The first thing i did is ask you for some facts to justify your blatant point, and yet all you do is pointing me out *i* am being offensive! I am sorry my reaction was offending to you. You should at least have been more careful making such statements, if you don't want to get offensive reactions.
I'm not offended at all! Nor were you being offensive. I don't take disagreement to be an offense, and I especially don't take offense at people having very different opinions than I do. You did immediately react with the Westerner / Western media / telling us what's good for us argument, and I was just pointing out that, well, I dunno, I don't generally let people build my opinions for me.
I don't believe, in the least, of being careful about the things I have to say. I do try, however, to ground what I say in reality. I did bring up two specific cases where very prominent, globally recognized journalists were murdered without any closure to their investigations; Politkovskaya's trial was a farce, and Roddy Scott, well known as one of the ballsiest, bravest correspondents anywhere (he once took a motorcycle ride alone around Phnom Penh in the mid 1990s, when Cambodia was really wild) was, as I said, killed by Russian security forces who said they mistook him for a Chechen insurgent.
This stuff is just the tip of the iceberg; two dozen or so journalists have been killed in Russia since Putin took office. It's significant, at least to me, because that's evidence of other restrictions; lack of freedom of press, persistent violation of civil liberties, culture of impunity among security services... the reason why someone from across the pond can look at these things and say, "hey, there's a repressive government there!" is because those are characteristics of *any* repressive government, anywhere. Russia isn't special; anyone familiar with that kind of behavior by the government (hell, those things even happen here in the US!) will recognize it. Violence doesn't have a language or culture.
These things start at the top; Bush (for example), to me, is personally responsible for the torture that happened at Abu Ghraib, because he's the one guy who can say "stop" or "you can't do that," and instead he encouraged extralegal methods of interrogation. If you're in charge, people get tortured and killed because of the things you ordered to be done, you're responsible. Putin is responsible for killings that men associated to his security services, or directly on their payroll (re: Kadyrov) perpetuate in the name of policy. If Politkovskaya gets killed because Kadyrov's goons want to silence her reporting, or if Russian troops take it upon themselves to kill Scott because he's reporting on the Chechen insurgency, that's Putin's responsibility. No one's going to find an instance (at least, I hope this isn't the case) of Putin literally pulling the trigger on someone or ordering the killing of someone who hasn't taken up arms against the government. That's not how bureaucracies work.
Again, you choose to look at someone as a "national" hero, that's up to you. I'm not trying to change your opinion of him, but I'm certain of the two of us, you were the one who was offended (I most certainly was not). Which is your right, I'm not complaining that you were. But the people who dislike Putin, who are many, aren't just complainers out to get Russia. I dislike him because abets in the murder and harassment of political dissidents. I also intensely disagree with you that Russia, or anyone for that matter, needs a strongman instead of good, efficient, transparent government. That was Gorbachev's point about the Soviet system, no? It's a problem of governance, efficiency, corruption, and the political system has to open up at some point to survive moments of crisis.
