Max Hastings is a lying brute who needs to be shackeled.

by Johanna Ganyukova, Russian Insider.com : 

Sir Max Hastings obviously has a chip on his shoulder. Vladimir Putin must have really upset him in a previous life. Writing for the Daily Mail, the renowned British journalist and self-proclaimed Conservative has outed himself as a bigot and neocon. His article on the Victory Day parade is a masterpiece of black propaganda that only an expert such as Josef Goebbels himself could be proud of. The depressing thing is, he has a large readership, with 709 people already sharing this disgraceful content online at time of writing.

Previously calling Putin a “lying brute who has to be shackled”, Hastings has, along with the rest of the Western media, done his darndest to turn Moscow’s Victory Day celebrations from something glorious into something sinister. Let’s analyse the twisted way he attempted this by examining his key points.

1.) “Vladimir Putin’s repeated acts of aggression against neighbouring states” – you only need to read more articles on Ukraine at Russia Insider to discover that the violence began on Maidan Square in Kiev, amongst the Ukrainians themselves and was in no way linked, and still cannot be linked to Moscow. The fact that the Ukrainian army is attacking its own people has been ignored by Hastings. What ‘repeated acts’? Is he referring to the Georgia/ South Ossetia conflict of 2008 when the Georgians invaded South Ossetia, killing Ossetian civilians and Russian peacekeepers? Yes, Russia got involved in this, but it was a reaction to aggression by Georgia.

2.) “Putin is a dictator, albeit an elected one” – this is a contradiction in terms – he cannot be a dictator if he has been elected – and he is fully accountable to the Duma. Indeed, he was required to seek the Duma’s permission to accept Crimea into the Russian Federation.

3.) “[The Russian people] have swallowed the big lie propagated by Putin’s ruthlessly state-controlled media” – Hastings, you yourself are currently propagating a big lie with this article, like the majority of Western mass media organisations. Russia has many press organisations that are critical of the government – Dozhd, Snob.ru to name just a couple. But I don’t suppose Mr Hastings speaks a word of Russian.

4.) “Russian missiles destroyed a Malaysian airliner over separatist-held territory” – I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this one.  Seriously, where is the *evidence*? There is just as much evidence to suggest that it was the Ukrainian army who shot down the plane in the first place. And quite frankly, if the US and EU had discouraged the violence and not supported the fascists on Maidan, the plane would have been flying over peaceful farmland 10 months ago instead of a bloody war zone.

5.) “While in Britain people moaned about the dreariness of eating whale meat and Woolton pie, in Leningrad they were eating… each other” – what an utterly distasteful and outrageously xenophobic statement. The siege of Leningrad was something that British people have yet to experience – pure, horrific starvation, named the “deadliest in human history”, caused by the Nazi blockade.  What is the purpose of this statement? To suggest that the citizens of Leningrad perished out of choice?! It’s absolutely shocking!

In general the article stinks of xenophobia and complete contempt for the Russian people and their (highly popular) leader. I have only one thing to thank Mr Hastings for – his apt phrase, which is utterly fitting for himself – “a lying brute who has to be shackled”.

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