Beware the Hitler talk

[LuvNewcastle]

3. That's how I see it.

He's not Hitler, in that he isn't rounding up minorities and sending them to concentration camps, although there are some minority groups he doesn't like and doesn't seem to care how they're treated. But some of his military moves are very similar to what Hitler did in central Europe.

His motivations are similar as well. He says he's protecting ethnic Russians, just as Hitler made the excuse that he was protecting German (and German-speaking) peoples. Putin appears to think there's something special about Russians, just as Hitler was fixated on Germans, and feels like they should all be united to their mother country.

Of course, in Hitler's case and in Putin's, this is more of a land grab. Hitler wanted to build a reich that would last 1000 years. Putin wants to restore the former glory of the Soviet Union as a major power in the world. Just as with Hitler, I think the only way to stop Putin is with U.S. intervention.

However, we have many more options at our disposal than Roosevelt had in his time. We can harm Russia economically, which could stir up a lot of problems for Putin with the Russian people. We can give Putin a lot of domestic problems to deal with so he'll have to deal with domestic problems rather than focusing his attention outward.