Assange

[Thomas Eckhardt]

> I will reply 
>by asking YOU a
> question: Do you think Trump and Putin are no different 
>from, say,
> Clinton or Obama?

If your measure is, say, the number of people killed 
around the world for oligarchic or MIC interests / 
geopolitical reasons, Clinton and Obama are far worse than 
Putin. If your measure is the degree of freedom of speech, 
artistic freedom, freedom of the press, gay rights etc. in 
the countries they govern(ed), Putin is worse. Trump may 
turn out to be worse than all of them, on both counts. 
Right now, however, he stands for cooperation with Russia. 
And this is a good thing.

I might add that Putin didn't vote for the Iraq War, still 
the greatest crime of the 21st century. He didn't destroy 
Libya and Syria at the side of the UK and France. He 
didn't cackle when Muammar Gaddafi was impaled on a 
bayonet (if you really want to call a politician's 
behaviour "monstrous", this is a prime example). He does 
not support the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in Ukraine or the 
al-Zenki militia in Syria who beheaded a twelve-year-old 
boy with a small knife on camera but nevertheless remain 
on the payroll of the State Department because, as Mark 
Toner said, "one incident here and there would not 
necessarily make you a terrorist group"...

I am no fan of Putin, but I prefer to look at the plank in 
my own eye before I look at the speck of sawdust in other 
people's eyes.

This article might be of interest for you:

"Some of my liberal friends, who have drunk the Kool-Aid 
of anti-Russia hysteria, argue that the US should not even 
contemplate acting friendly towards Russia and its leader 
President Putin. As one put it, 'We certainly at least 
must be in agreement that Putin’s cruel 
klepto-capitalist-KGB rule has harmed tens of millions of 
innocents in the former USSR, no?'

Well, actually, no, we are not in agreement. Where do 
otherwise intelligent liberal-minded people get these 
tales of Putin evil? Nobody’s saying that he is a 
Jeffersonian democrat, but let’s at least get the history 
right."

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/11/democratic-hysteria-on-russia/
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l