Putin animation targets Disneyworld

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What did Disney ever do to upset Putin? Yesterday, President Putin showed off in a computer animation a new cruise missile system that apparently is unbeatable. The animation shows multiple warheads descending on central Florida - i.e. Disneyland. For goodness sake hasn't Florida had enough troubles without this specter hanging over it? 

No doubt the animation was put together a long time before the school shootings.  I have this funny feeling that the Russian leadership deliberately chose the sunshine state for their chilling cartoon. Could it be that "Disney" represents something that irks the Slavic soul? Is it that Disney and Florida represent in all cultural saccharine way represent the American dream? Is it that "Disneyfication" of life haunts the collective Russian mind?  

This could be a poke in the eye for the Hollywood/Disney postmodern narrative which really rubs up Eastern Europeans and in particular Russians.  That cultural myth is probably at its most bloated when presenting the Second World War. Even my grandfather who was a D-Day veteran found this really irritating because of the American-European denial of the scale of Slavic-Russian casualties.  The figure remains disputed but they could be 26 and 40 million civilians and military.  The combined USA and UK figures do not add up to a million. These statistical truths somehow never got into the bloodstream of the West which still sees WW2 as something "they" won.  The East then sees itself as expendable - cannon fodder. 

Indeed, this theme has been played out time and time again in East/West relations. The East has felt that it is a bulwark to the West. The Byzantine Emperor John XIII pressed the bishops of the  Ecumenical Council of Florence (1431-1449) for a reconciliation between the Eastern and Western Church, between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. The Turks were at the gates of Constantinople and the Byzantines needed the West. A deal was signed and briefly, the schism of 1054 healed. A lack of military intervention on behalf of the West led to the whole thing collapsing. 


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