New Stalin statue erected by Russians in Crimea

New statue of Stalin, with Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta

From The Interpreter, Three Disturbing Developments in Russia:

[T]he whitewashing of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and of his GULAG prison camp system continued and expanded. Last week, Russian officials put up the first Stalin statue in more than 60 years, and to add insult to injury, they did so alongside statues of Churchill and Roosevelt showing the Western leaders deferring to him and in recently occupied Crimea.

The Russian media justified this by saying that this trinity created the post-war world that Vladimir Putin would like to go back to, but as one more thoughtful Moscow commentator put it, “erecting a statue to Stalin in Crimea is like putting one of Hitler up in Israel.”

And related to this was the celebration rather than lamentation of the 75th anniversary of a GULAG camp, one in which millions of Russians and other Soviet citizens were incarcerated and died between the 1920s and the 1950s. Praising prison camps goes well beyond approving Stalin’s role as a wartime leader.

I don't know what to say. Over the past few months I have been debating on and off (on KiwiBlog) with people who believe that Russia is not being aggressive and is not fighting a war against the Ukrainians, that they really want peace (yeah, bet they are annoyed the Ukrainians are fighting back!) and that the US is behind all the war in Ukraine. I've gotten to the point where I've had to stop, because it's like debating with the insane. Insane people and their thought processes are not normal. You have to be careful talking to them because they can suck you into their world where if you challenge obvious logical flaws, they go more "mental" and/or revert into endless loops. Things that cannot be true they can believe with certainty, despite any evidence offered.

Not that the leadership of Russia is insane - far from it. They are just acting as if they are. It's quite a feat to act as if insane and demand that everyone buy into your reality. And rather than acting decisively, various Western leaders either play along or dither about what to do (see from several days ago: Western Nations Split on Arming Kiev Forces). It's madness, really.