Thinking the Unthinkable in Ukraine

Genocide typical begins with the lie that a people does not exist and then proceeds to bring about their annihilation, and this is just what we have seen in Ukraine.

Genocide typically begins with the lie that a people does not exist and then proceeds to bring about their annihilation, and this is just what we have seen in Ukraine. Putin began by proclaiming that the Ukrainian identity is a fiction and then set about destroying it. In this way, the one big lie represents an attempt to erase the identities of 44 millions people, but it is sustained by the thousand little lies that keep his genocide going—and it is the thousand little lies that now demand our attention.

No regime advertises their gas chambers and killing fields, or else they lose legitimacy at home and abroad. This is why Putin will never own up to his own war crimes: doing so would leave him with nothing but phantasmagoria, a theater of cruelties with no real purpose. So, it is essential that we continue to talk about what it means to deport thousands of Ukrainian children from Mariopul into Russia, for instance, or to gang rape women as a weapon of war.

Few can stare for long into the face of genocide, for its cruelties are just too sickening. Consider the Russian soldier who is widely reported to have been arrested after having posted a video of himself sexually violating an infant. Countless children need to be raped before someone sick enough leaks a video of himself in the act, so it should not surprise us that reports of Russian soldiers raping Ukrainian children are mounting. Yet, few of us know how to stare in the face of this kind of sadism for long.

Genocide presents us with an emotional maze laced with dead ends. Its atrocities demand outrage, but the outrage can consume us in its fires; its suffering demands mourning, but the tears never seem to match up to the death tolls. We curse humanity for its cruelty only to find ourselves running up against a wall of cynicism; we pretend it isn’t happening only to find our denial freezing us in our footsteps. Even in those rare cases where the cruelties are halted, as in the Bosnian and Yezidi Genocides, it never seems enough because the crimes that preceded its cessation remain too much to bear.

Ultimately, we must come to terms with unimaginable cruelties and unthinkable crimes, and that requires us to paradoxically normalize genocide before fencing it in. In this way, we must make the unthinkable thinkable and learn to live with the devil. Otherwise, we risk drifting into denial. Doing so means learning the history, understanding geography, and situating the violence; and that means getting to know Ukraine as a real place, with its own culture, and a definite location on the map.

But we also have to fence in genocide by erecting a wall of moral principles against it, cementing them in law, and backing them up with the force of steel. And this means using every institution at our disposal to militate against the kind of crimes against humanity we now see unfolding in Ukraine: the sanctity of the family, the injunctions of religion, the honor of the military, the strictures of international society, the weight of international law. All of it should be used to capture and contain the genocide to which we are bearing witness.

Letting a genocide blaze unchecked means burning down the social order. Genocide leads men to commit unspeakable atrocities and in so doing shreds the social fabric. But it also does something far more intangible, which tends to impact even distant onlookers. It changes the way we look at people and transforms our conception of humanity. In this way, Russia’s crimes against humanity in Chechnya prepared us for its genocide in Syria, which conditioned us to passivity in the face of its annihilation of Ukraine.

Of course, other states were committing genocide over this time period as well. So, there was a cumulative effect at work, with attacks on Gaza, the starvation of Yemen, the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya, and the genocide Uyghurs all contributing to an international scene imbued with terror and violence. Each crime justified the next by taking us one step closer to lawlessness, but it also transformed the global imaginary into a scene of endless cruelties.

Genocide results from turning the moral order on its head. It is a product of fascism in that it springs from the worship of evil, and it is fascism’s fulfillment in that it organizes society around the pursuit of cruelty, which unleashes the pent up collective id, with all of its nihilistic tendencies. You may think that it cannot get worse, but once unleashed, genocidal tendencies tend to rapidly degenerate, and they will test your humanity.

Genocide is the ultimate crime against humanity in that its very prospect robs of us of our humanity. It robs us of our humanity by forcing us to bear witness to its suffocation. But it also includes all other crimes against humanity—torture, gang rape, mass starvation, ethnic cleansing, you name it. Whatever crimes war is prone to unleash are amplified in a genocide while criminality runs rampant. In this way, we have already seen Russian troops engaged in sadistic torture, systematic looting, institutionalized rape, and the routine starvation of cities.

It is a process of degeneration that has already spread to Russian society and could engulf the world. But the regression only quickens when we surrender to it. That is why fighting back is so important, and it is why Russia must be deprived of its oil and natural gas revenues, as Ukraine is given every fighter jet and weapons defense system needed to win.

~ Theo Horesh, author of The Holocausts We All Deny