Putin continues to try to revise history. From the AP dispatch:
President Vladimir Putin said Thursday no one should try to make Russia feel guilty about the Great Purge of 1937, saying it may have been one of the most notorious episodes of the Stalin era but "in other countries even worse things happened."
Speaking at a televised meeting with social studies teachers, Putin noted that this is the 70th anniversary of a year many Russians regard as a synonym for state-sponsored terror. It is an anniversary that has, however, gotten relatively little attention in Russian media.
And then this: "No one must be allowed to impose the feeling of guilt on us," he said. "Let them think about themselves. But we must not and will not forget about the grim chapters in our history."
And a bit more: We have not used nuclear weapons against a civilian population," he said. "We have not sprayed thousands of kilometers (miles) with chemicals, (or) dropped on a small country seven times more bombs than in all the Great Patriotic (War)" -- Russia’s name for World War II.
Well, at least he didn't blame it on Clinton. :)
Why use nukes when you can put a bullet in heads, starve, and work to death more than 35 million people? The crime is not that of Russia but of its former Communist regime. Why not summarily denounce it openly instead of playing games smacking of moral relativism and an (failed) attempt to make arguments of moral equivalency?
The only country where something even worse ever happened was China under Mao. By some coincidence, the same communist ideology was used to justify the genocide.
OK, what was done was bad, but not as bad as others, so we shouldn't feel bad about it.
Rationalizing can sometimes help an individual cope with a difficult situation, but this is ridiculous.
Yes, surely Putin is wrong to ignore or seek to rationalize and even cover up the historical wrongs done by his country.
We are surely superior to Putin, willing to acknowledge, in fact, that this nation has done more than its fair share of killing and to lament this fact Right? Hmm...well, maybe not on this website. Which makes the irony of this posting almost delicious, if it weren't so pathetic.
Well, there you go. Another moral equivalency argument. Yes, I do remember teaching about murdering 35 million of our own citizens. In fact, Americans and Westerners go out of their way to flagellate themselves for all the "evils" of their past (which there are indeed some, as any fool recognizes) even when they turn out to be not as bad under careful scrutiny or even cursory knowledge of the truth. It's hard to do that when you summarily starve, work, and shoot that many people to death.
Then again, maybe you're right, everyone on this website denies that Americans ever did anything wrong. There, we admit it, are you happy?
Why is it wrong to kill the enemy?