Why Ukraine Matters to Everyone
At what point does it become appropriate to invoke the phrase “never again”?
When the Russians flattened Grozny, it was supposedly an internal Russian matter, an anti-terrorist activity.
When they bombed Aleppo into rubble to protect Syrian dictator Assad, that was the Middle East; after all, there are no good guys over there.
When Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko was killed with polonium-210, when anti-Putin politician Boris Nemtsov was assassinated, and when opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned, oh, the Russians didn’t do it. Nor when four people, including two British citizens, were poisoned with Novichok nerve agent in England.
When they call Ukrainians khokhols, that’s just Russians being Russians.
When they invaded Ukraine, it was because they were threatened by NATO.
When they dropped a bomb near Babi Yar, it was because they were attacking the TV tower.
When their artillery hit the menorah at the Drobytsky Yar Holocaust memorial, that was just a casualty of war.
When they arrested thousands of Russian anti-war protesters, it was maintaining civil order.
When they made it illegal to call the war anything but a “special military operation,” or to transmit any information about the war that would cast the government in a bad light, that was just fighting propaganda.
When they shut down all opposition media in Russia, that was patriotically suppressing subversives.
When they laid waste to Mariupol, that’s just the way the Russians conduct wars.
When Putin called for the denazification of Ukraine, well, there is the Azov battalion after all.
When Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called Ukrainian president Zelenskyy — who is Jewish and who lost family members in the Holocaust — “a Nazi and a neo Nazi,” well, didn’t Ukrainian nationalists under Stepan Bandera participate with Germans in the murder of thousands of Ukrainian Jews during World War II?
And if the Russian soldiers shoot up the cars of fleeing civilians, loot houses and shops, rape women, and gun down defenseless non combatants, leaving their bodies in the street — when they summarily execute a man in a square in Bucha, telling the other civilians they had assembled, “This is dirt. We are here to cleanse you from the dirt” — well, doesn’t that happen in war?
Then maybe we should turn to this op-ed for Russian state news agency RIA Novosti to tell us what it all means:
Denazification is a set of measures in relation to the nazified mass of the population, which technically cannot be subjected to direct punishment as war criminals. … A significant portion of the mass of the people who are passive Nazis, Nazi collaborators, are also guilty. They supported and indulged the Nazi power. Just punishment for this part of the population is only possible as the bearing of the inevitable burdens of a just war against the Nazi system, waged as gently and discreetly as possible with regards to civilians. The further denazification of this mass of the population consists in re-education, which is achieved by ideological repression (suppression) of Nazi attitudes and severe censorship: not only in the political sphere, but necessarily also in the sphere of culture and education. …
Denazification can only be carried out by the victor, which presupposes (1) his unconditional control over the denazification process and (2) the power to ensure such control. In this respect, the denazified country cannot be sovereign. The denazifying state — Russia — cannot proceed from a liberal approach to denazification.
The name ‘Ukraine’ apparently cannot be retained as the title of any fully denazified state entity on territory freed from the Nazi regime. … Denazification will inevitably be de-Ukrainization — a rejection of the large-scale artificial inflating of the ethnic component of the self-identification of the population. … Ukraine, as history has shown, is impossible as a nation-state, and attempts to ‘build’ one lead inevitably to Nazism. …
The Banderite elite must be liquidated, its reeducation is impossible. The social ‘swamp,’ which actively and passively supported it through action and inaction, must survive the hardships of the war and assimilate the experience as a historical lesson and atonement for its guilt.
This genocidal rhetoric was published by a Russian state-owned domestic news agency, during a time when any “false information” about the war is legally suppressed. In other words, these views have received the tacit approval of the Russian government.
Clearly, the claim that Russia cares anything about protecting actual Jews, about preventing actual genocide, about extinguishing actual Nazism, is a brazen lie.
Now can we conclude that this is the “again” that was never supposed to happen?
Every American has good reason to be up in arms about what is happening in Ukraine, and not just for reasons of benevolence and justice. Kremlin money and Kremlin propaganda have been fanning the flames of political chaos in our own country for years. If you have been despondent in thinking that American representative government has seen its day, Vladimir Putin bears a heavy responsibility for helping create that perception.
If Putin doesn’t fall, we are in for some very dark times, not only in Europe but in our own country.
This doesn’t mean we should enter into a war with Russia, but we can at least do everything possible to make sure Ukraine defeats him. Dictators only survive by cultivating the mystique of strength. If Putin’s weakness becomes a fact that cannot be evaded, he is toast. Once it can no longer be denied that he was powerless to take Ukraine, that his strategy was stupid, that the Russian army was incompetent — when the pundits on Russian television start running out of explanations for why the 3-day special military operation still hasn’t seen success after a month, or several — when the casualties can no longer be ignored and soldiers’ families no longer care about the consequences of speaking up — when the lies are so transparent that nobody can believe them anymore — when the Russian economy starts falling apart — then we have a chance to see Putin fall.
As Garry Kasparov keeps pointing out, dictators escalate when they see weakness. If they see vulnerability, they take advantage of it; they do not stop unless they encounter strength.
It is therefore absolutely crucial that Ukraine be given the means to defend itself with overwhelming force. The fact that the West has not yet supplied Ukraine with fighter planes is a scandal. If one considers the heroic actions of the fighter pilots in Ukraine, who have done so much with so little, think of the lives they could have saved had they had the equipment they needed a month ago.
Our elected officials need to hear from you that this has to happen.
