Deliberately Murdering Civilians: Something Wrong With Elites
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Yet another ugly circus show evolves around the Eurovision bi-annual music festival. Do not grieve if you never even heard about Eurovision, the songs from there are not exactly worth reaching non-European audiences these days.
But the scandals are, sometimes. And, yes, this particular scandal is a must-see (or a must-read about). It’s about things nations can or cannot do in a war, yesterday and today.
To repeat, we are talking only about a song festival that happens once in two years. The next one has been scheduled for next April-May. And, today, singers and national broadcasters have already started their grandstanding hysterics about Israel’s participation. Spain, Ireland, Netherlands, and Slovenia have declared that they won’t be broadcasting anything from that show if Israel will be there. While earlier Mr. Nemo, the winner of the 2024 Eurovision, has sent his award back to the organizing committee, saying that since Israel is in, he’ll be out.
You may dwell at length on the matter of typically Western obligatory indignation even in sports and music, but then Israel really has been murdering thousands of civilians in Gaza, is that right? A nation can wage a war for legitimate reason, but it cannot harm civilians, or else all of its population should be a collective global outcast, that’s the current European idea.
But then, look at yet another scandal at the 2024 Eurovision, when some highly suspicious votes have been assigned to Ukrainian musicians there, to let them win. Although, according to European logic, Ukraine should not have been there at all, since that nation’s leaders have been guilty of mass murders of civilians ever since 2014, when the civil war have started in Ukraine’s East. But Ukraine somehow is a different case.
If you look closer, there is a lot of debate going on these days on that matter of everything (or not everything) being fair in love and war. How about the US with its contentious case of “the ethical and moral dimensions of warfare”, a debate around Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s (or somebody else’s) order of shooting unarmed suspected drug carriers in the water after their vessels have been sunk by the US Navy. “In U.S. history, war crimes have been rare”, fumes the Washington Post’s columnist (is that right, American soldier is an exemplary darling?). The writer goes on, asking admirable questions: is the administration legally right in claiming that the strike was justified by an “armed conflict” against “terrorist” drug traffickers and, if so, do the laws of war apply? And, if this isn’t a war, do the strikes amount to murder? To add, if that’s not a war, does it mean that shooting prisoners is also legal these days?
All in all, something is wrong with the world, if such stories are cropping up all the time. Mind you, we have just been talking about news of atrocities widely discussed. But then, there are cases which are not supposed to be discussed at all, and the biggest such case is, to repeat, Ukraine.
Do you know what will happen to you if you are European and are giving facts and comments on that matter? In Europe, that censorship-stricken world, even mentioning these facts are placing you among the “Putin’s team bloggers”, while in Germany you are likely to go to jail for that.
The facts are very much there for everyone to see. It has been announced, these days, that a long list of Ukrainian war criminals has been finally published by the General Prosecutor’s Office of Russia, to be submitted to the court. It is widely believed that the court will be sitting in Donetsk, closer to the place of crimes perpetrated.
The biggest problem was, and is, that the list of war crimes is so huge, that compiling it took years. These crimes started in 2014, when West Ukrainian armies marched on Donetsk and other cities of the East. Since that time shelling of residential quarters have become a daily routine, with more than five thousand civilians murdered. That was before 2022, when the civil war has evolved into a bloody conflict with Russia.
And since that moment on, the list of obvious, recorded and documented war crimes has grown to unimaginable degree. That list includes prisoners of war shot, civilians hunted and killed by Ukrainian drones, torture chambers organized and chemical weapons developed and sometimes used, not to mention attacks on nuclear power stations. All that, to repeat, is not even supposed to be mentioned anywhere, but especially in Europe and, to lesser extent, in the US.
All the court cases include hard material evidence, long interviews with the accused, videos and the rest. The list prepared by the General Prosecutor’s Office has one significant feature – it names the top Ukrainian leadership giving specific documented and witnessed orders to perform war crimes. And that’s quite a list. It includes the current Minister of Defense, the recently replaced Head of Presidential Administration, acting Security Service head and dozens of others.
The biggest problem is, these and hundreds of other Ukrainians have not been even trying to conceal or deny the orders they gave. Something (or rather someone) told them that Ukraine was not supposed to worry about things like international laws and norms of waging wars. Another (or the same) someone probably also told Israelis: now you can do anything.
And all that time there were and are other nations that respect the rules of war. Striking the territory from where terrorists habitually come – that’s normal. But that does not mean you can target innocent civilians while doing that act of justice. Or take Russia, with the recent Vladimir Putin’s remark about striking Ukraine “surgically”, that is, not ever touching civilians, even if that slows down the offensive.
That’s why today you can find a lot of commentaries of the Russian historians on the issue of the universal rules of war and where these came from. These norms were changing together with human society. The present ones originate from Europe of the late 19th century. What was a norm in earlier ages of the Western civilization was anything but humane. Three days of robbery and mayhem in a European city taken by the storm – that was an iron-clad rule. Murder of prisoners… there was such case in 1415, in a war of France against Britain, and it caused plenty of dismay, since prisoners paid ransom and were, simply speaking, business. Mind you, all these ad hoc norms were about Westerners fighting Westerners, while ravaging wild and uncivilized colonies needed no rules at all.
But a slow process of humanization started in the 17th century’s West, that was the Age of Enlightenment. That age has slowly changed the elites, integrating merchants and intellectuals with the descendants of the knights. So, a chain of Geneva and other conventions started to be developed in the late 19thcentury, criminalizing harm to civilians. The process lasted until recently, with the parties guilty of war crimes executed in 1945.
While now, it seems, something went wrong with the Western elites and the humane rules they were previously imposing on the rest of the world. So a bit of imposition of decency on these elites from the rest of the world seems to be an order of the day.
Dmitry Kosyrev is a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com
