Putin Outlaws Holocaust Denial in Russia

There are times when Putin seems like a tyrant to me, such as when he went for his land grab in Ukraine. There are times when he seems every bit the petty tyrant, the dictator, that he is portrayed in the Western media.

And yet, there are other times when I can see his logic, and when he seems like the strongest, clearest voice against Western hypocrisy.

Here is a link to a story about Putin outlawing Holocaust denial, which seems to make sense to me. There are some things that are too serious to futz around with, and suggesting that all of the stories and footage and documented proof of the Holocaust, to say nothing about massive graves and physical places like the death camp at Auschwitz, are somehow tainted or some giant conspiracy, is just patently absurd. Russia lost twenty million people fighting the Germany during World War II, and it was Russians who liberated Auschwitz, among other places. So, this is something that I happen to agree with, because it is so inciting as to be tantamount to hate speech.

Frankly, it should not take laws or action by policy makers today for people to accept and ugly truth that might just reveal something not just about Germans, but about what human beings are capable of doing to one another. Yes, it happened as a result of German actions during World War II, but it also happened to natives throughout the Americas and Australia, Armenians in Turkey, Ukrainians in the old Soviet Union (just a few years before the Holocaust, in what is known as the Holodomor, to Biafrans in Nigeria, to Communists and leftists opponents of the government in the Philippines, to everybody in Cambodia during the days of the Khmer Rouge, to Tutsis in Rwanda, in Darfur in Sudan, and now, in Syria and Iraq presently. And that means that it can happen again, and denial of such crimes is tantamount to a certain guilt by association. After all, why deny? Why try and rewrite history, ugly as it often is?


Russia's Putin outlaws denial of Nazi crimes by Alexei Anishchuk of Reuters, May 5, 2014:

http://news.yahoo.com/russias-putin-outlaws-denial-nazi-crimes-161442992--sector.html