Russian TV news is sometimes awesome
This post first appeared on Russia Insider
I finally watched Trump's Poland speech yesterday after hearing incessantly from Trump fans that it was very good. It was nothing of the kind. What it really was, was good old American electoral politics - Poles are a hugely important demographic in the rust belt states which handed Trump his victory. So is he going to smother them with sweet nothings? Of course he is! I get it, he was in the host country and he was undermining Merkel, and placating neocons - all smart politics.
But was it a good speech? No, it was full of a lot of dumb nonsense, militarism, and a large dose of Russia-bating, which plays well with the neocon-entranced Poles, which he gets a pass for as a politician, but a great speech it was definitely not. I am about as pro-Trump as it gets, but this speech was a dud. It was smart politics though.
So it was very gratifying to see this video today of Russia's top newsman, Dmitry Kiselyov, completely trashing Trump, the Poles, and the liar who wrote the speech, White House aide Stephen Miller.
Kiselyov starts out ridiculing the over-the-top compliments, blasting the Russia-bashing, the lauding of buying Patriot missiles (really Miller?), but then pulls out his carving knife and gives the president, the Poles, and the world at large a nice little history lesson about who did what to whom in WW2, and who is slandered and misrepresented, and by whom.
WW2 history buffs will love this take-down - because it deals in revisionism about the Soviet role in liberating Europe, so relentlessly slandered during and after the Cold War, and especially by the Russia-hating Poles. Brzezinski was typical in his attitudes, which he passed on to his icy spawn.
In a nutshell - Kiselyov explains that The Donald repeated a gross lie about the Russians deliberately not crossing the Vistula river to save the Poles during the Warsaw uprising. The truth is that the Polish government in exile living in the comfort of London gave the order to start the uprising, knowing that it was highly risky because the Germans were still strong enough to probably put it down, but that they were desperate to take control of Warsaw themselves, and not cede it to the Russians. The uprising failed, the Germans brutally put it down, and 150,000 Poles perished because of the stupidity and recklessness of the exiles who were willing to gamble with the lives of their countrymen. There is no way the Russians could have crossed the river to help the uprising - they did not have the strength to do so against German resistance, and the Germans knew it perfectly well.
He also debunks a lot of other WW2 lies - it's good stuff.
Kiselyov is at his best here, and you can see why he is so effective. He is a great showman, and masterfully skewers Trump and his speech writers. He even says that Trump is just a rude old guy who probably doesn't know the first thing about history and is just reading a piece of paper someone wrote for him.
If Trump wants to make great speeches, he's going to need new speech writers.
This post first appeared on Russia Insider
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