Where in the World Is Alexander Podrabinek? Hopefully, Putin Doesn’t Know

Pajamas Media ^ | October 3, 2009 | Kim Zigfeld

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Mr. Podrabinek is one of a literally dying breed: Russian journalists who are not afraid to tell the truth even if it gets them murdered. Reuters reports: “New York-based press watchdog the Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Russia the world’s third most dangerous country for journalists, with 17 killed since 2000 including Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya in 2006.”

Over at my blog La Russophobe, we’ve translated Podrabinek’s column on the valiant Russian website Yezhedevny Zhurnal many times. He’s written about official corruption, state propaganda, human rights atrocities in the Chechnya region, persecuted dissidents and opposition leaders, and the essential lack of an original Russian idea.

But now it seems, Podrabinek has gone one step too far.

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Ever since Putin first came to power, we’ve seen one critic after another brutally murdered and not a single killing ever solved. The Kremlin has seized control of every mainstream media outlet and now, even though the vast majority of Russians can’t even go online, it is squaring off against the last vestige of critical reporting: Internet websites. Putin is reviving the Soviet state as fast as his limited resources will allow him.

And the world is just letting him do it. Instead of confronting Putin, U.S. President Barack Obama is offering him gifts of appeasement in the form of reduced military confrontation and ignoring the neo-Soviet crackdown. Given Russia’s deep and abiding hatred of America and her values and its willingness to support America’s most lethal enemies, Obama is clearly bequeathing a future conflict with Russia to America’s children just the same way Neville Chamberlain did.

But we must reserve our harshest scorn, of course, for the cowardly denizens of Russia who look the other way as Putin carries out his final solution for the problem of democracy. Their craven silence as sources of information are switched off and propaganda based on outright lies once again overwhelms them is truly nauseating. It is a betrayal of all the heroic Russians who struggled to resist the first Soviet dictatorship and gave their lives doing so.

Little wonder, given this crude backwardness, that Russia doesn’t rank in the top 130 nations of the world for adult lifespan. Indeed, given Obama’s cowardice, perhaps our best protection against the Russian menace is that they seem hell-bent on driving themselves into extinction.

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Ok if Russia is the World’s 3’rd most dangerous in the world for journalist what countries make up slot 1 @ 2? Would that be China and Korea?