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By Maureen Dowd
opinion columnist
WASHINGTON — A long time ago, I was a Cosmo Girl.
I read Cosmopolitan magazine and studied its barrage of recommendations on how to attract men.
A tip for reading an intriguing ebook on the bus to and from work. I opted for Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment. “
This literary honey trap didn’t work. But after reading “Crime and Punishment,” I walked away thinking that the Russian temperament is touching and truthful.
Raskolnikov, the deficient former student, kills an older woman who is an unethical pawn saleswoman, as well as her half-sister. He is filled with guilt and disgust and, in the end, turns himself in to the police.
It stuck in my 20-year-old head that self-incrimination is a Russian trait, and that Russians understood at a deep point that you can’t put yourself above regulations just because you think you’re superior.
Vladimir Putin, of course, contradicts this notion, as does Stalin.
Putin is less Dostoevsky than Euripides, a walking revenge. Like Medea, a hot production of the opera kicked off the Met season on Tuesday, Putin is committing a savage murder of innocents regardless of the consequences.
Medea feels disrespectful: that’s all she wants to justify her carnage, murdering her own children and her husband’s new wife in a poisoned suit and crown. In some versions of Greek myth, Medea and Jason obtain the Golden Fleece, brother and betraying their father with it, and was unwilling to see her husband satisfied in another woman’s arms. Now he desires blood, invoking in the opera the “Black Furies” and the “deities of Hell”.
Putin also feels disrespectful, still mourning the disintegration of the Soviet Union and content to murder several innocent Ukrainians to satisfy his desire to reconstitute this lost empire.
At the end of the opera, Medea sets fire to the temple where she killed her two sons. It lights up around you. The horrified crowd fled singing,
Oh, terror, the earth and the sky are on fire!Let’s fly from the burning sky.
In a disturbing echo, Putin raised the specter of a sizzling sky in a speech Friday in the golden Georgievsky Hall of the Kremlin’s Grand Palace. He grimly alluded to the use of nuclear weapons, which would leave the earth and sky on fire.
“The United States is the country in the world that has used nuclear weapons twice, destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. And they set a precedent,” he said.
Seemingly insane, Putin claimed that “the dictatorship of Western elites” is a “reversal of classical faith and values. “It has come, he says, “to be seen as an upside-down faith: natural Satanism. “
Concluding his own destiny with that of Mother Russia, noting that his country will have to occupy its rightful position in the world as a “great millennial power, a total civilization”, he announces that he is officially swallowing 4 provinces in eastern Ukraine as a result of false referendums there.
We are inundated with concern and anger over his ungodly brutality, but Putin doesn’t care. Like Medea, he is distant from the cries of the Greek choir.
To justify his unprovoked attempt to subsume Ukraine, Putin made the absurd claim that the West is a “neocolonial system” that has “dreamed” of dividing, weakening and dividing Russia into a colony.
While President Biden and European officials accused Russia of sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines, designed to send Russian herbal fuel to Europe, Putin hinted that these were the paintings of the Anglo-Saxons. “Sanctions are no longer enough, and now they have become subversion. He said.
Biden responded at a White House news conference on Friday, stating that the administration will impose new sanctions on Russia and noting that the world would not recognize fraudulent referendums.
“It’s not going to scare us or intimidate us,” Biden said. He can’t take his neighbor’s territory and get away with it. “
Ukrainians are achieving successful army offensives in the northeast of the country, and Russian men are fleeing Putin’s Russia en masse; by some estimates, more men left Russia to serve in Ukraine than served there.
Donald Trump posted on his social media site: “The Russia/Ukraine disaster NEVER happened, and in fact would not have happened if I were president. “
He’s probably right. If Trump were president, he would be in Putin’s pocket and the United States would not help Ukraine.
For a long time it was assumed that a nuclear weapon would never be used again because of the consequences. But what if you deal with an evildoer without worrying about the consequences?A fashionable Greek tragedy.
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