Russia's War Against Ukraine
OP-ED
George Weigel: The lethality of the big lie
Russian President Vladimir Putin visited an aerospace center in Samara, Russia, on July 21.
It’s true that Putin engages in historical revisionism in his quest to force a "New Russia" onto the world-historical stage. But this aspect of Putin's rhetorical armamentarium strikes me as less a matter of developed ideology, of the Hitlerian or Leninist sort, than as something more analogous to a Mafia don's appeal to putative loyalties embedded deep in Sicilian cultural memory when trying to get the other dons to do what he wants. In other words, think Don Corleone, not G. W. F. Hegel, when trying to understand Putin's rhetorical m.o.
