Another genocide

A major problem for Biden’s national security team has been trying to match Biden’s random and spontaneous policy statements toward Ukraine. It typically takes his administration a week or two to catch up. Prior to the invasion, for example, Biden remarked at a press conference that the US response to Russia’s use of force would depend on “whether it’s a minor incursion.”

In responding to a more recent question regarding possible Russian use of chemical weapons, Biden emphasized that it “would trigger a response in kind.” A presidential spokesman quickly stated that the United States would not be using chemical weapons in return. Even if National Security Adviser Sullivan genuinely believes the “level of systematic deprivation of life” doesn’t “rise to the level of genocide,” it’s only a matter of time before Biden makes the call.

The Biden team’s belief that the enormity of Russia’s criminal acts has not reached the level of genocide puts them on a par with previous US administrations who mishandled major cases of genocide in the 20th Century. Currently, Biden’s national security wise men presumably believe that genocidal activity must reach the massive level of death and destruction aimed at Armenians, Jews, and Tutsi’s by the Turks, the Germans, and the Rwanda government, respectively.

Even then, the Roosevelt administration refused to address the issue of the Holocaust; the Clinton administration did not engage Rwanda; and it took over one hundred years to charge the Ottomans with genocide against the Armenians. The failure of the Israelis to support Ukraine, moreover, puts the lie to “never again”.

In actual fact, the issue of ‘enormity’ has nothing to do with an actual genocide. This week’s ‘Economist’, the most authoritative English-language newsweekly, argued that “Investigators are like to find that Russian forces should be indicted, even if they have not killed on such a systematic scale as to have committed genocide.” The Economist has rarely been so obtuse. The key determinants of genocide relate to ‘intent’; there is no doubt that Putin and his sadistic military are trying to subjugate a nation and to exterminate members of a specific or definable identity group.

Like the Nazis 80 years ago, the Russians are trying to extinguish Ukraine as an independent nation. The horrors of Bucha that are being repeated throughout Ukraine certainly resemble the horrors of Babi Yar, which took place in Kiev, and the wanton destruction in Spain by the Nazi’s Condor Legion, which was memorialized in Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, the international symbol of genocide The United States and its Allies even suppressed the truth about Hitler’s Final Solution during the war. We were bystanders to these genocides, and once again we appear to be bystanders.

Excerpted: ‘Another Genocide: Bucha Joins Guernica and Babi Yar’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org