Russian troops withdrew from north of Kiev four months ago, leaving the debris of mindless cruelty in their wake. Corpses of civilians and soldiers, both Russian and Ukrainian, lay on roads, in cellars, or buried in hastily dug graves. Some of the dead were executed, with their hands tied behind their backs. Others were casualties of indiscriminate, perhaps purposeful bombing and artillery attacks. I do not doubt that Mariupol, Donbas and other Russian-occupied territories will eventually yield evidence of similar atrocities.
Nor is this the first time Ukraine has undergone such trauma. The Holodomor, forced starvation of millions of Ukrainians during Stalin’s reign of terror, occupies the same place in Ukraine’s memory that the Shoah does in that of the Jews. The Armenian genocide by the Ottomans remains in the hearts of the Armenian diaspora.
Still, no race or nation is immune to acts of savagery. Many Ukrainians took a willing part in the Holocaust: Babi Yar, a ravine in Kiev, was the site of one of the single greatest massacres of Jews under the Nazis, and took place with willing help from Ukrainians. John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-American who was a guard at the Sobibor and Majdanek death camps, lived only a mile from my family’s home in Ohio. I have a Cleveland phone book from 1965 that lists his address and phone number, no different than the thousands of other Ukrainians that moved to the Cleveland area after the war. Nor do Americans have to look far for our own shame: Greenwood, Fort Pillow, My Lai, Abu Ghraib, these names remind us that we are not without guilt.
Why does this happen? The Milgram experiments showed that our consciences are relatively weak defenses against doing what we are told, regardless of our personal morality. And religion is more often the cause of massacres than a prevention: Christian versus Muslim, Sunni versus Shia, Muslim versus Hindu, Jews versus nearly all of the above, endless variations on an age-old struggle of who’s right about the Almighty, usually ending in blood. Putin’s “denazification” of Ukraine had the blessing of the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, so we can’t look for relief there.
I think that the answers to those questions lies in the fact that none of us are really civilized. Even the most timid soul can feel the impulse to murder in his or her heart (often over something meaningless or trivial), but fear of discovery and punishment keeps that impulse in check. Suddenly, along comes a situation where a person thinks “I can do this. I have permission from the bosses, or at least no one will find out about it”. How many of us would fail that test, and commit the crime?
The most important part of that thought is “at least no one will find out about it.” The extent to which Putin has gone to make sure nobody in Russia knows the true horrors of his invasion, not even calling it a war, attests to his understanding of the importance of the Russian people not knowing, or at least not wanting to know. The Nazis went to extraordinary lengths to cover up their Endlösung as they retreated, realizing that any justification that they might have made to themselves would crumble to dust under the harsh light of the truth.
It is unsurprising that autocrats, would-be autocrats and their apologists find Holocaust denial a useful tool. Whether they themselves believe it is immaterial. It is only important that their followers believe it. No one wants to think that the direction they are going is wrong, no villain ever really thinks of themselves as such. But the end product of any autocracy is the mass grave.
Winston Churchill said that “…democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” The most important benefit of democracy is that it protects us from ourselves. We are not civilized, and democracy, which only functions with free expression and a free press, provides guardrails against going with our impulses.