Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 28 – The killing
of 30 innocent civilians in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol has sparked outrage
around the world, and many people who have not thought a lot about who is
responsible for the outrages in Ukraine are finally focusing on the
responsibility that Vladimir Putin bears for such crimes.
But if Putin must be blamed for what
has happened there and elsewhere, he is far from the only one who should be,
because tragically many others bear direct or indirect responsibility for what
has happened, and it is vitally important that they be identified as such, according
to Moscow commentator Igor Eidman (sobkorr.ru/infopovod/54C638757465C.html).
The reason for that is two-fold. On
the one hand, it is too simple to think that Putin alone is guilty of what is
happening and that were he not in the Kremlin, everything would be fine. Too
many people are complicit. And on the
other, those others need to know that they like officials in Nazi Germany who
claimed that they were “only following orders” will ultimately discover that
that is no defense.
Putin does bear primary
responsibility as the author of these crimes and these deaths, Eidman says. But
following him are the people in the Russian force structures “who are
fulfilling criminal orders which violate the elementary laws of war. Like terrorists,
secretly and concealing their citizenship, they are going on the territory of a
neighboring state not at war with Russia in order to kill people.”
Then there is blood on the hands of
the Russian bureaucracy as a whole, he continues, a group which “in exchange
for the right to steal gives their loyalty to their ‘master’ and helps him hold
on to power and carry out the war.”
Russian big business, “the so-called
oligarchs including the former Yeltsin ‘family,’” also bears responsibility for
Mariupol and the other places of crimes committed by Putin in Ukraine. That is
because they want to preserve the system under which they profited and are now
giving the Kremlin leader “the financial resources for carrying out Putin’s
aggressive policy which is suicidal for Russia.”
There
is also blood on the hands of “Russia’s corrupt political class which has
discredited in Russia the idea of democracy and thus has opened the way for the
coming of a semi-fascist dictatorship. So too there is blood on the hands of the
Russian intelligentsia, some of whose members have created “the ideological
base for the justification of war” and the promotion of chauvinism.
And
ordinary Russians must bear responsibility for these crimes as well. “They are
prepared to believe anything broadcast on television if it corresponds to their
nationalistic and xenophobic complexes” and to sing praises to Putin, boosting
his rating and thus providing him with the kind of support he needs for “the
continuation of the war.”
But
responsibility for Mariupol does not end at the borders of the Russian
Federation, Eidman argues. Former
Ukrainian President Yanukovich and his entourage have blood on their hands
because they helped Putin unleash a war in the Donbas, a war many of them
continue to help promote from their hideouts in Russia or in the war zone
itself.
And
the blood of the Mariupol victims also on the hands of Putin’s “friends” and “’peacemakers’”
in the West because they, sometimes “for selfish reasons and sometimes out of
stupidity are helping Putin to avoid punishment for his aggression. By blocking
pressure on his regime, they are extending the war.”
“The
world swallowed the seizure of Crimea and it got the war in the Donbas,” Eidman
points out, and “if now, in connection with the new attack on Ukraine are not
taken extraordinary international measures then a still larger and more bloody
war will begin.” The victims of that war “will remain ont eh conscience of the conformist
Western elite.”
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