Russian folk story, but Ukraine and Grozny apply

[Bernardo de La Paz]

A pair of Russian peasants find an old lamp. While they are cleaning it a genie appears in a flash. The genie asks the first one "You freed me, so I grant you a wish". The peasant thinks and says "I'd like a cow!" With a puff of smoke, a cow is now standing beside the peasant. The genie turns to the second peasant and says "You freed me, so I grant you a wish". The second peasant hardly pauses and says "I'd like you to kill the cow."


Russia (but basically Putin) couldn't stand the example of a thriving democracy beside his lumbering corrupt dictatorship. Hence vengeful missile attacks against civilian targets and the obliteration of Grozny (though the latter was not a democracy).

[Just A Box Of Rain]

1. To be certain, the main "threat" that a free and prosperous Ukraine posed to Putin was

through its "demonstration effect," showing the Russian people what sort of society they could have if they abandoned their seemingly intransigent willingness (eagerness?) to live under authoritarian and totalitarian leadership.

For a western-style liberal democracy with a market economy begin to emerge, even imperfectly, on Russia's border--and especially in a nation with so many cultural, political, and linguistic roots in common--was (and is) a nightmare for Putin and the other anti-liberal forces in Russia.

Trying to stuff this out was his main objective. It wasn't fears about NATO or some other excuses, it was the intolerable situation of Ukraine developing as a liberal democracy that would make Russia and Vladimir Putin look bad in comparison.

He wants to kill the cow.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. Yes, I think NATO was down on the list, behind Ukraine natural resources too. . . nt

[Dale in Laurel MD]

3. Just one example:

Early in the invasion (at least), one of the main activities of Russian troops was carrying off as many household appliances as they could.

A similar envy was one of the drivers of the American Revolution. British soldiers stationed in America during the French and Indian War a decade earlier were struck by the greater wealth in consumer culture terms that they saw in the American colonial population.

[Aristus]

4. Yes.

In all the talk about tyranny, and tea, and rights, it's often forgotten that the American colonies before the War of Independence had the highest standard of living in the world for the time.

[2naSalit]

5. +1

To think that there was an entire army and supporters back home who were in favor of the looting. Barbarians, for centuries. Them having their own Land/country/governing body only allowed them to develop their barbaric tools in isolation of sorts, now look what they have become... Advanced barbarians.


Should russia even be a country at this point? It has become a threat to life on the planet, when is time for the rest of humanity to transform that whole scene into something less than a pariah?