Genocide Now Looms in Ukraine
Russia is now weaponizing rape, starving cities, bombing hospitals, and destroying cities just for the sake of it.
The Chief Editor of the Kyiv Independent has related an unconfirmed report from a doctor in Zhaporizhzhia, which you should skip over if you have a weak stomach. The doctor admitted a group of girls from Mariopul with vaginal tears, who had been raped by Russian troops, and the oldest was just ten years old, just ten years old.
Wartime atrocities are seldom concocted out of thin air, but it is even rarer in the case of rape, which is so difficult for survivors to talk about. Meanwhile, most people are still trapped inside Mariopul, and we now have the burned bodies of women who were raped in Bucha. So, whether or not this particular story is confirmed, Russian troops are weaponizing rape, and it is almost certainly more widespread than most of us imagine.
Starving cities, raping en masse, targeting hospitals, and executing civilians in the street are all common in genocides, and they were all routine in Syria, where Russia helped Assad starve and obliterate its cities. So, we should not be surprised to see Russia doing it again. In fact, Russia did much the same in Chechnya, first under Yeltsin and later Putin.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But try it again and you should prepare for your army to be obliterated and your economy crushed.
It is only the rarest of genocides that are identified when they are happening, and those that are named in the present are often only approached in the abstract. It is only a few years after the event that movies and memoirs begin to memorialize the tragedy, and decades later that the most daring among us may begin to absorb their profundity. But you cannot stop a genocide by watching Hotel Rwanda and Schindler’s List decades after the event.
So, we should welcome the fact that Russia’s war crimes are now being identified as genocide, even if we cannot confirm whether they satisfy its more formal definitions. The crimes of a genocide are simply too horrifying to imagine. So, most people’s initial response is usually denial. It is only after repeated exposure and the distance that comes with time that they are able to confront what has happened. In this way, we are far ahead of the curve in Ukraine.
Yet, as more horror stories come out of Ukraine, we should prepare for many observers to start shutting down. It can be traumatizing to observe crimes against humanity from a distance, because they are not just crimes against their particular victims but insults to our shared humanity. And as reports of atrocities stream in, it is quite common to react in extreme ways.
It is precisely this process of grappling with mass crimes against humanity that is explored in my forthcoming edition of The Holocausts We All Deny. The escalation of these crimes over the course of the last decade, coupled with their amplification on social media, and our participation in them as both victims and perpetrators, has left a significant portion of the world with many of the traumas typically reserved for the victims of war.
Over the course of the last eight years, since Russia invaded the Crimea, crimes against humanity have proliferated. It began in the summer of hate when Libya degenerated into civil war, Isis took a major chunk of Iraq and Syria, Israel obliterated Gaza, and Assad stepped up his crimes against humanity in Syria in 2014. Suddenly, countless numbers of us found ourselves thrown headlong into stopping major crimes against humanity—or spurring them on, as the case may be.
Since that time, we have watched Saudi Arabia blockade Yemen, destroy its ports and infrastructure, and with the help of British and American arms and logistical support, and the continued fighting of Houthi rebels, ultimately take tens of millions of people to the brink of starvation. We have watched Burma ethnically cleanse a million Muslim Rohingya and China place a million Muslim Uyghurs in concentration camps. And we have watched people turn to rightwing nationalist and fascist leaders in every major region of the world.
In this way, we have come to steel ourselves in defense as we reimagined a far more violent and hostile world. But it is quite possible that in fighting back and winning, Ukrainians will transform the global imaginary. In short, it is possible that they are helping us to rewrite the story of the fascism this time, just as we rewrote the story of fascism last time by crushing it to dust. Yet, if we are to do so, we are going to have to stay engaged, and we are going to have to keep our heads.
We are also going to have to provide Ukraine with everything they need for a quick victory. That means giving them the fighter jets they have requested, rationing oil and natural gas in Europe to close off Russian imports, and treating the shift to clean energy like the World War Two mobilization climate advocates have been discussing for decades.
Humanity has just passed through a decade of horrors in which all too many of us succumbed to nihilism, but Ukrainians are leading us in reclaiming our dignity and reimagining a better world. And they are casting out the hatred that has fueled rightwing nationalists and fascists the world over by casting out their leader, who has increasingly come to appear the new Hitler.
~ Theo Horesh, author of The Holocausts We All Deny