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Ideas

The Club Of Tyrants: Putin And His Western Comrades, Past And Present

Russia's President Putin may speak of denazifying Ukraine, but his words and actions — from the Mariupol maternity hospital to the atrocities of Bucha to Friday's missile attack on the Kramatorsk railway station — show that he's taken up the mantle of Europe's line of fascist dictators. Take a look at those today who still lend him support.

photo of a woman holding up an anti putin sign

An anti-Putin protester in London last month

Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images via ZUMA
Héctor Abad Faciolince

OpEd-

BOGOTÁ — A Ukrainian soldier at the front walks across a snow-covered field. He has one of the saddest smiles one could imagine. There is a photographer nearby, Alex Lourie, one of those people who risk everything to show the truth, who hears the soldier speak a language he knows. Both have been in Iran and discover they can understand each other in Persian. So the soldier recites him a verse: "I wonder at times / Who will tell you of my death?"

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He is not a soldier by profession. He ran a business and was forced to fight. He feels a moral obligation to defend his country from the Russian invasion. His wife and child stayed home. Who will inform them of his death?


The same may be said of thousands of Russian recruits, aged between 18 and 20 years, whom Putin has sent to be slaughtered because of an obsessive delusion that Ukraine is not a country, is run by Nazis, and is making weapons of mass destruction to attack Russia.

Extremists in Europe

Even some of my own colleagues repeat his idiotic ideas, preferring to believe an autocrat's fabrications over the United Nations, the WHO or any independent media that can see how Putin's Russia is using lies and threats.

In Mariupol, Putin is recreating the hell he made before in Syria and Chechnya

Who are Russia's remaining allies in the world? Which countries voted with Putin at the UN? In the European Union, his friends coincide precisely with right-wing extremists, like Viktor Orbán, who would not allow arms for Ukraine to pass through Hungary. They are the likes of Italy's Matteo Salvini, French politicians Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen, and Spain's Santiago Abascal — the denizens of the sordid, anti-European world of right-wing extremism.

And his allies in the Americas? They're also of the extreme Right: Trump called him a genius. In Brazil, Bolsonaro is awed. Then there are the tin-pot dictators who claim to be socialists, in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. As the novelist Javier Cercas said, "The Russian invasion is the first, large-scale martial confrontation between national-populism and democracy."

Kramatorsk train station aftermath

photo of military covering dead bodies at Kramatorsk railway station

Victims of the missile attack Friday on the Kramatorsk railway station in eastern Ukraine

Seth Sidney Berry/ZUMA

Murderer in the Kremlin

At the start of his tale, Taras Bulba, the 19th-century writer Nikolai Gogol explains the role of the Ukraine's cossacks in European history. In Ruthenian, cossack means a "free man," and his tale shows just what it means to "drink like a cossack."

The cossacks, he wrote, arose in the 15th century, in a corner of Europe "devastated and pillaged by the Mongols," where men had to become "brave and forget there is fear in the world." These became the warriors of a once-peaceful land, and an unyielding rampart for Europe against the ruinous invasions of the East.

Today, the invasion, as well as the bloodstained imperialism behind it, come from a fascistic autocrat. He showed his colors in a recent speech, urging a purge of "Russian traitors" who oppose his "military operation." He wants to pummel those "who live in Russia but think like Europeans" and deny this is a war to "denazify Ukraine." He wants them spat out like "a pesky fly in your mouth."

Putin spouts a Nazi-style jargon, and confirms it with vile deeds: bombing hospitals, schools, theaters and residential blocks. In Mariupol, he is recreating the hell he made before in Syria and Chechnya, sending thousands of civilians — and hundreds of children — into mass graves. In more recent days, we have seen the atrocities in Bucha and the massacre at the Kramatorsk railway station.

This is Putin the murderer, a hero in the West to the extremists on the right.

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food / travel

Pasta v. Fascists: How Italy's Staple Dish Became A Symbol Of Resistance

Pasta may not be considered controversial today, but it played an important role during Italy's fascist years, particularly in one family's celebration of community and liberation.

Photo of the Cervi family.

Photo of the Cervi family, whose seven children were shot by the Fascists on December 28, 1943, at the Reggio Emilia shooting range.

@comunisti_alla_ribalta via Instagram
Jacopo Fontaneto

ROME — Eighty years ago — on July 25, 1943 — the vote of no confidence by the Grand Council of Fascism, leading to Benito Mussolini's arrest, set off widespread celebrations. In Campegine, a small village in the Emilian province, the Cervi family celebrated in their own way: they brought 380 kilograms of pasta in milk cans to the town square and offered it to all the inhabitants of the village.

The pasta was strictly plain: macaroni dressed with butter and cheese, seen as more of a "festive dish" in that period of deprivation. As soon as the Cervi brothers learned about the arrest of Mussolini, they procured flour, borrowed butter and cheese from the dairy, and prepared kilos and kilos of pasta. They then loaded it onto a cart to distribute it to their fellow villagers. Pastasciutta (dry pasta) specifically regards dishes with noodles that are plated "dry", not in broth. That would disqualify soup, risotto, ravioli...

Even though pastasciutta is the most stereotypical type of pasta today, it had a complicated relationship with the government during Italy's fascist years.

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