Pessimizing Ukraine
Unlike many of you, I spent about an hour listening to Iuliia (Latynina) chat up Misha (Podoliak) about the ICC whatever involving Vova1. And they talked about other stuff, as well, including The Washington Post’s bonehead decision to make a Lt. Col (nom de guerre Kupol) the poster boy for The Ukraine Pessimization Campaign2.
Being held to account and actually facing justice are not the same thing, especially if you live in Ukraine, a country without a functioning court system. Yet forcing Putin & company to even contemplate the possibility they might face criminal charges at Oude Waalsdorperweg 10 can’t be a bad thing.
Milosovic, Milutinovich, Plavsic, Karadzic come to mind. Been to that jungle and back. There are many more heads of state and former heads of state who deserve to be prosecuted and punished for crimes that inflicted great suffering on their own citizens and the citizens of other countries.
What has been accomplished up to now is not negligible. But it’s not enough.
The contemporary struggle for accountability began just a little more than 40 years ago when the military junta that had ruled Argentina for the previous seven years, on the eve of a transition to democratic government, issued what it called a "Final Document on the Struggle Against Subversion and Terrorism.3"
But I digress.
Developments in Ukraine today are putting their stamp on the way that the struggle for accountability might evolve internationally after we’re all dead. One way is in the choice of self-aggrandizing terminology.
Maybe, but not as cool as the boastful and fatalistic Irish, who today are making progress, slow progress. Ukrainians are indeed wonderful, like people everywhere, but not without gigantic governance problems.
As we are fond of repeating: Ukraine remains a sham democracy. It is a primitive post-soviet feudal autocracy not underpinned by elections or coordinated work of institutions, but by popular uprisings. Absent them, even the illusion of democracy would not exist4.
This war might change that, or it might not.
Latynina chats up Podoliak (March 17, 2023)
The purpose was to put to rest debate over the "disappearances" that had been the method by which the armed forces had prevailed over both their violent left wing antagonists and over their peaceful critics in Argentine society: read abductions, detention, torture, execution, etc. At least nine thousand persons disappeared in this manner in Argentina according to a government commission that subsequently compiled information about the disappearances and that said the number was probably a lot higher. Estimates go as high as twenty to thirty thousand. As for the Belarusian and Russian state-sponsored death squads, the number could be much higher.