Putin is one grim fucker. He almost seems to relish outrageous and blatant acts of violence - from the Salisbury poisonings to using chemical weapons in Syria to his brutalising of the people of Ukraine. Its the behaviour of gangster - sending a message via sadistic and merciless brutality. And the ridiculous denials and lies are all part of it.
Fuck trying to accommodate and "learn to live with" him and his regime. And fuck off the "all as bad as each other" argument. There is a qualitative difference between your run of the mill political leaders and regimes and the likes of Putin - hes down there with Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein or Papa Doc. Its not just hes doing what he sees as necessary / what he thinks he can get away with - ruthless cruelty its his default state.
An understandable stance but still an incomplete, distorted one.
Some powers have had a reputation for especially overt forms of brutality for a very long time. For example plenty of people were especially keen not to be captured by soviet forces in world war 2, likely for rather good reasons. There was a well-earnt reputation for brutality and the reputation itself was used as a source of power and intimidation. But there are other examples too, for example people have reasons not to want to end up being captured by the USA either. The detail of the brutality and its justification varies and its completely reasonable for people to argue about those details and what level of equivalence exists, but I dont trust those arguments to be fair and balanced when in the middle of a particular conflict with vivid and horrendous examples of one regimes brutality on show every day.
For example dont ask me to overlook the other conflicts we have heard so much about this century, dont ask me to forget about the bravery of being out of range, Guantanamo bay, rendering to hidden prisons, waterboarding, sexual humiliation and the use of dogs. Dont ask me to forget who supplied and trained security forces that shot unarmed protesters during uprisings, and who was happy to sell more equipment to regimes that not long earlier had been having their snipers shoot protesters in the eye. Dont ask me to judge more favourably the use of euphemisms such as 'collateral damage' and 'shock and awe' compared to the sort of bullshit justifications Russia is fond of.
We can condemn all of those things without giving Russia and Putin any sort of let off. We can condemn terrible acts of brutality and bloody murder in all their forms whenever they occur and whoever they are conducted by, and regardless of what justifications are used by the regimes that carry out these acts. We can regard all of these things as terrible and regard all perpetrators as contemptible and criminal without having to create special new categories of horror that we then only apply to countries that it is politically convenient to apply them to. Double standards are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
I would still focus on the crimes of Putin and his regime in this thread because this thread is about a war in progress that he started, where many terrible things are happening. Its only when other people start going on about how this stuff is somehow different to other particular things we've seen that I feel the need to indulge in this sort of post. If my words wind people up then there is a simple solution, stick to the war in question here and dont invent new categories of horror when this horror is not actually new to the human condition.
apnews.com
www.independent.co.uk
