¿Is Vladimir Putin Crazy?
By: Carlos Alberto Montaner
Journalist and narrator Juan Manuel Cao asks himself this question. He doesn’t believe it, and neither do I. He is a bit crazy, like all dictators, but that does not prevent him from having a certain distorted idea of reality. Was Adolf Hitler crazy or was he a manipulator causing panic attacks in everyone around him? Was Fidel Castro crazy when he thought that “Yankee imperialism” was sending him hurricanes and denounced it from his tribune? In any case, madness is a medical category that changes partially with each edition of the DSM or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association.
This has to do with Vladimir Putin. His ideas of diplomacy and the vulnerability of his country are those of Cardinal Richelieu and his successor, Cardinal Mazarin, the backdrop for some of the best narratives in The Three Musketeers. They were excellent ideas to strengthen France in the 17th century, but ridiculous in the 21st century if applied to Russia. Russia is the largest country on Earth (twice the size of Canada). And the most populous of the European or Eurasian countries, to be more precise in the field of demography: 150 million inhabitants.
Putin has failed to notice that military technology has changed the face of Russia forever. It would be unthinkable that the horsemen of Mongolia, drinking the blood of their small horses, would conquer a territory as large as they did in the Middle Ages (the largest continuous empire humans had ever seen). Or that the Russian Cossacks (there are Cossacks in Ukraine too) successfully rebelled against Moscow. That simply is not possible.
That is why Putin’s action against the Ukrainians and against the Russians is so vile. They are two peoples united by history and ethnicity but separated by politics since Lenin (and later Stalin) left millions of Ukrainians to die from starvation, in order to give them a failed lesson in political economy…Read more…
Published in elblogdemontaner.com Saturday April 2, 2022