German chancellor Angela Merkel has reportedly told Barack Obama that after talking to Vladimir Putin she was unsure whether the Russian president was “in touch with reality”. . .
The New York Times reports that in a phone call with the US president, Merkel said that Putin was living “in another world”.
Merkel sounds quite surprised here but I don’t know why she should be. Putin and absolutely everybody else holding political and economic power in Russia today is a remnant of the Soviet era. He has been listening to, absorbing, and finally producing and again absorbing an endless stream of propaganda that offers a certain worldview. He had no reason to question this worldview ever in his life because it gave him a more than comfortable existence and surrounded him with a bunch of terrified sycophants. And now the sycophants are repeating the same old Soviet-style propaganda to him.
How many times did I say on this blog that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a sham, a pretense? There was no transfer of power, be it political or economic, after 1991. The same people remained in power. They practiced the same approaches and uttered the same words.
How many times did I say that it is meaningless to speak about the end of the Cold War if, for one of the sides in this war, it hasn’t ended? I force myself to watch the Russian newscasts on a regular basis, and I’m telling you, the rhetoric of the Cold War is as strong as ever. I was lucky to grow up in the late 1980s and 1990s when there was a brief respite in the FSU media from the constant US-bashing and the saccharine odes to the ultra-patriarchal and deeply nationalistic values of the “mysterious Russian soul.” Even then, when I moved to Canada, I brought some of this exceptionalist, anti-Western worldview with me.
Clarissa's Blog 
Anyone who’s been paying attention realized the guy is out of his gourd years ago. But the leaders of the free world only figure this out now?
We’re doomed. The world is led by freaking idiots.
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The world is led by freaking idiots.(Cliff)
Yep, I think that dawned on me when I was about 11. 😉
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Yeah, me too, but every once in a while there’s a new reminder that’s especially depressing…..
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I don’t think Merkel is an idiot. She just really does not want to upset Russia too much, and so whatever she personally thinks of Putin, she will continue to treat him as respectfully as still possible — note also that the mentioned quote was not confirmed by officials in Germany. Germany really needs good relationships with Russia. So she’s not stupid. Just rather opportunistic. Also Merkel is very hesitant to alienate anyone in general and will probably really try to find a solution that does not cause Putin to lose face if he backs down. Maybe Obama and Merkel even agreed to a sort of good cop/bad cop strategy. I also assume that it is not a coincidence that Merkel communicates her real, and harsh, opinion on Putin via Obama and American media, and then does not confirm it. It comes across as passive-aggressive and insincere, but I think/hope this is part of a strategy to keep communication between Germany and Russia open while the US is more confrontational.
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Very good points Clarissa. I wonder if the history books will someday view the “end of the Cold War” as being sort of like the period between World War I and World War II, where some consider that it wasn’t really two separate wars but really one massive war with a twenty year lapse in between. Similarly, will it be viewed that what everyone thought was the end of the Cold War was really a lapse (about the same, twenty years).
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I have to disagree here with Frau Merkel, whom I respect greatly, God bless her.
Putin is not crazy. KGB never had idiots and crazy ones in its rows. He is a criminal, and he is to be sued as such rather than treated as a sick person.
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