Yesterday, Vladimir Putin addressed the plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum
(SPIEF) and brought up again the issues of de-Nazifying Ukraine.
The sole high-profile guest at the session was the president of Algeria, an Arab and Muslim country,
which didn’t deter Putin from invoking the solidarity of Jews around the world.
Let’s discuss today Putin’s rhetoric and his keynote address at SPIEF.
But before we do, here’s a quote for you.
I have many childhood friends who are Jews. According to them,
Zelenskyy isn’t a Jew — he’s a disgrace of the Jewish people.
I’ve got a lot of friends who are Russians. Some are even now in this room with me.
I suggest analyzing who is a disgrace of the Russian nation, shall we?
Millennia ago, archaic people had a starkly different idea of time compared to us in the 21st century.
To them, the past could easily merge with the present.
Let me give you an example. Suppose a guy is riding a horse into battle.
But before that, he dismounts the horse, walks further, takes on his opponent, and gets killed.
Back in the olden days, this plot could be illustration with a single drawing of a dead guy on horseback.
Today, a drawing like this could be produced by a toddler who can speak but who can hardly
process when one event ends and the next one starts.
As they grow up, kids almost follow the developmental path of humanity from archaic thinking patterns
to modern ones.
They begin to grasp temporal and cause-and-effect relationships.
By their teens, they typically lose faith in the almighty Santa.
Reporter: What kind of relationship do you have with Santa? Do your wishes come true?
Putin: Our relationship has been an amicable one.
I owe him the fact that we’re all talking today here.
Over the past couple of years, Vladimir Putin has apparently been aging backward.
First, his political creed echoed an immature teen catchphrase,
“If Americans are allowed to do this, why aren’t I?”
Then, the president ceased to assume responsibility for his decisions.
Allegedly, he was forced to invade Ukraine.
Later, he changed the tune to the effect of, “It’s not me! Zelenskyy struck first.”
Finally, on Jun. 16, 2023, Putin slipped into archaic thinking patterns.
As he addressed the plenary session at SPIEF, without batting an eyelid,
the president talked his battles with Stepan Bandera, Andriy Melnyk, Yaroslav Stetsko, Stepan Lenkavskyy,
and other WW2-era Ukrainian nationalists.
A Stepan Lenkavskyy employed the whole gamut of methods to exterminate the Jews.
What the hell is this? I once read post-WW2 statements from a Banderite scumbag
where he detailed the execution of a Jewish family.
While he was kidding in his Santa remarks, he was dead serious on the Banderites and Melnykites.
Vladimir Putin’s thought process isn’t entirely clear. On the other hand, we heard him say things.
At SPIEF, he said in no uncertain terms he is fighting the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)
and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) from 80 years back.
Therefore, Putin’s 2023 rhetoric smacks of 1943.
These are the ones who the Ukrainian authorities are supporting today, both in person and ideology-wise.
How do you not fight it? We must do it.
Such thinking patterns are typical of some present-day Muslim fundamentalists.
From their perspective, modern Europeans are the same bunch of crusaders from centuries back.
On their worldview, staging a terrorist attack in the London Underground
or a bloody carnage in a Parisian night club is a noble act of jihad.
It’s hard to wrap your heads around it.
With Vladimir Putin at the helm, the Russian army uses Iranian drones to strike Ukrainian cities
and destroy residential blocks in the dead of night.
All the while, the president explains it away by saying he’s fighting Stepan Bandera and Andriy Melnyk.
Though we can’t make sense of it, it’s clearly happening. Bandera, Melnyk,
and their kind kicked the bucket decades ago.
The remaining UPA and OUN members are about to turn 100. But that’s whom Putin is fighting.
Not just that, he’s calling on Jews from around the globe and Israel to join him in his endeavor.
Like, the memories of the Holocaust are still haunting us, right?
The truth is, they are. That’s why Israeli doctors are going to Ukraine.
Israeli medications and humanitarian aid are shipped there, too.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS
There’s a funny episode in the Family Guy animated series.
The protagonist, Lois Griffin, is running for office. During the mayoral debate,
she comes up with an unbeatable trick to sway the voters.
First she says, “9/11 is bad.”
Then she keeps reiterating, “9/11, 9/11,” in response to any question. The audience absolutely loves it.
What was meant as grotesque political satire in Family Guy became reality at SPIEF.
Vladimir Putin went so far as to quote the anti-Semitic remarks uttered by Ukrainian nationalists in the 1940s.
This was followed by a documentary video montage showing Ukrainian units take part in the Holocaust
and the Volhynian massacre.
The video featured unblurred disfigured bodies and detailed the gruesome tortures.
I don't know if you've prepared the two-minute video I asked you to do, Dmitry. Dmitry, play it please.
September 1941, Babi Yar, an outskirt of Kyiv. 30,000 Jews were executed there over the course of two days.
The SS were actively using Ukrainian nationalists as their troopers.
The audience was appalled. Sadly, none of the yesmen in attendance dared to ask Putin:
“Mr. President, everything that you’ve told us and showed us is gruesome.
This footage is gut-wrenching. But so what? Why would you strike a residential block in Kryvyi Rih on Tuesday?
13 ended up dead, while nine are severely injured.
Did they enable the Holocaust? Did they start the Volhynian massacre?
What about the Ukrainian towns wiped off the map and turned into a moonscape?
What about the cities with entire streets and neighborhoods razed to the ground?
According to the UN, over 520 kids were killed in the wake of the armed invasion.
And nobody knows the extent of underreporting.
Mr. President, why would you show us the footage from 1943?
How does it explain away your current policy?”
Notably, the short documentary was voiced over by Dmitry Kiselev, a propagandist who was cheering
for a monument to Peter Krasnov, a Cossack leader who defected to the Nazis.
We must erect monuments to Kolchak, Wrangel, Denikin, and Krasnov
(the Russian anti-Bolshevik military leaders).
Here’s Peter Krasnov’s most infamous quote.
Let it be relayed to all Cossacks that this war is waged not against Russia, but against the Communists,
the Jews, and their henchmen peddling Russian blood. May God help the German weapons and Hitler to prevail!
Interestingly, some local enthusiasts from southern Russia indeed built a monument to Krasnov.
Take a look. Except this quote wasn’t used as an inscription.
Let’s conduct two thought experiments.
Experiment one. Imagine a Beijing International Economic Forum.
Let’s say Xi Jinping has trouble fixing the economy.
Instead, he distracts the audience’s attention and switches it to a foreign agenda.
Xi goes like this. Do you know how many Russians defected to the Nazis during WW2?
The Russian Guards Corps, the Wehrmacht’s Russland division, Andrei Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army,
Konstantin Kromiadi’s Russian National People’s Army, and, finally, RONA,
the 29th Volunteer Infantry SS Division headed by Bronislav Kaminsky.
Xi continues. Do you happen to know that Russians sometimes turn to the streets of Moscow to parade
the portrait of Kaminsky, the very person who massacred Poles in Warsaw in 1944
in a show of overkill that even raised some eyebrows with the Germans?
The posters read, “Thanks for your try!”
It means they thank Nazis for their attempted overthrow of the Communist government.
Which deeply insults us, the Chinese Communists.
Mind you, it’s a popular slogan out there in Russia.
That was the footage from Moscow. Here’s the city of Samara.
You can also see the “Thanks for your try!” slogan accompanied by the portrait of Krasnov, a Nazi.
And he’s being extolled quite officially there.
Speaking of official. St. Andrew’s Cross stands for the Russian Navy.
The Russian national flag is white, blue, and red. Do you know who else used both St. Andrew’s Cross
and this banner? Exactly! Russian Nazi henchmen and collaborators of all stripes.
Hence the logical conclusion.
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army must bomb Moscow and Samara to smithereens.
And the entire Rostov Region to boot, since they erected this monument
to Krasnov adored by Putin’s propaganda.
Now, I’m sure you realize that the above example is nonsensical.
And yet, this kind of nonsense follows Putin’s political discussion standards to a T.
Experiment two. China doesn’t destroy Russian cities and doesn’t mass-kill civilians,
just because some Russian defected to Hitler 80 years ago.
Instead, 80 years from now, in 2102, China shows the world the videos and photos
of atrocities committed by the Russian army in Mariupol, Maryinka, Volnovakha, Popasna, Soledar, and Bakhmut.
It plays the footage of dead bodies of Ukrainians executed in Bucha and Irpin, of the aftermath of Russian
strikes on residential blocks in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Uman, Chasiv Yar, Dnipro, Kryvyi Rih, and Chernihiv.
China shows the aftermath of the collapsed Nova Kakhovka dam.
It also throws in a pinch of Russian propaganda begging the authorities
to cut power in Ukraine and starve Ukrainians to death.
Following this public display of the well-documented evidence of atrocities,
the Chinese People’s Liberatin Army invades Russia.
Why? With the sole purpose of fighting Vladimir Putin, Sergei Shoigu, and Gen.
Surovikin who wreaked that havoc on Ukraine. Sure enough, in 2102, this’ll be a burning issue!
Enough of the thought experiments. Let’s pick up where we left off.
WHAT ABOUT THE ECONOMY?
As you may remember, our video deals with the St. Petersburg forum,
which is allegedly international and even — shocker — economic.
But the discussion of economy will hardly make the highlights reel. Instead, the real highlights of the forum
was Putin’s fight against Bandera and country fair-style theatrics like this one.
There he goes. Awesome! Give him a big round of applause.
He’s fashioned an immersion water heater out of it.
But in all fairness, Putin scratched the surface of economy, too.
His manner reminded us of his speech at the COP21 climate change conference in Paris back in 2015.
We’ve completed our end of the Kyoto protocol bargain and even exceeded the targets.
Between 1991 and 2012, Russia didn’t just hinder a rise in greenhouse gas emissions.
We brought these figures down.
Thanks to our policy, we saved the atmosphere from some 40B tons worth of CO2.
It’s all ancient history by now. But back then, even rock-ribbed Putin supporters would go,
“What an ingenious way of reframing Russia’s industrial decline!”
This year’s St. Petersburg forum unfolded along these lines.
Putin vigorously reported a record-low unemployment rate.
Of course, your unemployment rate goes down as your working-age citizens flee the country en masse,
die in combat, and become disabled.
You can even target zero unemployment as long as your only remaining demographics are retirees
and people with disabilities. You can also eliminate poverty if you send all the poor to die in combat.
In the video we posted yesterday to our second channel, we talked about Russia being on the brink
of a demographic disaster. It all started with the pandemic and was followed with the war,
the mobilization drive, and the two largest emigration waves since the collapse of the USSR.
It has resulted in the biggest HR shortage in Russia’s recorded history.
There’s not enough qualified people in IT, metallurgy, machine-building, mining, and so forth.
All the while, a happy camper named Putin reports a decline in unemployment.
He also dwelled upon Western businesses pulling out of the Russian market. Let’s sum it up.
First, a fair wind to all of you. Second, please get back. Yep, that’s roughly what he said.
Did Vladimir Putin almost three-hour-long speech feature occasional bits of reason?
Oddly enough, it did. For example, the stream of mumbo-jumbo included this gem, and I’m quoting:
“Some countries have a political system such that it prioritizes those with
a poor educational background and those culturally challenged.”
Amen. Spot on.
See you tomorrow!