Would you be able to watch a video of a man forcibly castrated? And should your stomach prove strong enough, would you put a ‘like’ on it? Thousands of Russians did both.
The video proves the eclectic nature of the Russians, who seamlessly join archaism with modernity. As a tribute to the former, several Russian soldiers held a Ukrainian POW down, while the man in the photograph castrated him with a Stanley knife.
That foray outside the Geneva Convention has old antecedents. Prisoners were sometimes mutilated in the Byzantine Empire, Africa, ancient Japan and elsewhere.
That such practices are still extant in our post-industrial age testifies to the Russians’ commitment to what Putin lovingly calls “traditional values”. I too admire conservatism, but not irrespective of what it is that’s being conserved.
Yet such traditionalism effortlessly blends with the Russians keeping an open mind to the technological advances of modernity. Thus, while some soldiers castrated the prisoner, others were filming the action, doubtless with their smartphones.
Having completed the procedure, the soldiers waved the severed genitals before the smartphone camera and then, in a sudden flash of inspiration, called the victim’s wife to spread the fun more widely. They then shot the prisoner in the back of the head.
The man wielding the knife is a Kalmyk, a member of the only Buddhist nation that has settled in Europe. Many other Mongolian peoples have fused with the Finno-Ugrian and Slavic Russians to create a nation that, according to the first Russian philosopher Chaadayev, inherited the worst features of both Europe and Asia.
One of Russia’s greatest poets, Alexander Blok (d. 1921), celebrated this heritage with gusto and pride:
You are but millions. Our unnumbered nations
Are as the sands upon the sounding shore.
We are the Scythians! We are the slit-eyed Asians!
Try to wage war with us – you’ll try no more!
War brings out the worst in even civilised nations, never mind the descendants of the Scythians. But the worst in some nations is much worse than in some others.
Isolated instances of inhuman savagery happen in all wars. But in the on-going bandit raid on the Ukraine, such instances aren’t isolated. They are what passes for Russia’s military strategy.
Lest you may think that it’s only the ethnic minorities, such as the Chechens, Kalmyks and Buryats, who are guilty of inhuman atrocities, listen to the few survivors of Bucha. Retreating Russian troops left that city near Kiev strewn with mutilated, tortured, often raped corpses of women, men and children.
Those few denizens whose luck was good testify that simon-pure ethnic Russians were the worst. Even Chechen militants, known for their cruelty, weren’t a patch on them.
In this context, calls for peace talks sound especially, inhumanly callous. Thus a Mail columnist who’ll go nameless (I’ve named him often enough before) writes: “If anyone suggests we try to make peace in Ukraine (as I do), he is immediately denounced as an ‘appeaser’.”
I wouldn’t denounce him as an appeaser. I’d denounce him as an accomplice.
How do you make peace with murderers, rapists, castrators and looters? How do you even sit down to talk to them? Would you negotiate with someone who has done such things to your family? I wouldn’t.
When your brothers, sisters, children, spouses and parents fall victim to such satanic atrocities, you don’t talk. You fight – and continue fighting until only one side is left standing.
The only kind of peace the Ukraine can accept after all this is Russia relinquishing every inch of stolen Ukrainian territory and submitting to an international tribunal on war crimes. Pushing the country into any other arrangement means promoting the victory of Putin’s evil regime.
I can only regret that the Russians have allowed themselves to be brutalised to such an infernal extent. That part of their nature had to be close to the surface to have burst out so quickly and to such an effect.
It is our sacred duty to help the Ukraine in every possible way. In doing so, we’ll also be helping ourselves, for marauding Scythian hordes don’t stop until they are stopped.
And if you don’t believe me, re-read Blok’s poem. He understood his own people much better than even Mail columnists do.
A Royal Marine received a life sentence (eventually reduced to seven years) for killing a wounded Taliban prisoner. His fellow marines also recorded the event, including a declaration, “I’ve just broken the Geneva Convention.” [The event was documented on this very blog, including his quoting from Shakespeare.]
One doubts the Russian soldiers are even aware of such a convention. The video obviously provides proof of the crime (I’ll not watch it). We’ll watch the papers for the reaction of the Russian hierarchy. Spiritually superior to the British (just ask them), their reaction should be stronger. Don’t hold your breath.
Thank you for reminding me, and doesn’t time fly. War is a nasty business, and what those marines did was unpardonable. But that was an isolated event, not a strategy deliberately pursued by the Allies. And there was no mutilation involved, nor gloating to the victims wife.
It seems these national units are mostly mercenary types for which low pay understood to augmented by plunder. It is even reputed the Buryats and Chechen boys fought it out over some spoils.