I am so sick of hearing Putin’s victimhood story being repeated.
The “big lie” seems to go a long way - a lot further than I ever imagined.
Hitler’s “big lie” was that the Jews stabbed the Germans in the back, and that World War I was lost only because of sedition from within, not that they were outgunned, outmatched, and outfought after the US joined the fight.
The South’s “big lie” is that the Civil War was a “noble cause”, and that the only issue was “states’ rights” and that they were right all along anyway. Cripes, we have military forts, schools, bridges and monuments named after seditious traitors; the biggest mountain in Georgia (taken from Native Americans) has a relief sculpture of Confederate leaders - and it’s a huge tourist attraction.
The “big lie” of Vietnam was that we were winning, and the lie persisted for years until enough kids got killed that it was unsustainable. And yet there are still people who believe we didn’t do enough, even though we dropped more ordinance on an area the size of Connecticut than all the bombs and missiles used by both sides in all theaters of war (Europe, Africa, Asia, Middle East) in World War II. Including the TNT equivalent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Wakefield’s “big lie” that vaccines cause autism is going strong and has caused more damage and human suffering than is otherwise imaginable, even though it has been refuted by scientifically designed studies and Wakefield himself has retracted it.
There is another “big lie” at the moment which is political, but it involves “a stolen election” and a significant fraction of the populace believes it without a scintilla of evidence.
Putin is just following along the playbook of those who plays the “victimhood” big lie, and for reasons to abstruse to ponder, it works, at least for a while. (I am reminded that Stalin’s many lies were not acknowledged to, or by the Russian public until long after his death.)