Peter Hitchens is UK Daily Mail columnist. I tend to find him a bit ‘holier than thou’ and he usually writes in such a finger wagging style, and from such a moral high ground that you would think he never ran a red light or parked on a yellow line even.
However, he has spent a lot of time in Russia, and in todays Mail on Sunday, he wrote what I thought was a very interesting article. Here is an excerpt with a link to read the rest:
If not Putin, who? It’s because I love my own country that I can see the point of this sinister tyrant who so ruthlessly stands up for Russia
For months Western commentators have been predicting the fall of Vladimir Putin and lauding pro-democracy demonstrators.
But here Peter Hitchens returns to the country where he spent two years as a foreign correspondent – and offers a very different and provocative view of next week’s vital election.
I like Vladimir Putin. I wish I did not. But I cannot help it. I know that by saying so, I will trigger the lofty wrath of the right-thinking lobby which wants to portray modern Russia as the Evil Empire in a new Cold War.
In that war, which they are trying so hard to start, they will see me as a traitor. But it is exactly because I love my own country that I can see the point of Mr Putin.
He stands – as no other major leader does in the world today – for the rights of nations to decide their own business inside their own borders.
He has underlined that by refusing to join in the rash American-backed effort to destabilise the Assad regime in Syria. He has dared to wield a real veto (unlike David Cameron’s disposable cardboard one) and face the consequences.
He has used his country’s huge oil and gas reserves to maintain an independent state. And he has rejected the current mania for privatisation and market forces as the cure for all ills.
Russia, he believes, has had quite enough privatisation. And that is why the searing beam of selective outrage is being turned on him by the global media and many Western foreign ministries, not to mention the ‘activists’ who roam the world deciding which governments are bad and which good.
That is why you are being invited to rejoice at the anti-Putin demonstrations in Moscow, while dozens of other equally justified protests in other countries go unreported.
Read more here: Peter Hitchens on Putin
For our native Russian speakers, here is a translated version: Russian Version