On Friday, American Republican Senator Lindsey Graham called for the assassination of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Many analysts have dismissed it as a rant, typical of a man whose mental health has been in question for some time. However, there is nothing shocking or mad about Graham’s remarks. They reflect the US administration’s traditional way of thinking. Without announcing it, official America would like to do a sleek job of assassination of world leaders it is opposed to, but that is not the case in reality. It either failed to kill them, making a mockery of its intelligence agencies, or the killings turned out to be messy because they were carried out by a mass of ‘revolutionaries’ encouraged and supported by America–as in the case of the Arab leaders.
A classic case of America’s failure to assassinate another country’s leader despite trying hard for decades is that of Fidel Castro, the leader of Communist Cuba from 1959 to 2008. America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employed bizarre methods to kill Castro–through a fountain pen with a concealed hypodermic needle so fine that being stabbed by it would be undetectable; botulism toxin pills sought to be administered to Castro by a former lover, and through both poisoned and exploding cigars (as per an article in Encyclopaedia Britannica). Castro survived scores of such assassination bids, ten American presidents and ruled Cuba for almost half a century before retiring in 2008. It was another eight years before he died of ill health in 2016, at 90.
Cool Castro
Not only did Castro remain unfazed by these attempts on his life, but he was also a picture of charm when asked about them. On a 1979 trip to the US, Castro was asked whether he was wearing a bullet-proof vest which he presumably “always wears”. His trademark cigar in mouth, Castro asked, “What vest?” as he unbuttoned his military shirt to show his bare chest. “I will land in New York like this. I have a moral vest, which is strong; that has protected me always.” Commenting on the attempts on Castro’s life, a common Cuban said: “He is their (America’s) number one target but has more lives than a cat, he is still going strong.”
Incidentally, even Putin had asked Castro about how he survived so many attempts on his life. Castro told him that he took care of his security personally. Never mind America’s character assassination of leaders like Castro and Putin, describing them as “brutal”, “repressive” and “dictatorial”, there is a side to their personalities that begs attention, beyond the propaganda of America and its allies. Such leaders have an abiding faith in themselves and their ideologies that gives them a sense of destiny and realism at the same time, although they articulate it in their own style. Unlike other Communist titans, such as Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong, Castro was opposed to the idea of an embalmed body kept in a mausoleum for perpetual viewing after one’s lifetime, and, accordingly, he was cremated.
Putin’s Wit
A year after Castro’s passing away in 2016, Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone asked Putin about the assassination attempts on his life, referring to a similar situation around Castro; about Putin’s management of the security set-up around him and whether he wondered about his fate and future. During the interview, aired on ‘CBS This Morning’ in June 2017, Putin’s reply to a question on his possible assassination was a wisecrack: “Do you know what they say among the Russian people? They say that those who are destined to be hanged are not going to drown.” Unlike atheist Castro, Putin believes in God, even in folk signs and omens. To a question by Stone about his fate, Putin said, “Only God knows our destiny, yours and mine. One day, this (death) is going to happen to each and every one of us, the question is what we will have accomplished in this transient world by then.”
In another interview on ‘Russia Insight’ in the March of 2018, Putin answered questions about his view of the history and future of Russia at length, but when asked whether he would like to know about his own future or what would happen to him in five or ten years, Putin’s response was a matter-of-fact “No.” About his role and Russia, he said, “I have a certain job and the goal is clear. I want our country to be successful, powerful, stable, balanced and forward-looking.”
Putin has expressed this thought in many interviews given to the Russian and world media. Unlike the American leaders, who either want “to make America great again” or bomb and destroy whole nations to prove that America is the most powerful nation on earth, the Russian president is not given to bluster. Anybody interested in making an independent assessment of the man and the leader that is Putin, should watch his interviews and speeches, available on YouTube. The current propaganda being done by the western media and leaders, especially British and American leaders, of which the Graham call for Putin’s assassination is part, has had no effect on Putin and the rest of the Russian leadership that stands like a rock with him. The Kremlin’s response to Graham’s call was dismissive: “He is a drunk who has lost his mind.”
Character Assassination
America and Britain have mastered the art of demonising world leaders who block or oppose their hegemonic designs. The purpose of the malicious propaganda is to justify the killing and overthrow of such leaders, as is happening in Putin’s case. Nobody knows it better than Putin. During the last 20 years, ever since Putin retrieved Russia from the buffoonery of Boris Yeltsin and set about rebuilding it as a world power that could—and did–stand up to America, the American leaders, across the political boundaries, have been gunning for him. The leadership has waged a propaganda war against Putin from various political platforms and through the media and has almost won the war.
There are media houses all over the world heaping condemnation on Putin, painting him as an evil dictator like Adolf Hitler. There are thousands of protestors on the streets of Europe, even Russia, calling for Putin’s downfall. They are all pretending that the war started just ten days ago and that it is an “unprovoked” and “unilateral” one. Putin is smart enough not to join the propaganda war and remains focussed on the actual war. Not just Putin and his military men, but even military experts in America are contemptuous of the heroics and theatrics being staged by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, and the mass protests against the war.
American Col. Douglas Macgregor, who was a senior adviser to President Donald Trump’s defence secretary, told a shocked Fox News anchor on Friday: “The first five days were, frankly, too gentle. They (Russians) have corrected that. In another ten days, it should be over.” The eastern part of Russia, he noted, “is firmly in the grip of Russia” and that “seizing territory is not the objective of this war, only destroying the Ukrainian armed forces.” He called Ukraine’s president Zelensky a “puppet”, who is jeopardising his people’s safety by dragging the conflict. When the anchor egged him on to praise Zelensky, Col. Macgregor said, “I don’t see anything heroic about him; the only heroic thing he can do is to come to terms with reality, neutralise Ukraine, because a neutral Ukraine would be good for us (America) as well as Russia.”
Russia’s Focus
Unreported by most of the world media, the Russian military, in keeping with Putin’s objective of the “demilitarisation” and “de-Nazification” of Ukraine, is currently engaged in “cauldron manoeuvres” against it in eastern Ukraine. The enemy troops, reportedly infested with neo-Nazis, are being encircled, which is expected to choke their fuel, ammunition and food supplies, force them to either surrender and escape to the safety of civilian life, or get killed fighting a losing battle. While the western media is pounding us with reports of the fierce resistance being put up by Ukraine’s armed forces and people, in military terms, things are moving “as planned”.
That Washington also has a plan against Russia and its president is well known to the Moscow political and military establishment. Putin never spares an opportunity to talk about America’s destruction of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and the other countries in the name of democracy. Given a chance, Putin knows, the American leadership would do to him exactly what it did to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Col. Muammar Gaddafi. It is with the Libyan design in mind that the US has been engineering a ‘movement’ for democracy in Russia. It would take a fool not to recognise it. It is this that Putin has set out to defeat. Ukraine is America’s proxy war against Russia, and Putin had no choice but to fight it.
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