I’m writing this on Day 12 of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol, cities with millions of residents, are being smashed to pieces. Almost two million refugees have streamed into countries to the West. Putin shows no sign of calling off his murder campaign – my deliberate choice of words.
We’ve watched this before, most recently in Syria, where Russians and Syrians under Assad dropped barrel bombs on hospitals. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled their country. Another murder campaign. Another crime of monstrous proportions.
This feels personal even though I am not Ukrainian, nor do I know anyone there. This man says it better than I can. Slava Malamud posted this today: “People ask me who I have in Ukraine. Nobody. Not a soul. [It is] the crippling horror of what’s happening, … the enormity of the tragedy. The unmistakable, pounding sound of evil on the march. … The enormity of the crime is staggering.”
We care more now because Ukraine is European and because the reporting coming out of the cities and border areas has been so good. We have more eyes with which to see. The war scenario itself is one that is easier to understand – Russia invades a peaceful country that never posed a threat. Putin is a ubiquitous monster. We have known his face for 23 years.
I’ve used the word murder and crime to describe what Putin is doing. I believe those words are precise. However, if I am going to be honest, those words are also precise as a description of other cases that make Americans and those of the ‘West’ uncomfortable.
Name me a nation that has fought a war that has not committed war crimes. You cannot. Name me leaders who ordered their forces into war who could not be brought to the bar for crimes against humanity. You cannot.
Obama and Trump with drone strikes that killed children, wedding parties, and entire innocent families. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others with their orders regarding torture. Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman with their orders to carpet bomb and firebomb cities – Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo. How can Hiroshima and Nagasaki not be considered crimes against humanity?
In naming their names and crimes, I am not suggesting a morally obtuse ‘everyone is guilty and thus all are evil’ kind of lazy nihilism, a kind of stupidly superior attitude of cynicism, but something more complicated and troubling.
When nations go to war, especially when nations engage in an offensive war that extends beyond the boundaries of their own geographic borders, and especially with the advent of long-range artillery, missiles and air power, those nations will invariably kill women and children and old men, non-combatants. The killing may be unintentional or ‘collateral damage’ in the awful language of military-speak, as we have repeatedly claimed regarding many deaths associated with our drone missile attacks. The killing may be wholly intentional as appears to be the case with the Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities. The parents of the dead Afghani and Ukranian children don’t care about power politics or zones of influence or terrorists. Their children have been destroyed. An evil has been done.
Nations are not innocent, nor can the citizens of nations claim innocence or ignorance. Americans cannot claim any exceptional morality. I pay taxes. I vote. I have not emigrated to Ireland or New Zealand. The list of our own crimes is out there for anyone who cares to think and read. I can claim neither ignorance nor innocence.
But we must choose and not just based on a simpleminded version of the lesser of evils. The United States is many things but not totalitarian. All of those people escaping war zones who long to come here know something that many, in their endless sophistries, often forget — here it is possible to speak and write and often live free of the iron hand of the State.
We must choose, and I choose the United States and other democracies. Here, at least, and in those democracies, we possess the possibility for change without catastrophe. We may be mired in our own oligarchic corruption and have a powerful neo-fascist movement and our federal legislature is a gerontocracy and sclerotic, and our Supreme Court is beginning to fulfill a right-wing agenda, but we are not Russia or China or North Korea. The secret police are not coming for us here. Our free press is wildly eclectic. We have not invaded a free, democratic country, and with NATO, we are doing all we can to protect Europe and funnel aid to Ukraine. Both actions are wholly good. This time, a unified West stands with the victims. This time, the United States has acted with wisdom, subtlety and resolve.
