The New York Times and British Timothy Garton Ash (who was one of the British handlers of the anti-communist dissidents in Prague and made a new career out of it) are on board with the Ukrainian dehumanization of the Russian government and the Russians as a nation.
The former has published the latter's essay, which, against the background of the MH17 tragedy, paints Vladimir Putin as a "irritating man with a rather ratlike face" whose use of the Russian neutral word "narod" (people) someone translated into German as "volk," which Ash develops into the adjective völkisch to insinuate that Putin is today's Hitler.
According to Ash, it is Putin, not the US-organized regime change through a violent putsch that "covertly stirred up violent mayhem in eastern Ukraine and [is] explicitly advancing his 19th-century völkisch vision as the policy of a 21st-century state."
Never mind that it is the Kiev fascist regime that carried out the Odessa massacre and which, only in one day yesterday (July 18) killed over 40 civilians and wounded over 200 just in the city of Lugansk.
According to Ash, it is also Putin who "perverted ... the Western-developed and United Nations-SANCTIFIED humanitarian doctrine of the 'responsibility to protect.'" Thus, according to Ash, Putin is also a perversion of the holy, which was "developed by the West." So Ash also paints Putin as a Satan. So Ash presents the leader of Russia first as a "rat-like," then as Hitler-like and at last as Satan-like. The hyperbole has become absolute.
For Ash, Putin is then nothing less than "totally unacceptable and a grave threat to world peace." In comparison, the imperial demands of Her Britannic Majesty are "legitimate rights and responsibilities" with which "we also have to agree." In contrast, as claimed by Ash, "Mr. Putin’s völkisch version of the 'responsibility to protect' produces disastrous possibilities."
In his conclusion, Ash then presents Putin as a new Hitler-like "völkisch" dictator who rose from "an obscure renter" and who now stands for "a deadly doctrine," "an ideology of resentment written out in blood."
Of course, this brutal propagandist demonization happened before--recently, at times when the West wanted to justify its illegal wars and interventions, which is now again a possibility. The other obvious goal is to beat Russia back into a position where it would turn its back on the legitimate national-liberation struggle of the millions of those in Ukraine who have risen against fascism, the junta, and NATO's Drang nach Moscow.
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