Stalin Unclear What Problem People Have With Syria Elections

“The West has plenty of divisions, but they might as well be the pope for all that they’re unwilling to back up their demands with military force.”

Moscow, April 18 – The World-War-II-era leader of the Soviet Union expressed puzzlement today over objections raised as to the legitimacy of recent elections in Syria.

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, who led the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from 1922 to 1952, told reporters on Monday that he remained bewildered by Western assertions that the parliamentary elections held in Syria this week were problematic. The legendary, if controversial, Soviet leader insisted nothing was wrong with the rule of Syrian President Basher Assad, and that he should be free to rig or otherwise predetermine elections to his heart’s content.

“What do they want from the guy?” wondered Stalin, whose purges of key Soviet institutions such as the Red Army threatened to undermine the country’s military capacity. “He’s a dictator. That’s what dictators do. I would know.”

Stalin, whose ruthlessness and brutality were in some historians’ assessments the main factor in the USSR’s defeat of Nazi Germany in WWII, referred to his own 1935 quote asking how many divisions the pope has: “The West has plenty of divisions, but they might as well be the pope for all that they’re unwilling to back up their demands with military force. What my time as General Secretary of the Communist Party proved more than anything else was that might makes right. So the West is going to have to decide: either they’re willing to put troops on the ground in Syria to protect the opposition groups they supposedly back, or they’re wrong. Talking about Assad’s elections is a distraction.”

For his part, Assad voiced gratification that the former Soviet leader was thinking of him. “He was one of my late father’s role models,” gushed the Syrian president, referring to his father Hafez Al-Assad, a man whose ruthlessness included the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians in a single city to quell unrest. “It’s touching to know that Comrade Stalin was thoughtful enough to spare a few words for my sake.” Assad has been fighting a bloody civil war for six years, a conflict that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and rendered millions homeless or refugees, upheaval that would be familiar to Stalin, who was famously willing to sacrifice untold numbers of soldiers and civilians alike, whether his own or the enemy’s in order to stop the Wehrmacht.

“It’s really important to me that Comrade Stalin saw fit to endorse Syria’s democratic processes,” added Assad. “I hope the West takes to heart the advice of that man, because he knows a thing or two about international relations and government.”