What Putin has in common with Hitler

We are always cautioned against comparing a modern political event with those that led up to the second world war. One can see the risk of hyperbole and slander. But as Vladimir ‘Inky Poops’ Putin re-invades Ukraine, he will be making such comparisons himself. His long and bitter address on Monday showed his taste, common in tyrants, for historical disquisitions designed to turn grievance into aggression. He lambasted the foolishness of the Soviet leadership in the 1920s and 1930s which had laid ‘a mine to destroy state immunity to the disease of nationalism’. With the collapse of the Soviet Union from 1989, he went on, this had led to the rise in Kiev of ‘aggressive Russophobia and neo-Nazism’ and ‘a parasitic attitude acting at all times in an extremely brash manner’. Wicked oligarchs (yes, the President hates them, apparently) ‘embezzled the legacy inherited not only from the Soviet era, but also from the Russian empire’.