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Friday, December 1, 2006 12:00 AM

Who poisoned the KGB agent?

Only a state with a highly sophisticated nuclear program could kill a person with a radioactive toxin.

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  • Tuesday, December 5, 2006 09:03 AM

    Patricia, get over it

    Your family was abused by the Mafia. But you're not your father, and not everyone in the mafia is a "murderous thug." As i said before, it's safe to assume that anyone who has any power in Russia has dirty hands, but some hands are dirtier than others. The world isn't just bright-line rules, like it seems you have for the mafia: everything and everyone even remotely related to the mafia is absolutely and completely bad. Things are more complicated than that.

    Now, even though I lived under communism and my family was abused by it, and I fled, I am not stuck in a pathological reaction to communism and governmental authority, like it seems you are to the mafia. You said, "I bet you hate everything Marx-related and government authority" but you're just projecting your own automatic reaction to anything Mafia-related.

    I managed to get over my family's history with communism to vote with the left and support many leftist policies, even though I have personally seen communism fail completely. I'm not a reactionary right-wing nutcase like many Russian immigrants tend to be because they can't think their way out of their own experiences. Not everything is an extreme.

    Can you manage to get over your family's history and admit that sometimes, even organized crime can be more ethical/better than an authoritarian government? That's, i think, my main point. Is it possible, in your world view, that that could be the case?

    Maybe some of Putin's measures have helped some people, but that doesn't make him above reproach. Maybe he was opposed to organized crime, and you don't like organized crime, but "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is too simple for the real world, with all its strange bedfellows and contradictions, don't you think?

    Plus, I think it's quite silly to equate american labor-union-related Mafia to the Russian oil oligarchs. They have different goals, different modes of operations, live in very different social and legal environments. It would be equally silly for me to be opposed to the Communist party that runs the city of Bologna in Italy, for example. Yeah, i don't like communists, but I realize that the communists in Bologna are VERY DIFFERENT from the communists in Russia.

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