Putin's war against the neighboring country forces us to reconsider the concept of evil in the world and how to respond to it.
Evil lost its former “glory” many years ago . Evil foresaw that the devil was possible. Together, these concepts were seen as an obstacle to certain forms of private responsibility for behavior. So the world has decided to downplay evil and expand the definition of good.
But downplaying the devil has a price, which has become apparent at a time when the world is looking into the abyss of human catastrophe in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin's “scorched earth” tactics have revived the possibility of world evil, pure, convincing and undeniable.
Daniel Henninger writes about this in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The subject of recognizing evil as such has become difficult. After all, living in an era of volatile postmodern terms implies that a clear, traditional understanding of at least something is bound to be the subject of revision. One could agree that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 or the explosions on the streets of European cities were an act of terror. But the claim that it was “Islamic” terror was quickly criticized as inaccurate, unjust or offensive. Simple evil has become a topic of debate.
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Some events have gone down in history as an undeniable evil. For example, these were the Nazi death camps built for Jews. But while there have been events that can be called pure evil, such as the massacres in Cambodia in the 1970s, the executions organized by Putin's troops in Ukraine have come as a shock. No one expected this to happen again. No one could have imagined a rocket with the inscription “for children” aimed at the train station. For about the past 10 years, the understanding of what evil is in the United States has been rethought and detached from individual responsibility. Evil has become surprisingly ephemeral. Murders, including mass killings, are seen not as the misconduct of specific people, but as the guilt of “weapons.” Climate change has acquired the status of “existential threat to humanity.” And the problem is not that all these problems are unfair. However, more and more things that humanity considers important have become abstractions. This can be called the “problematization of morality.” Crime, identity, race, fossil fuels have all become amorphous “problems” that can be discussed forever.
The years of diminishing evil have made the political system incapable of acting decisively when evil appears. And this poses a personal, public and national risk. The importance of the war in Ukraine is that it forces us to rethink the concept of evil and the reaction to it, as well as the willingness to accept reality. Attempts to “distance” the topic of the war in Ukraine are made through attempts to accuse the West of starting it. They say that NATO should not have expanded to the east. But in reality, NATO is not guilty of Russian aggression. He has been forcing Putin to kill political opponents for years and destroy cities such as Grozny or Aleppo.
innocent people. He deliberately destroyed the physical order of everyday life of Ukrainians. And no intricate explanations are possible. It's just evil.
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If Chinese leader Xi Jinping throws the Uighur minority into concentration camps or imprisons dissidents on false charges, it must be acknowledged that politics cannot explain his intentions or desire to do so. Putin and Xi have introduced the idea of national election and are undermining Western liberalism. But their partnership, announced in February, is not just about ideological or economic rivalry. It also encompasses a shared and proven desire to pursue cannibalistic policies, which include assassinations, in order to achieve their goals. Opinions about the nature of evil have varied since the days of Eden. But we can say for sure that the events in Ukraine after February 24 proved that if you give the devil a chance, he will definitely try to destroy everyone.
See the special topic: Anonymous announced the hacking of one of Gazprom's companies 728 gigabytes of data were leaked to the network. The situation in the Mykolayiv region is steadily tense Vitaliy Kim noted that it is important to push the enemy away from the city and region as far as possible. NATO, Finland and Sweden Air Force exercises on the Baltic The exercises began to increase the Alliance's cohesion and interoperability. The head of the Mariupol police department and Poklonskaya's ex-husband were detained by the DBR A polygraph check confirmed his cooperation with the occupiers. Never again? Victor Pinchuk's article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
