Trump Defends Putin: Now Steps Back in History to Defend Old USSR in Oval Office

The USSR No Longer Exists Except in Trump's Mind

To listen to what Trump said today at a Cabinet meeting in the Oval Office is to enter a bizarrely anti-moral alternative universe. In a confused, ahistorical, and rambling comment in a ramblingly reality-deprived confab, Trump uttered this stunningly benighted take on the Soviets’ attempt to conquer and permanently communize Afghanistan saying in part: “The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They [the Soviets] were right to be there.”

Trump's entire Oval Office rant is here from YouTube:

January 2, 2019: The Oval Office and on TV

FYI: In 1979, there were no “terrorists from Afghanistan going into the Soviet Union.” None.

Not even the old Soviet leaders claimed as much. The official Soviet excuse for invading was: “… to shore up the supposedly legitimate Afghani government (itself installed in a pro-Soviet coup in the previous year),” which BTW: had been upending local customs and brutalizing its internal enemies.

There’s nothing “right about that invasion.” Not even close. Virtually the whole international community, even nations which usually kowtowed to the Soviet Union at the time sharply denounced that flagrantly illegitimate use of Soviet power.

The U.N. General Assembly, often a Soviet-friendly conclave, passed a resolution against the invasion, 104-18. In protest against the invasion, some 66 nations joined the US-led boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.

That invasion was an application of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which promised the use of Soviet armed force to crush any attempt to roll back communism or attain human rights, anywhere the Kremlin considered within the Soviet sphere of influence. The doctrine was, in a word, evil (the word Reagan first used in 1983 in a speech to National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, FL).

Tens of millions of people had human rights, or and hopes for them destroyed, and of course many thousands lost their lives.

The B/L on this Trump view from the main article here. Related article with main points highlighted here.

For any American president to say the old Soviet Union was “right to invade Afghanistan” is truly mind-boggling.

It’s morally akin to approving Mussolini’s fascist invasion and subjugation of Ethiopia, or even the killing fields of Pol Pot. It is unfathomable, and it is an outrage.

Trump is either historically illiterate or morally monstrous. Let’s hope it’s the former. Either way, he should recant those remarks. They sully the Oval Office and the nation which its occupant is supposed to serve.

My 2 cents: Not much to add to article and the B/L.

Thanks for stopping by.