We are witnessing an unprecedented, unspeakable terror of horrendous proportions.
It is an unmentionable horror – the aggression perpetrated and premeditated by Russia against Ukraine on the flimsiest of provocations and pretexts.
The atrocities and abuse of unimaginable savagery and cruelty may not be that which defines the war. The real tragedy could very well be the unthinkable desensitisation of our humanity.
There is a looming pall of darkness. Is it indifference? Are we aligning ourselves to a nameless, shameless, rabid monstrous evil without name? We may find much too late that we have misplaced our conscience and compassion.
Are we meekly submitting ourselves to those whom we think are righteous and powerful? Our soul may have been contaminated, hijacked by the toxic venomous and poisonous ideology of the politics where fake news is disseminated to gain support for despicable deeds.
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The truth about who and what we are lies in the freedom of choices we make. Isn’t it an irrevocable value never to wound or injure another life, especially the vulnerable and marginalised? Does the situation so mesmerise us that we are unable to offer sisterhood and brotherhood to the victims?
The puzzle is that some of the academically qualified and intelligent among us seem numb to the pain and the dark narrative of killings, making allowance for barbaric behaviour.
What you are about to read is incriminates and implicates the Russian leadership. The attempt to annihilate and obliterate another nation reveals the ruthless, remorseless nature of the beast.
Horrific Russian op-ed
An op-ed for state news agency RIA Novosti titled “What Russia should do with Ukraine” by pundit Timofei Sergeitsev created a stir recently.
The rhetoric is truly horrific, even by the standards of what we are used to seeing from pro-Kremlin media.
Below are a few quotes:
- “Denazification is a set of measures aimed at the Nazified mass of the population, which technically cannot be subjected to direct punishment as war criminals”
- “However, besides the elite, a significant part of the masses of the people, who are passive Nazis, are accomplices to Nazism. They have supported the Nazi authorities and indulged them…”
- “…The just punishment for this part of the population is possible only as the bearing of the inevitable hardships of a just war against the Nazi system”
- “The name Ukraine can seemingly not be retained as the title of any fully denazified state formation on the territory liberated from the Nazi regime”
- “Denazification is inevitably also deukrainisation – a rejection of the large-scale artificial inflation of the ethnic element of self-identification of the population of the territories of the historical Malorossiya and Novorossiya begun by the Soviet authorities”
- “Unlike, let’s say, Georgia or the Baltics, Ukraine, as history has shown, is unviable as a national state, and attempts to ‘build’ one logically lead to Nazism”
- “The Banderite elite must be liquidated, its re-education is impossible. The social ‘swamp’ which actively and passively supports it must undergo the hardships of war and digest the experience as a historical lesson and atonement”
I am reproducing the above as it is expressed and documented in its original form. This is an appalling indictment of the abominable thinking behind the aggression and atrocities.
If you have been indoctrinated and brainwashed to believe that one nation which attacks its neighbour is doing it on the grounds of superior morality, you may want to rethink and reassess how your conscience was led to such a dangerous conclusion.
Ask yourselves these hard questions if you have a living conscience and a spiritual soul:
- Why are the homes of ordinary citizens, hospitals and schools being bombed? Are these identified as Nazis or associated with them?
- Why are children being killed? Are they dangerous Nazis?
- Why are women being brutalised and raped? Are they violent Nazis?
- In the carnage and mayhem, we must ask: why is there a massive allowance for wholesale butchery and slaughter against the innocent? This, on the pretext that one side is doing good?
- Are the victims to be terminated as they are labelled as passive Nazis?
There is nothing complex or sophisticated about what one side is doing to the other. Dig deep into the gut of your conscience and seek the truth. You might find an insidious standard operating system at play:
- They label, categorise and demonise the other. They dehumanise the other as inhumane, posing the gravest threat to their or humanity’s existence
- They concoct and construct all kinds of justifications to legitimise their evil actions
- Their favoured response to justify the aggressions would predictably be to point to what happened in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. If others could do it there, we are doing it here, so what’s the difference? So goes their logic
- There seem to be orders to target civilians, just like in the wars in the Middle East
- Just as in the fiasco of non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, we have some people hollering about biological warfare labs with no substantive evidence. If the locations were known, with the precision technology available, one could have destroyed these labs with missiles. Or one could nullify such so-called perceived threats with targeted attacks on identifiable threats. This mirage in the desert of propaganda is convincingly sold by some and unquestioningly accepted by many
A potential war crimes tribunal would have impediments and obstacles, as it must also prosecute those who have committed similar atrocities in the past.
So, the appeasement and pandering to make a deal with war criminals is always on the table. There would be the inevitable proposal to accept a peace deal that would cede territory to the aggressor.
We can choose to be gullible or naive armchair pundits and critics. It would be a depravity if, from the comfort of our homes, we choose to support one side over the other in this conflict, citing all kinds of reasons.
Doing this while the innocent are slaughtered or raped and their homes pillaged is simply wrong. There is no dissonance here: it is either black or white. The dithering and posturing mean additional lives lost.
If we think that the fact that many innocents will be murdered is acceptable, a fact of war (as long as it is not us!), that would be sad.
We cannot be writers, bloggers and commenters sitting in convenience and comfort while crying over the spilt milk of such obvious criminality.
We have to be the voices of integrity. We have to discern and speak out on behalf of the wounded and the weak, the vulnerable people of the world. Our silence, on the other hand, would be deafening and damning,
To those on both sides of the divide: whoever you support, never let your heart be butchered by toxic ideologies or your soul massacred by evil philosophies.
That which constructs ‘rational’ reasons for the taking of life is evil by whichever standard affixed to it. There should be no moral legitimacy accorded by us, as persons of shared humanity; otherwise, we would be just as culpable in the murder and rape of innocents.
We must raise our voices and condemn this human-made trauma and travesty that threatens to usurp our humanity. In Ukraine, let there be no “final solution” of history repeating itself.
AGENDA RAKYAT - Lima perkara utama
- Tegakkan maruah serta kualiti kehidupan rakyat
- Galakkan pembangunan saksama, lestari serta tangani krisis alam sekitar
- Raikan kerencaman dan keterangkuman
- Selamatkan demokrasi dan angkatkan keluhuran undang-undang
- Lawan rasuah dan kronisme
The person who gave his comment must be a Russian. What he is saying is also very much the propagande of the Kremlin that he imbibes on the Nazis. The real issue is the human condition of the urge to posess Territory in this case, the greed for Territory. Denazification is only a rationalisation or justification. History has been brought in along with ideology and international politics.
This article simply gloss over the role of the Nazis in Ukraine. (Note that I just glance over the article as I could not bear to read such propaganda). Why don’t you highlight the role of the Nazis in killing about 14,000 people in the Donbass region for the past 8 years since 2014? A country where its militia killed its own people? Isn’t this the real genocide? Why don’t the article highlight the role of the US in carryiout the coup against the elected president aat that time?