Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 1 – A dangerous
but entirely predictable trend is occurring in both Russia and the West: Many
who see what Vladimir Putin is doing in Ukraine as a crime are saying he is mad
or insane, an approach that simultaneously makes him less responsible for what
he has done and leaves others less responsible for bringing him to justice.
Semyon Gluzman, a psychiatrist who is
also a member of the Ukrainian Presidential Humanitarian Council, notes that “in
the media and on social networks, one every more frequently encounters the
formulation: ‘Putin is ill’” (profi-forex.org/novosti-mira/novosti-sng/ukraine/entry1008228787.html).
“Many
really consider that he suffers from definite psychological illnesses,” the
psychiatrist says, “but this is only a convenient explanation in the existing
situation. Unfortunately, it is not correct.” Neither Putin himself nor those
around him from psychological illnesses, and they should not be evaluated or
excused in that way.
Instead, Gluzman says, “all their
characteristics, like those of a murderer, thief or other good for nothing, are
not psychiatric phenomena but rather objects of the subjects of moral
philosophy.” Like Hitler, Stalin, Saddam
Husseyn and their ilk, Putin and his entourage are “absolutely responsible –
and in the event of a trial could be held” to be such.
Guzman’s comments on Putin’s sanity
come in the course of his discussion of the ways in which Putin is restoring
the use to which psychiatry was put in Soviet times, as “a weapon against
dissenters,” as Moscow is doing now in the case of the illegally detained
Ukrainian flier Nadezhda Savchenko.
By so doing, he says, Putin and his
regime “want to frighten not only her but also all the residents of the Russian
Federation who are fighting for her liberation.”
The Ukrainian psychiatrist notes
that when he co-authored a study in 2008 with Dutch scholar Robert van Voren of
Moscow’s use of psychiatry against dissent, he wanted to soften the title “On
Dissidents and Insanity” From the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev to the Soviet
Union of Vladimir Putin.” Van Voren didn’t
agree to that, Guzman says, and he was right.
The Dutch scholar was able to see even
then where Putin is heading, Guzman continues. “One of Putin’s goals is the
return of the distant past into the present, [and] he is attempting to return
not just to the Brezhnev era but to the Stalinist one” in this sector as
apparently in many others as well.
Gluzman notes that several months
before her death, Anna Politkovskaya telephoned him to ask if he would provide
a medical evaluation of Russian Colonel Budanov who was seeking to avoid
criminal responsibility for the rape and murder of a Chechen girl by claiming to
have been temporarily insane.
Gluzman says he turned her down but
recommended two Moscow colleagues who might be able to help. “As it turned out,” he continues, “each of
them had refused to help Politkovskaya earlier explaining their refusal by
their fears of reprisals from the [Russian] authorities.”
Politkovskaya was later murdered as was Budanov after he was
freed from incarceration, Guzman says, adding that this is the way things are
in Putin’s Russia.
“Putin needs psychiatry,” Gluzman
says, “in order to sow fear among those who disagree. That was the practice in
the USSR. Those were not in agreement with the ideas of the totalitarian
ideological machine were sent for an indeterminate time to the beds of
psychiatric prisons” for “treatment.”
Tragically, that is happening again
as in the case of Savchenko. Equally tragically,
some are applying a similar logic and thus intentionally or not excusing Putin’s
crimes and in some cases justifying their own failure to act against him.
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