Crimea and Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin: Yelping that Crimea's Russian majority was under threat from gangs of rampaging "neo-Nazis, nationalists, and anti-Semites," spewing out of Kyiv's Euromaidan and headed south, Vladimir Putin, the Russian Federation's president-in-perpetuity, dispatched troops to the 'rescue,' so rendering a European state. To date the 'fascists' menacing Russia's colonists in Crimea have proven phantasmagorical. Indeed the only folks volks? found giving the Nazi salute there, while warming their backsides with burnt offerings of Ukrainian and Jewish books, were the lumpenproletariat skinheads of the "Russian unity" movement. Their peculiar choice of evening entertainment hasn't been seen in Europe since April 6, 1933, when Hitler's Brownshirts 'cleansed' the Third Reich of 'decadent' literature. Mr. Putin keeps curious company. , according to Winnipeg Free Press. The Kremlin's carvers have set others on edge, too. Stranded in their only homeland, now occupied by racist Russians, Crimea's Tatars are under real threat, particularly if, as seems likely, Ukrainians they have lived with in peace for decades are forced to decamp, retiring to regroup into whatever remains of Ukraine. To use politically correct Canadian terminology the Crimean Tatars are a "first nations" people. They have nowhere else to go. And they well remember the ruthless deportation of their nation at Stalin's command, in May 1944, when some 200,000 men, women and children were exiled, and many murdered. Now they find themselves, yet again, in the Kremlin's clutches. Stalin's unfinished cultural genocide may see its final solution under Putin. Now there's a legacy project. Let us consider the dismemberment, the cutting into pieces, or, better put, the mutilation of a country. But a question remains: Assuming they even existed, where did Putin's nightmare Nazis disappear to? Did they find some other land to bogey? Perhaps they went north to Estonia, where one-quarter of the population are Russians, or into Latvia, where almost 25 per cent constitute the demographic leavings of Soviet imperialism. For Moscow's men these minority exclaves must appear much more vulnerable than their counterparts in Crimea. Will Russian troops next invade the Baltic states? Probably not, most respond, as they are in their political independence, territorial integrity, and sovereignty guaranteed by the Alliance. Really? Ask Ukrainians today what their treaties with proved to be worth. My guess is people in Tallinn and Riga are having bad dreams right now, not alarmed by fantasies featuring reanimated hordes of Hitlerites tramping their way, but instead having night sweats about the Russian bear coming out of hibernation. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.