Putin follows Peter the Great as Russia's 1% own 59% of wealth

Peter the Great (1672 -1725. He modernised Russia and visited Western Europe in 1697 and 1717. His eldest child and heir, Alexei, was tortured and executed in 1718. Alexei had a poor relationship with his father. 

The Russian war against Ukraine is a year old and it's the biggest land war in Europe since 1945.

On April 30, 1945, in an underground bunker in Berlin, Adolf Hitler committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule and shooting himself in the head. After the death of the beast Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allied forces,ending Hitler’s dreams of a “1,000-year” Reich (empire).

Another insecure dictator in 2022 wanted to restore the Russian Empire and he too had a record of mass murder.

It was not on the scale of the Austrian-born Hitler but Putin and his henchmen have no mercy when it comes to targeting civilians.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said this week that nearly 18mn people are in dire need of humanitarian assistance. Some 14mn people have been displaced from their homes while 8mn have moved abroad.

Vladimir Putin, the current Russian dictator, has compared himself with the tsar, Peter the Great (1672-1725), in their historic quests to win back Russian lands.

“Peter the Great waged the great northern war for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them. He did not take anything from them, he returned [what was Russia’s],” Putin said last June after visiting an exhibition dedicated to the tsar.

The revelation of imperial ambitions showed that the alleged grievance of the eastward Nato expansion was a facade for a conventional war of conquest.

Peter's rule, Putin suggested, was proof that expanding Russia had strengthened it.

"It seems it has fallen to us, too, to reclaim and strengthen," Putin concluded, with a near-smirk (according to Sarah Rainsford, the BBC's Eastern Europe correspondent) that left no doubt he was referring to Ukraine and his aims there.

Populist agitator Paddy Cosgrave hates Ireland

Ireland and 12 other European countries are Full Democracies: only 21 in World

Paddy Cosgrave, chief executive of the Web Summit and the most prominent business backer of the Sinn Féin political party, seems to spend a lot of time seeking material to support his claim that the Irish Government "is the largest organised crime cartel in Ireland, maybe Europe" and "the corruption & criminality of the old economy is seeping into the new economy of Irish tech."

This delusional partisan says most Irish journalists are "sycophantic, bootlicking, propagandist[s] for the crony class." In his dystopia, the Irish Government operates like Mexican drug cartels and the Italian Mafia.

The Web Summit mainly holds events in countries - Portugal, Brazil and Qatar - where bribery is endemic. Cosgrave has no problem with corruption in these countries and the Portuguese government provides half of the annual revenue of the Web Summit. However, Ireland is a cesspit of corruption according to Cosgrave!

The 3 founders of the Web Summit had a bitter public bust-up and they have amassed 14mn documents in advance of a hearing at the Irish High Court.

Cosgrave has become Ireland's Donald Trump.

Founded in 2010 the Web Summit company got funding and public agency support from the Irish Government. 

Eaten bread was soon forgotten by Cosgrave and he has copied the tactics of both the far-right and Trump.

The demonisation of groups is the tactic of the authoritarian and if one person behaves badly, they are all tarred with the same brush. If the pattern in the US follows, public officials will be exposed to violence. Dr Anthony Fauci, America's recent top medical expert on the coronavirus pandemic, had to get police protection.

George Orwell in 'As I Please: 1943-1945' wrote “Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end, you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.”

Mainstream journalism is not perfect in a free society but Cosgrave's abuse is from the Trump playbook.

India used to be proud of its democracy but the Hindu nationalist government "Through its control of the media, monopolization of campaign finance and harassment of opponents, India seems set on a path to becoming an illiberal pseudo-democracy similar to Turkey or Russia." The present prime minister ordered a raid of the BBC bureau as he was upset with a TV documentary.

Reporters Without Borders ranked India 150th worldwide for press freedoms in 2022, down from 142 the year before. China is at 177.

Ireland has a ranking of 6 among 180 countries

The Irish and Finnish states despite their achievements or faults were the only two new states after the First World War to survive as democracies in the period 1918-1945.

In November 2021 Cosgrave opened the web summit in Lisbon with "evidence" of Irish corruption. 

Last November the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD: a club of mainly advanced countries) said that since "the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention entered into force over 20 years ago, Portugal has not had a single foreign bribery conviction. Detection remains low and Portuguese authorities prematurely closed foreign bribery cases without investigating relevant allegations thoroughly and proactively, with the number of cases terminated having increased significantly compared to Phase 3. Notwithstanding recent reforms, Portugal has not addressed longstanding Working Group concerns regarding its legal framework, and sanctions for foreign bribery against natural and legal persons do not appear to be effective, proportionate or dissuasive."

It's ironic that to Cosgarve, the Irish Government "is the largest organised crime cartel in Ireland, maybe Europe" when Sinn Féin was the political front for Provisional IRA, and together with other Republican paramilitaries, they were responsible for 60% of the deaths in what were called the Troubles in 1966-1999.

Both the Provisional IRA and Provisional Sinn Féin were led by the same people.

2022: Web Summit chief calls Irish government a crime cartel