Witnesses to Atrocity
Terry H. Schwadron
April 5, 2022
The images from Ukraine are sickeningly immoral, but we still look. We still need to look.
As Russian troops withdraw from various towns around Kyiv, the capital, we see Ukrainian corpses left in the mud, hear confirmed reports of systematic civilian executions and rapes, the strewn detritus of abandoned Russian tanks and armor.
The New York Times analyzed satellite photography to confirm that the dead were being left in muddy streets even before the Russian pullback. Other news outlets highlighted their own photographic and video evidence of the dead left to rot in the streets, some with hands tied behind their backs. We’ve seen images of destroyed hospitals, schools, apartment buildings: The targeting of civilians is undisputed.
Separately, this week, The Times featured a singularly haunting photo of desperate hands reaching for a single loaf of bread.
The parrying words seem empty, the claims uselessly partisan, the global concerns at an alarming high point. There is no worthwhile explanation, nor a practical hope of a way out, though eventually, Ukraine, Russia and the West will have to hammer out something that provides a way to end what comes across as simple madness.
Once again, we have no idea what “normal” should look like.
Joe Biden doubled down on calling out the emerging scenes from Ukraine as war crimes and Russian President Vladimir Putin therefore as a war criminal — this time ensuring that his remarks would not be misinterpreted as “off the cuff.” If it is a provocation, so be it, he indicated.
Americans seem happy to celebrate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for legendary strength under pressure without being willing to commit our troops. The United Nations and its Security Council, with Russia as its current, inappropriate head, is feckless. Through NATO, we’re the bulwark against bully nations running across borders and the documentarians for ever-strengthening cases of for war crimes.
Meanwhile, solutions elude all parties, who continue to talk past one another.
In the USA
At home, the bellicose messages that want either yet more weapons or fewer refugees, more Ukrainian sacrifice without our own involvement continue at elevated levels. Where are the congressional heroics that match with Lithuania canceling Russian energy imports. In the U.S., we can’t get through a sentence about Russian oil without calls to drill more now in our national parks.
Somehow none of the moves that Joe Biden has taken to keep an international alliance together but keeping the U.S. out of global war is good enough. Yet this split Congress will never vote to go to war with Biden as commander-in-chief.
The political polls do not reflect efforts towards stopping Russian oil while releasing strategic reserves to counter gas pump prices or the commitment to defend democracy itself while MAGA voices continue to praise Putin.
Yet, the polls say we’re apparently willing to favor our unhappiness over gas prices and perceived culture wars over any efforts to guide through the needle required by international complication. Republicans want to talk about Hunter Biden and transgender athletes; Democrats want to talk about accountability for a former president seeking his own way to overturn democracy in this country.
We spend our time arguing about qualifications for the U.S. Supreme Court reflecting only an overt partisanship of the definition. We think democracy is a tool towards power, not towards the protection of our own people and systems.
Look, there’s plenty to hold Biden to account, but facing down Russian tactics in Ukraine ought to be one thing we could all back without issue.
Something is utterly out of whack.
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