Downing Street in 2007, Trump moved into the White House in 2017. That’s a gap of 10 years during which Putin became a villain, after and before periods of angelic goodness. The solution is evident: let’s bring Blair and Trump back, to see Putin again not as a Hitler impersonator, but as “a Western-oriented leader”.

“Back then”, Tony, Putin was a KGB officer duping his Western marks to turn them into his unwitting agents of influence.