[Peace-discuss] Obama adviser compares Putin to Hitler

[C. G. Estabrook]

In fact Gorbachev's comment is essentially accurate, while Brzezinski's is 
vicious Democratic party propaganda.  --CGE


Ricky Baldwin wrote:
> Ludicrous.  The fact that people like Brzezinski are running around
> free - not to mention influencing policy - says something, something
> bad about the world we live in.
> 
> Here's our old friend Gorbachev's spin (which also needs reading with skepticism, of course,
> tho without some of the involuntary facial tics that may accompany
> reading Brzezinski's outburst):
> 
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/11/AR2008081101372.html
> 
> I got it from Just Foreign Policy.
> 
> -Ricky
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at uiuc.edu>
> To: peace-discuss <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
> Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2008 3:30:11 PM
> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Obama adviser compares Putin to Hitler
> 
> [From the man who brought us Osama bin Laden. --CGE]
> 
>     Obama adviser compares Putin to Hitler
>     Kate Connolly in Berlin
>     Tuesday August 12 2008
>     guardian.co.uk
> 
> The foreign policy adviser of US presidential candidate Barack Obama
> has called on the world community to isolate Russia in protest over
> its campaign in the Caucasus, likening its tactics to those of
> "Hitler or Stalin".
> 
> Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the national security adviser under
> President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981, and is now advising the
> Democratic candidate, said the Russian prime minister, Vladimir
> Putin, was "following a course that is horrifyingly similar to that
> taken by Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s".
> 
> He said that Putin's "justification" for splitting up Georgia -
> because of the Russian citizens living in South Ossetia - could be
> compared to when Hitler used the alleged suffering of ethnic Germans
> in the Sudetenland as a pretext for annexing Czechoslovakia in 1938.
> 
> In an interview with the conservative German daily Die Welt, he said
> even more striking were the parallels between Putin's strategy
> against Georgia and Stalin's invasion of Finland in 1939, describing
> both as "the undermining of the sovereignty of a small, democratic
> neighbouring state through the use of violence". He added: "Georgia
> is to an extent the Finland of today, both morally and strategically."
> 
> Polish-born Brezinski, 80, who earned a reputation as a hardliner due
> to his anti-Soviet politics, said the world was now being confronted
> with the question as to how it should react to Russia and what he saw
> as its efforts to "reincorporate old Soviet areas into the Kremlin's
> sphere of control". He said at the heart of the issue was access to
> oil and specifically who controlled the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline
> which runs through Georgia.
> 
> "If Georgia no longer has its sovereignty it means not only that the
> west is cut off from the Caspian Sea and Central Asia, but we can
> also assume that Putin will exercise a similar strategy against
> Ukraine if he faces resistance. He's already publicly voiced threats
> against Ukraine."
> 
> "If Russia continues on this path it has to be isolated by the
> international community," he said, including economic sanctions on
> which all alliances from the European Union to Nato would have to
> take a joint stand.
> 
> He added that Russia's invasion of Georgia was proof of the failure
> of the White House during George Bush's eight year tenure, to
> recognise the "Putin regime" for what it really was.
> 
> "Two episodes illustrate this better than any others," he said.
> "First, when Bush met Putin for the first time and said he had looked
> into his soul and could trust him. Secondly, when Condi Rice, not so
> long ago, said that the American-Russian relations had never been
> better than they are today." He said the White House had deceived
> itself.
> 
> Asked why it was that he only spoke of Putin and not of the Russian
> president, Dmitri Medvedev, Brzezinski said: "He [Medvedev] has about
> as much influence over the current situation as the official head of
> state in the Soviet Union of the 1950s had over the Soviet Union.
> Nobody can even remember his name."
> 
>     ###
> 
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