Russia Has No Moral Defense

 

There are worse pictures one could see today than the one I have chosen, of brave Ukrainian women who were released as a POW exchange, their heads deliberately shaven as if to humiliate and unsex them. They are crowned with courage which is far better than hair. They dealt with hardship and sacrifice--their heads are those of warriors. I chose to look on these faces, determined and hopeful, to remind us that people endure and persist despite unfathomable fuckery, because the other images we have today are so dire.

In the re-taken towns of Bucha and Irpin, is has become clear that Russian forces committed mass murder of fighting-aged Ukrainian men. They have clearly been targeting civilians previously, but it is clear the goal is total war. And while the tales of poor Russian military members looting goods they had no access to previously, and trying to capitalize on their war crimes is an almost ironic indictment of the poverty of Russia's kleptocracy trickling down, some of these same "poor rural Russians" are committing atrocities beyond picking clean the houses of corpses and even their bodies. 

They are committing rape. on even young children. And as a modern person, I might find it too sensational, if I didn't know better. Rape is a powerful terrorism tool, after all. It separates the women from the community and disempowers them, even alienating them from their own children in a way, by making the product of their fertility a weapon against them. It causes trauma and doubt. It reduces their feelings of having safety and choices. 

And this weapon of rape isn't even new. I wish something intervened between that horrid then and now to make people not be this way. How in the world could rape be still a tactic of war? But then again, how could genocide still be a thing where a thousand cameras and a million typing fingers stand ready to say that war crimes are crimes, and horror is horror, and this attempt at occupying Ukraine is already such a vast evil in progress we have to kick up the ghosts of history we thought dead and stilled to discuss them anew?

How can we stand aghast at the threats of bioweapons and nuclear shocks while surveying the sheer idiocy of mere boys digging trenches in the Red Forest, dictated by those who remember a calamity but never would inform mere cannon fodder of the risks? We are looking at the risk of mass destruction, not from tactical advantage, but maybe even from incompetence and gross savagery. It is too easy to place all the blame on Putin, a Satanic stand-in, and try to ignore the greedheads and propagandists that elevated and empowered him, and the culture that still will fuel this war for some time to come.

It's a lesson that to be a great nation, it is necessary to be a moral one. I hope my own country remembers this thing. That all countries do. That Russia is made to remember it. And maybe even very violently, at that.