Mr. Dunn responds to evidence of his previously wrong forecasts and the genocidal nature of Russia's war with remote diagnosis psychobabble appointing himself his critic's therapist and the absurd claim that Ukraine ceasing to defend itself against exterminationist Russian conquest will bring peace:
"Ukraine could stop fighting anytime, too. But you never talk about that. It is truly a wonder how much you relish the defeat of Russia. I see that objectification is something you enjoy, too. Your pejoratives have evolved with more sophistication over time, but fail to impress anyone as arguments for peace. If the "obvious answer" I should be looking for is an enormous, humiliating defeat of Russia, then I have but one question for you:
How will the defeat of Russia bring about peace?"
The simple fact he's silent on: if Ukraine stops fighting, it ceases to exist. If Russia stops fighting in Ukraine the war ends. How do we know? Russia's leaders and its media have said so thousands of times. Mr. Dunn's thesis of geopolitical conflict between irreconcilable opposites as a de-escalation therapy problem depends on bystander genocide denial and apology.
Tim Snyder's October talk shows how Russia's genocidal war fills not just some, but ALL the legal criteria, as stipulated by the 1948 UN Convention, for defining genocide. Since Snyder says it better than I can, the video link is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_2y2LgTvoI , and the transcript (with imperfect punctuation) is pasted here. It's well worth your attention, since it illuminates how herculean an effort at cognitive dissonance and denial genocide apologists like Mr. Dunn and Code Pink have to engage in to divert their own and their audiences' attention from the genocide happening right in front of us:
"We will kill one million we will kill 5 million we will obliterate them all we will drive the children into the raging River we will throw the children into burning huts they should not exist at all we should execute them by firing squad."
It's an honor to be here at Boston University today to take part in the inauguration of this new major and Holocaust genocide and human rights. I come to this program this University and this topic the topic being the war in Ukraine and the question of genocide as a historian genocide is a legal term. I'm going to be speaking to you about that legal term but I'd also like to remind you and ask you to keep in mind that genocide is also a human test that the legal character of the word genocide can also provide us ways of escaping what might seem to be the human obligations before I make this argument I want to acknowledge that I would not be speaking to you here today about this topic were not for the basic fact that ukrainians have chosen to resist a genocidal War this this discussion and all other discussions about genocide human rights and for that matter democracy and its future have been radically changed and indeed enabled by the fact that Ukraine is now resisting Russia and the arguments that I will make depend to a very large degree on the work of Ukrainian journalists who are working in conditions of great risk as well as the
work of Ukrainian and other historians so history is many things it's the search for patterns it's the search for the telling detail it's the search for the patterns and the details that allow us to shake ourselves out of the everyday it's the search for the
patterns and the details that allow us to see something maybe something very mportant that otherwise we might not see and seeing is important because if we do see for example a genocide that makes it impossible for us to be a bystander once you see a genocide you can no longer stand by either you were on the side of the perpetrators or you're on the side of the victims once you see it and therefore much of our mental energy goes into not seeing genocides my thesis in this lecture about the war in Ukraine and the question of genocide is that this war has been a genocidal war from the beginning that was announced as a genocidal war that has been prosecuted by as a genocidal war and indeed today as I speak to you right now it is being prosecuted as a genocidal War I'm going to structure this talk around the objections to this thesis because as I've just said the easier thing to do is not to see so what I'd like to do is
address five of the ways that we tend to avoid seeing and as I do that make the case that what is happening is genocide and along the way I'll be speaking to that somehow very simple but nevertheless evasive question what is the word genocide actually mean
so the first objection to saying that what is happening in Ukraine is genocide is to say
but there are other crimes as well and that is of course true I agree the great Philippe Sands speaks of the quartet of War of aggression war crimes crimes against humanity and genocide all of which are legally distinct Concepts I agree that it is possible to characterize the events in Ukraine in other ways I agree with Philippe Sands that war of aggression is probably the easiest to prosecute but the fact that something is the easiest to prosecute doesn't exclude the reality of other kinds of violations there is also
genocide going on which leads me to the second objection which one very often hears to the thesis that what is happening in Ukraine now is genocide the second objection is that we can't prosecute um the there no one has jurisdiction there's no venue we'll never capture the perpetrators we can't prosecute it strikes me though that that's a that's an evasion that's a way of not seeing what is happening obviously you would care very much to know that there is a murderer loose in your neighborhood and that would be different than there is a manslaughter in the second degree lose in your so what might seem to be a simple legal distinction uh actually captures a very important difference whether we describe this as genocide now is a description of what is happening it's not just the the it's not just laying the foundations for some kind of future prosecution it also has to do with how we will remember this later because it's the sad truth as those of you who studied in this field know that most genocides are forgotten and the reason why they were forgotten is that they were never noted in the first place so if you don't note that a genocide is happening in the first place you're asking a lot of future generations to remember it to record it to evaluate it later on the third objection and again I'm hoping to crowd out all possible questions so that there will simply be silence at the end of this lecture the third possible objection is that this doesn't feel like genocide that when I say genocide there's a kind of elemental objection that this doesn't this doesn't feel like a genocide and it rarely does from the outside it rarely does I think
almost never does it feel like genocide from the outside uh when when I was in Ukraine a month ago I was in a school building an elementary school building in a little village called yahidne in Cherno blast north of Kiev where the Russians had occupied for about a month before being driven out in March and in this school building on the ground floor which the Russian soldiers had used as their local base there was their graffiti left behind and their graffiti said among other things ukrainians it was a slang term for
Ukrainians but Ukrainians are devils ukrainians are Satan that's the ground floor in the basement of this school or I should say former school because after what happened there will never be used as a school again in the basement of of this former School of this school building all of the inhabitants of the village every man woman and child was held for a month without regular access to food or water or hygiene or toilets and those conditions many people died and during that time a number of people were executed so when I was in that building looking at the drawings of the children's left on children left on the wall looking at the notations that the adults made of the people who had been
shot and the people who had died from exhaustion from that perspective it did feel more like genocide and I'm gonna I'm gonna submit that if we're talking about feelings we might want to privilege that perspective over over the one that we have from the outside more broadly if you're Ukrainian you're being told daily that you do not exist as a people that you have no right to exist as a people Ukrainians have been deported in on the scale of the millions four mil according to the Russian's own boasts 4 million ukrainians have been deported from the territory of Ukraine they've been killed on the scale of hundreds of thousands their children have been kidnapped on the scale of at least the tens of thousands their water and their energy supplies are deliberately being destroyed but that's there that's not that's not here and what I'm trying to say in response to this objection is that it's that varied sense of distance that very lack of solidarity which is an integral element of genocide itself that feeling that somehow this isn't genocide can actually be part of the genocide it's a way in which it's impossible to
be a bystander right if you choose not to see something that's happening you are taking part you are you are taking part but that feeling I know it's a pervasive feeling it takes many forms the feeling that we're not sure maybe it's complicated maybe the perpetrator is actually the victim who knows time will tell maybe our own consciences aren't perfectly clean maybe it can't be happening while we ignore it because we're not the sort of people who would ignore it while it's happening that kind of circular reasoning is very powerful we couldn't possibly be bystanders and therefore it's not a genocide is the way that we very often think it can't be a genocide because it
doesn't feel to us like a genocide and we're not the kind of people who would be bystanders but we are of course we are of course we are the kind of people who would be bystanders and it's by this very logic that we become the bystanders so genocide's a test it's a legal term but it's also a human test my part here is to make the case as the historian who's honored to help open this major to make the legal case that this term genocide is actually describes the crime that's being committed my task is to show that a genocidal War has been underway for eight months that the experiences of ukrainians plus the intentions of Russians equal a genocide and then we can ask about ourselves the fourth objection would be to say would be to ask but are the Deeds genocidal are the Deeds genocidal are what Russians are doing in Ukraine does that actually amount to a genocide and here we run up against a dilemma which those of you who work in this field will be very familiar with namely the difference between vernacular understandings of genocide and legal understandings of genocide in the vernacular the word genocide is often used to mean they killed every single person but that's not what the word genocide means legally and if by the way if genocide means they killed every single person uh that word wouldn't have much application I mean even the Holocaust doesn't come close to they killed every single person so if the definition of genocide and now I'm going to do the boring thing which is indispensable of reading to you a couple of paragraphs of law out loud um they're short genocide means according to the 1948 convention which codified Rafael limpkin's word in international law it means the following actions number one killing members of the group by the way genocide is met if any of the following crimes have been committed okay so the first one is killing members of the group this has obviously happened the war itself the bombing from the sky the missiles and the drones directed at civilians in mariupole alone it looks like more than 100 000 civilians were killed in one city alone the executions everywhere that Russia occupied territory the death pits which are found again and again in small and medium-sized places that the Russians occupied the targeted killings of people regarded as being active in Ukrainian Civil Society the filtration camps in which people regarded as politically active or simply men of a certain age are taken out and killed all of these things amount to killing members of a group second genocidal crime in the law I'm quoting again causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group here one could mention systematic torture everywhere that the Russians occupy and is deoccupied the ukrainians find torture chambers torture is an absolutely ordinary wet part of the Russian regime in Russia and used far more frequently in the occupied territories of Ukraine this has been true by the way since 2014 in the occupied territories of Ukraine it's just now that territories that are being de-occupied and the actual physical evidence can be can be recovered the bombings of Hospitals and Clinics and schools also cause serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group I would also say that deportation or to use a term we sometimes use ethnic cleansing is a form of bodily or mental harm and I'd like to emphasize the scale of these deportations according to claims that the Russians themselves make regularly about 4 million people have been deported four million Ukrainian citizens have been deported from Ukraine that is about 10 percent of the total population of the country if you'd like to imagine the scale of that imagine that all of New England all of New York State all of Pennsylvania have been entirely physically depopulated stripped clean of every single person then you have a sense of the scale the deportations in Ukraine that's the percentage ten percent
so I think that's obviously met the third Criterion of genocide is a crime is deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part again this is obviously the case the deliberate destruction of whole cities The Campaign which is unfolding right now to deny ukrainians access to water and electricity over the winter those are the conditions of life and again Russian propagandists Russian politicians make no secret about this they boast that this is what they are doing they say it openly the fourth Criterion the fourth example of a genocidal crime imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group the genocide conviction Convention of 1948 does not explicitly mention rape but I would maintain that rape is an example of bodily or mental harm as above in the campaign of systematic rape inside Ukraine carried out by Russian soldiers in the voices of those Russian soldiers we often find a specific political overtone or specific genocidal
purpose that after the trauma of rape Ukrainian women would not wish to raise Ukrainian children would never wish to Bear children imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group also applies to the filtration camps and the deportation in the filtration camps and the deportation that follows the Russians are screening for fertile women and children they are sending the fertile women and children preponderantly to Russia scattering them deep into Russia with the idea that this will prevent the birth of Ukrainian children but it will allow the birth of Russian children
that is quite literally genocide according to this Criterion the fifth is and I quote again forcibly transferring Children of the group to another group hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children have been deported to the Russian Federation during this war for
adoption by individual Russian families spread across the vast territory of the Russian Federation so that they can never form a Ukrainian Community again the New York Times referred to Children recently as the booty of War which I believe is correct Russia has been boasting about kidnapping Ukrainian children and assimilating them from the beginning of the war this has been an openly declared goal of the war as I am speaking to you children are being deported from Herson oblast as as Russia withdraws from her song thousands of children children are being deported right now objection so I hope I've made a case that all of the crimes of genocide the sub crimes of genocide are taking place and to remind you only one of them need to be taking place for this to be genocide but all of them are taking place the fifth objection would be what about intention genocide is about intention and that's true the language of the convention again to quote is the act must be committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part in National ethnical racial or religious group as such here we find an opportunity to look away because we can say how do we know about intention we can never get inside someone else's mind so how can we be a hundred percent sure about intention that's what we say when we're pushed when the when the evidence of the crimes is indisputable we move to saying but how can we be sure about intention and this is where a lot of the conversation about genocide is right now how can we know about intention but of course if we took this view of intention that intention requires my looking inside your mind no law no law involving for example murder or a number of other crimes that we prosecute every day would be possible we make we make all the time in everyday jurisprudence and everyday trials we make judgments about intention and we do it without telepathy all the time I think there's a reason why we applied the telepathy standard to genocide and not to other crimes which is that we would prefer to think that it's not genocide we would prefer to think that a genocide is not happening as we look away if the telepathy standard were the right standard then the 1948 genocide
convention would of course be meaningless there would be no sense in having a law forbidding genocide if intention really meant that you have to make mental contact with someone else I'll talk more and this will be the rest of the talk in fact I'll talk more about how as a historian we do establish intention around Mass crimes around mass murders but here I want to make I want to I want to note another way that people deal with intention or try to resist intention people will say there is no piece of paper where the leader of the country specifically confesses to the detailed intention to carry out exactly the crime that has taken place right there's no there's no piece of paper which proves it and that's true there's not there never is there isn't one for the Holocaust there's no order from Hitler where he says this is such and such exactly should happen from the Jews but there are all kinds of other pieces of evidence which using basic historical or legal judgment we can I think quite reasonably establish that Hitler had this sort of intention that many other people did too the case I want to make in the rest of this talk is the pro is that the problem is not that we lack evidence of intention I think if anything the problem is that we are overwhelmed by the evidence of intention and that what happens is that as we hear more and more evidence of intention some of which I've already supplied you with as we hear more and more of it what we do is we ratchet up the standard for what would actually qualify as intention right that's the temptation the more the more we hear about Russian intentions the more we say well I just got used to that and so now I want something even more shocking right to prove that it was genocidal:
“They should not exist at all we should execute them by firing squad we will kill one million we will kill 5 million we will obliterate them all we will drown the children in the Raging River we will throw the children into burning wooden huts.”
You might have thought these quotations were from some distant historical case. They're all from Russian State television. In the last few days Russian state television is controlled directly by the president of the Russian Federation there are thousands of similar statements made to tens of millions of Russians on a regular basis on media that they and we know is controlled personally by the president of the Russian Federation as I say the problem is not the lack of intent it's the super abundance of evidence of genocidal intent which makes us raise the standard and that becomes another way of looking away what I want to do rather than bombard you with more quotations of this kind of which there is in fact a kind of unending Supply is to take a different tack I want to give you nine examples of how a historian would evaluate intention. I could just for the rest of my time read a list of statements that are similar to the one that I just read. But rather than doing that I want to respond to the challenge that I've set which is how do you actually evaluate intent how could you become comfortable with saying that someone intended to do something different sorts of people judges psychologists and so on would do this in different ways I'm going to do it as a historian who has written about mass killing so the nine classifications that I would choose the nine ways of thinking about the language that's been used and seeing it and understanding this is genocidal that I propose are going to be number one and it's going to be an earnest undergraduate indeed who writes these all down and no doubt you will get extra credit if you do number one I can promise that because I don't teach here.
1. Colonial
2. Apologist
3. Dehumanizing
4. Narcissistic
5. Escalatory
6. Metaphysical
7. Fascist
8. Replacement
9. Exceptionalist
Let me try to make sense of this Colonial language. Much of historical genocide is associated with the phenomenon of European and other colonialism. The language that Putin has used since 2011 about Ukraine has specifically invoked the category of civilization the central category of colonialism in for the last 10 years but with greater intensity in the last two or so Putin has has made the claim that Russia of course exists as a state and Nation but Ukraine of course does not exist as a state of State a nation that is the absolutely predictable normal way that European colonial powers referred to the political and social groups that they encounter the power of the imperial stance allows you to say who exists and who doesn't exist it also allows you to declare always and never so the Russian language which far too many people take on and still use to the effect that Crimea was always Russia or that Ukraine and Russia were always together is an example of this sort of imperial usage with these always imply
nevers: if Ukraine was always together with Russia then we can dismiss not only the Ukrainians and their their self-conscious political history which actually goes back hundreds of years but we can dismiss anything that doesn't that seems to challenge a Russian narrative if Crimea were always Russia then we can forget about the 600 years in which there was a different state in Crimea which by the way is longer than the United States has lasted or any Russian entity has lasted we can dismiss that we can forget entirely about the indigenous people of the Crimean Peninsula the Crimean Tatars who were dispersed in the late 18th century when Russia absorbed For the First Time the peninsula and who were forcibly ethnically cleansed every single one of them in the spring of 1944 under Stalin if Crimea and Russia were always together then we can just forget about those people upon whom what we would now call genocide was very often perpetrated which leads me to the second point or the second kind of classification which is apology or apology apologism where your attitude towards a specific event in the past reveals your specific intent to change the future what do I mean the example of neo-nazis will be familiar I'm sure to many people what do neo-nazis often say about the Holocaust they often say about the Holocaust that it didn't happen what do they mean when they say the Holocaust didn't happen they mean they would like for it to happen again that is the meaning of that when you deny a specific crime that people with whom you identify carried out in the past you are affirming that crime and the victims always understand that the victims never get that one wrong right or the intended victims so in in this war Russia Begins the war by reaffirming a memory law which makes a crime in Russia to recall that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies in 1939, thereby exporting any possible naziness to other people during the course of the war Russia has destroyed monuments to the halodomor which is the mass political famine in Ukraine of 1932 and 1933. the way that the Russians discussed that political famine while taking down the monuments is very interesting because what they say is there was no intention there it was just nature there was a famine maybe there were some administrative mistakes and during the very days that they take down the monuments they are also deliberately trying to destroy Ukrainian water supply and Ukrainian power supply and of course once you do that anything that happens afterwards it's just nature
it's just nature there was no intention there it was just nature taking its course just like it did in 1932 and 1933 when four million ukrainians starved to death right so the way that you talk about specific mass killings in the past is also a revelatory of specific intentions in the present the third kind of language that helps us to identify intent could be called dehumanizing language and there's a very specific way in which Putin claims that ukrainians don't exist so the colonial bit is they're not there they're not a state they're not a nation but there's a very specific way and it's going to be familiar I think to Scholars of the Holocaust that Putin talks about Ukrainians not existing they don't exist because the people who claim to be Ukrainians are not really from here they're not really attached to the land they are alienated from the soil the people who call themselves Ukrainians who mistakenly believe themselves to be ukrainians and it's a mistake because there's no such thing as Ukraine of Ukrainians these people have been seduced by habsburgs or Germans or Poles or the European Union or the Americans or the Jews they've been seduced by some outsider and that is where the sense of ukrainian-ness comes from they misunderstand themselves they have false consciousness they don't know who they are they have ideas which come from the outside and that makes them very dangerous no there is a there is an echo here of Hitler's version of the Jews which is that they don't they're not attached to the land they come from outside they don't have a real Homeland they don't belong here and as with the logic of the Jews so with the logic of the Ukrainians as Putin sees them where do they belong then where do they belong they belong nowhere they belong nowhere and this kind of logic where you say that the people I'm talking about only exist because of an alien threat that is the source of their existence the source of their existence is the Habsburg polish German EU American Jewish whatever it might be foreign threat the only there they are only instantiate themselves as as a foreign threat that means that we have to destroy the top level of society and that was in fact the Russian war plan the Russian war plan in the very beginning was genocidal specifically if the intent to of killing and rounding up the elite Ukrainians the people who were thought to be the ones who made who who ran everything and the idea of course was that there were not that many of these people and it would be relatively easy to do right this is what Putin meant when he talked about
de-Ukrainization that we can just wipe clear the top of society and then the rest of the happy masses who do know who they are and who are attached to the land and so on they will remember that their Russians and everything will spring back into a natural reality this is what Russian propaganda said at the time, Ria Novosti, which is a very popular official tabloid published accidentally not long after the war started a long essay about about the Russian victory it was a text which had been prepared on the assumption that Russia would win the war in three days an assumption which was widely shared not just in Moscow and what what this text which was accidentally published said is that we have destroyed the top level the aliens the elites and the happy Ukrainian masses who were attached to the land or joyfully joining this larger Russian state right the genocidal logic was spelled out absolutely absolutely clearly.
The fourth criterion the fourth way to interpret some of this language is what I would call the narcissistic. It’s you don't know who you are until you look at someone else so it's all genocide is all about you and it's all about your need for self definition and this may seem rather harsh but it is quite possible to define yourself in opposition to others and perpetrating a genocide is a way of defining yourself when when Putin says that he's carrying out de-Ukrainization or de-Naziification or desatanization which I'll I'll return to that later it's a fruitful term, what he is saying is that we Russians exist insofar as we're carrying out this project of correcting some other people or destroying some other people in none of these terms and indeed in none of this war can one find the language about what Russia is there's been a lot of head waving and like hand wranging about what is Ukraine. I think there are some pretty easy answers to that but what's really in doubt during this war on the basis of official Russian statements is what is Russia what's the Russian future what are Russian purposes during this war the definition of Russia has been narrowed by the Russian leadership itself to the project of destroying Ukraine. So this is what I mean by the narcissism that we need the genocide is necessary because it teaches us who we are and you can't take it away from us for that reason this is of course also what scholars of fascism would call a politics of us and them and I'm going to return to that theme.
We know who we are when we destroy someone else when we name the enemy as Carl Schmidt put it, Carl Schmidt the most famous and the most talented Nazi legal theorist politics begins when we name the enemy we can name him Satan we can name him Nazi it doesn't really matter we name the other in some firm way and then we aim to
destroy the other and that's how politics begins if you're the leading Nazi legal theorist that's how politics begins and that's not an idle reference because the the 1948 genocide convention was designed to anchor and restrengthen another kind of legal tradition right the Nazi legal tradition was very real and very powerful and very persuasive in its context and in its time and the convention that we're talking about from 1948 just a few years after the war was meant to do something entirely different.
The fifth kind of of contextual argument of contextualization is what I would
call the the the escalatory and again this will be familiar to scholars of the Holocaust and to others the when when Hitler in late 1941 and early 1942 made a whole cluster of statements about the necessity of exterminating all of the Jews of resolving the Jewish question once and for all the overall context was the defeat the coming defeat of the Wehrmacht and in particular the alliance between the British the Americans and the Soviets which Hitler argued could only be the work of the Jews it's so improbable how could the capitalists the Communists Wall Street Fleet Street the Kremlin how could they all be together it's because of the Jews says Hitler there is there is something slightly similar going on in the way that Russian officials describe Ukraine we weren't able to defeat them right away and what does that mean it confirms what we said before it just proves that these ukrainians are agents of international Powers because look the international powers have hastened to help them and that only proves that they're not really ukrainians but agents of international powers and therefore we are all the more correct in seeking to destroy them there's another escalatory logic which goes like this we thought in the beginning we could win this war by killing the top level of Ukrainian society it turns out that there are more of these self-conscious Ukrainians than we thought that does not lead us to question our initial assumption instead it simply means that we have to kill more Ukrainians and that by the way is what Pavel Gubarev the soldier that I quoted earlier specifically meant when he said we'll kill one million we'll kill 5 million we'll obliterate them all what he meant was the more people there are who continue to say they're Ukrainians the more of them we will have to kill so there are more than you think but you don't adjust your assumptions you just continue to kill or you kill more people these assumptions and here I'm going to get into some of the deeper parts of the argument the assumptions are and this is my sixth way of interpreting the assumptions are metaphysical that reality is not really what it seems to be um I mean we've already gone pretty far with this with the idea that Ukraine isn't a state and Ukraine is not a nation but there is a kind of alternative reality which not everyone can see and again here you find some interesting Nazi themes like the idea that Jews spread mental illness all right the Jews are the cause of mental of mental illness a frequent argument in Russian propaganda is that the ukrainians are Russians who are mentally ill and can only be cured of this mental illness by the application of of violence um they do not know who they are which of course is an imperial claim if I say you do not know who you are right I'm asserting my power to Define Who You
Are but alongside the mental illness idea there's there's a related idea which has a quasi-religious source and that is the idea that the ukrainians are possessed by Satan now I say that and some of you chuckle um but this is actually a fairly mainstream argument um Gubarev who I quoted before who was who appeared by the way in front of millions and millions of people saying this when he said we'll kill one million five million obliterate them all the justification that he gave was that the Ukrainians are possessed by Satan and that is the reason why they don't know their Russians and so we can try to exercise Satan but if we fail we then have no choice but to kill them that's what that's what he said you might think this is some kind of outlier as an argument but it's not it's actually rather mainstream I admit it didn't fit into all those arguments about how Putin is really a rational technocrat that we heard for a long time but in Putin's own discussions about Ukraine for 10 years there has been this idea that Russia and Ukraine were United by God and therefore anyone who challenges this connection must be on the other side Putin said when he visited Kyiv for the last time in 2013 that Ukraine and Russia were connected as a matter of God's will in his historical discussions of Ukraine I hesitate to use the word historical but in his discussions of the Ukrainian past he repeatedly makes the argument that Russia and Ukraine must be together forever because of a baptism which took place in the year 988. Now as a historian this pains me and it forces me into long explanations about how in the year 988 there weren't really modern nations and the person who was baptized maybe the person who was baptized was a Scandinavian warlord who was from a clan that was fresh off a career in slave trading and so on and so forth but I don't want to be forced into that now the point that I want to make about this is slightly different which is that this the appeal to baptism as a ritual of cleansing which determines who is always right forever is what is what matters here. The idea is that it's not that Russians go to church which by the way statistically speaking they don't whereas statistically speaking ukrainians do which is like the 75th irony in all of this. The point is that when you make this kind of claim about Russia and associate it with eternal Purity what you're saying is that the other side is Satanist and when I say what you're saying I'm not I'm not I'm not extracting this logic myself this is deep in the thinking of the most important Russian Christian fascist thinker a man called divanilin who Putin has been citing regularly for more than a decade who he cited most recently on September 30th during his speech about annexation it is deep in Russian media culture um solovil who's perhaps the most important television propagandist a couple of weeks ago at the end of his program said what are we fighting against we're fighting against Satanism a member of the security Council of Russia which is the highest organ of the Russian State reported on in toss of all places and those of you who are old Soviet hands and remember what toss used to be you know this will be all the more extraordinary but toss reported um yesterday I think it was that a member of the security Council of Russia has has assigned um has defined the task of the Russian army in Ukraine as desatanization or the same description of the war was echoed by Ramzan Kadyrov, who is the the leader of Chechnya in Russia, and one of the most important political figures in Russia who also said that the problem in Ukraine is Satanism and followed that up with the claim that all of the Ukrainian cities have to be destroyed. So that's the metaphysic and the metaphysic there's a word for this metaphysic which is a familiar word, that is a fascist metaphysic so one doesn't have to have fascism to have genocide there can be genocide without fascism but part of the interpretive context there is I'm afraid fascism um those of you who work on Russia or on fascism or on the Holocaust or on the Jews will of course know perfectly well what the reference to Satan is all about and who is meant in that reference to Satan um specifically in the tradition of Russian anti-Semitism but also in in in um in in deschtoma and in all visual Nazi propaganda the association of Satan with the Jew is front and center to say that our our mission is desatanization in describing a country whose president is Jewish is a resonance
which no one at least in that part of the world is going to miss, but this this metaphysic is also fascist in a deeper way which speaks to a tradition of Christian fascism which is interesting intellectually it appears in Romania it also appears in in in Russia and in this in this tradition which as I've already said Putin reads and and cites the idea is that the world has been fragmented the world is spoiled right and there's only one way to heal this and what does spoiled mean spoiled means there are facts and there are values and you can't bring everything together into one beautiful whole right Russia's mission as the only unspoiled country is to bring the world back to a kind of totality this is what this fascist tradition says and what this means in practice and you'll see immediately the relevance for Russian practice and especially propaganda in this what this means in practice is that no matter what Russia seems to be doing it's good or at least forgivable because it's part of this mission to restore the entire world right another thing that which is which Miss which this which this means is that since there's no such thing as true it's fine to lie right and so this this post this thing about Russia Today which we describe I think perfectly correctly as post-modern um this idea the weaponization of the idea that there is no truth actually has another origin which is not post-modern at all, which is which is this fascist view that that there is there is no truth to begin with and therefore if you're lying in the service of Russia what you're doing is actually good and I'll repeat something I said earlier because I think it's important in this kind of argument Russia is always innocent right it's not just that Russia is Forgiven Russia is always innocent because Russia is the only hope for the restoration of the world and once you believe that then a whole lot of other things start to fall into place number eight is Replacement Theory so replacement theory is I mentioned this because it's a present day Theory um which is very well known in the in the far right in this country and elsewhere President Putin is a replacement theorist he worries aloud and often that
his race is going to be overwhelmed by the numbers of non-russians and non-orthodox and so on in the in the telegram channels of the mercenary group Wagner Wagner is
named Wagner by the way because the person who named it thinks that thought that Hitler's favorite composer was Wagner but at this point the talk you will not be surprised by that um the um the in the telegram channels of the Wagner mercenaries Replacement Theory talk is ubiquitous in the practice of this war there is in fact an attempt to undo what fascists call replacement it is not just as I said before that a Russian war aim is the mass kidnapping of fertile Ukrainian women and Ukrainian children who can be assimilated into Russia right that is of course to undo the notion that there aren't enough Russians by taking white people who you can call Russian it is also the case simultaneously that Russia in hugely disproportionate numbers sends the young men of its own indigenous groups from the Caucasus and from Asia to die in Ukraine so the attempt to undo what they see as replacement goes in both directions and you could also point out that the genocidal intent here is not directed only at Ukrainians if the young men from these what are already often very small groups are being sent to die in disproportionate numbers this will affect the future of those groups specifically I mean all these cases are sad but one that I find specifically sad is the case of the Crimean Tatars who were targeted for complete ethnic cleansing under Stalin
after 1991 many of them made their way back or rather the children the grandchildren made their way back to what was then Ukrainian Crimea Crimea was then invaded by Russia in 2014 and the Crimean Tatars lost all of the rights they enjoyed in the Ukrainian State and were suffered to and were subject to specific forms of oppression which now after this invasion in 2022 include being mobilized to go and die in Ukraine right so the the specific attack on the indigenous males of the non-Russian nationalities I think is also an example of the of the operationalism of operationalization of Replacement Theory number nine and here I'm I'm coming to enclose is the idea of exceptionalism that the rules don't apply to us so that you might say that this is a genocide but who made the rules anyway that's a quotation from Mr Putin's speech of September 30th
who made the rules anyway who made those rules the rules do not apply to Russia because Russia is a millennial civilization that is also a quotation from that speech now this kind of talk is consistent with the Nazi legal Theory which I referred to earlier which says that law is not about Universal rules um law oh this is a different point same theorist Carl Schmidt says power begins from the ability to make an exception right he who can make an exception is he who rules says Carl Schmidt so what is Putin doing when he stands up in September 30th and says what are these rules anyway and who made them and they don't apply to us because that we're a millennial civilization
he's trying to make an exception and that kind of exceptionalism opens the way for the perpetration of genocide it's also Imperial it's also fascistic fascistic it's also narcissistic but it's exceptionalism because the genocide convention is of course a rule
so in conclusion what I want to say I mean first of all I hope that I've made the case that both parts of the genocide convention are should be seen as applying here that the we can see the intention not because we can see into somebody's mind because we can't not because there's a confessional letter from the ruler which there isn't and there never has been never will be but because with the help of historical and other forms of interpretation we can make reasonable arguments about what is actually intended I hope also that I've made the case that the facts on the ground in Ukraine correspond to all of the forums of genocidal crimes as defined in the convention if we are resisting all of this um I I suspect that it's because there's just too much evidence and that we have become jaded or one final thought if we are resisting this it might be because we're saying to ourselves at some level well it's not the Holocaust isn't it it's not it's not the Holocaust and of course it isn't but I think it's very important as we speak about in sequence the Holocaust genocide and human rights to think of the Holocaust not as a tool of forgetting but as a tool of remembrance not as a way of dismissing other events but as a way of helping to see other events as they take place if we place the Holocaust outside of History by saying that it's Unique or special then what we're doing is we're trying to demonstrate our own virtue we're virtuous because we we say that the Holocaust is outside of History but that's the opposite of virtuous because once we say the Holocaust is outside of History what we're really doing is we're saying nothing's like it there's no genocide going on right now and therefore I'm not responsible and in that way in a few quick psychologically appealing bits of reasoning um we we find ourselves ignoring the genocides that happen before our eyes history is meant I think to help us with this to resist these kinds of temptations history is the search for patterns it's a search for the telling detail the search for self-awareness it's the knowledge that allows us to see or not see and then once we see then we know that we're doing one way or another on one side or another we're doing like the Holocaust the category of genocide can offer us ways out we can say surely not now surely not here surely not on my watch
surely the intention is not clear surely the actions are insufficient but in this case everything is absolutely clear and sufficient and has been from the beginning:
“All That Remains Is Us and what we do next. They should not exist at all we should execute them by firing squad we will drive the children into the Raging River we will throw the children into burning wooden huts. We will kill one million we will kill 5 million we will obliterate them all.”