"One anti-Soviet, anti-Russian law is being submitted for another . . . They can't seem to do without it! . . . They talk about human rights in Russian prisons and places of detention. That's all well and good, but they have plenty of problems of that kind themselves. [Look at] Abu Ghraib - or Guantanamo, where people are kept jailed for years without being charged. Not only [that], the prisoners walk around shackled, like in the Middle Ages. They have [even] legalized torture. Can you imagine if we had done anything like that? They would have eaten us alive . . . It would have been a global scandal.
"But in their country, everyone keeps quiet about it. . . . Those so-called secret CIA prisons: who has been punished for that? . . . They are up to the ears in shitty stuff, they're drowning in it, and they still insist on criticizing us.
". . . . I am probably a bad Christian, because as a Christian you are supposed to turn the other cheek. I am not yet morally ready for that. If they slap our face, we have to retaliate. Otherwise they'll go on slapping us forever."
-------Vladimir Putin, 2012
Source: Philip Short, Putin, (Henry Holt, 2022) pps. 561-2
No comments:
Post a Comment