Several Chechens have been arrested for the murder of the dissident Boris Nemtsov in Russia.

N said this was going to happen the second after I told him of Nemtsov’s assassination. This has been a regular pattern in Russia: do something horrible, then blame the Chechens.

Putin has lost some of his recent gains among the Russian neo-Nazis with his slow and bumbling progress in the invasion of Ukraine. Chechen-bashing is a great way to get the neo-Nazis back into the fold while distracting everybody from the murder of the dissident.

For everybody who’s been following the events in Russia for the past 20 years, the triumphant “the Chechens did it!” is nothing but obnoxious. This card has been played so often and so shamelessly that it just got boring.

P. S. One of the Chechens accused of killing Nemtsov blew himself up with a grenade.

For many people, religion is nothing but a way to project their unhappy parent-child model on something outside themselves to make it less painful.

In this model, God is a strict parent whose love is conditional and has to be deserved. Former unloved children invent the original sin, the profound sinfulness of humanity, the need for a savior, etc to explain why they were never loved unconditionally as children.
Of course, there is a lot of rage attached to the knowledge that, for your parent, you were always damaged goods, always not good enough. This rage is displaced in this kind of religious people onto the sinners, the unfaithful, the atheists, etc. We all know that few things can equal in their destructive power the rage of the religious hordes that are destroying everything in view because the pain of being unloved, unwanted children burns them up.

For this sort of religious people, religion is all about fulfilling series of mechanical and meaningless obligations  (fasting, praying in a certain way and during certain time of the day in a specific position, controlling one’s diet, not having sex on certain days, etc). These rituals allow them to feel like good, obedient children who are trying to deserve the strict parent ‘ s approval. “God” controls their lives in the same areas – food, sex, clothing – that their unloving parents did.

1. No, Putin is not tall, charming, handsome, and linguistically gifted. He is 5’5, ugly, socially awkward, speaks very little English, and his Russian vocabulary is that of a lower-level small-time gang member.

2. No, there is no evidence that Putin killed a mujahid in Afghanistan with his bare hands. He wasn’t even in Afghanistan.

3. Yes, Putin is divorced and it is also rumored that he secretly married his long-time mistress and the mother of his two children Alina Kabaeva. 

4. Yes, there is heavy persecution of gay people in Russia but they are fighting for their rights on their own, without any noticeable help from American activists.

5. Yes, Putin has been accused (by some quite reliable people) of blowing up apartment buildings in Russia as a pretext to starting the second war against Chechnya.

6. Yes, it is true that an opera house in Moscow was taken over by Chechen terrorists and Putin gave orders to gas everybody in the building, including hundreds of civilian hostages.