Why the Russians Cut Off a Moscow Bombing Suspect’s Ear and Made Him Eat It

Last Friday, terrorists attacked Moscow’s “Crocus City Hall” music venue, killing over a hundred people. My condolences to their families. Within a day, leaked footage showed a suspect getting his ear cut off and being made to eat it. Additional footage showed a suspect in great pain with electrical equipment attached to his genitals.

It was the type of gruesome footage from which we tend to turn away. We form our private opinions and don’t discuss them. I fear the silence allows some observers to regard this as extreme but effective justice. Perhaps people will tell themselves the word that has justified centuries of Russia’s self-inflicted tyranny: “order.” Marquis de Custine wrote 200 years ago, “Officially, such brutal tyranny is called respect for unity and love of order.”

To say nothing about the dangers of presumptions of guilt and unconstrained authority, this episode points to important differences between Russia and the West, which most of us do not understand and, I fear, cannot understand. But I will try to explain them anyway.

Russia is a society held together by fear and threat. Creating fear is almost always the first thing they do. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, one of their first actions was to kidnap Simferopol resident Reshat Ametov, a Tartar activist, and leave his body to be discovered later with signs of torture. Weeks later, when they invaded Donbas, one of the more outspoken pro-Ukrainian city council members, Volodymyr Rybak from Horlivka in Luhansk Region, was similarly kidnapped. He was drowned, and then his body was mutilated and left to be discovered. These stories never gained much traction. Russian disinformation was so good that everybody was discussing if Russia was invading and never got to describing how they were invading.

The terror worked for Russia. It drove opposition underground and helped the Kremlin’s propagandists and useful idiots in the West proclaim that the regions were pro-Russian. We in the West do not think that lies could be so vulgar and horrific, but they are. For Russia, this is normal. The world is held together not by laws, customs, and social norms but by barbarism. If you want to be beautiful, just murder everyone who might say otherwise, and you will be beautiful.

Read more at American Thinker

 

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Home of the Brave: Stories in Uniform
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Saddam Hussein and the Dark Princes of Love
Saddam Hussein and the Dark Princes of Love
Television - a story about the Iraq War
Television - a story about the Iraq War
Convoy Home
Convoy Home
Fire and Forget
Fire and Forget
Home of the Brave: Stories in Uniform
Home of the Brave: Stories in Uniform
The Tea Party Explained
The Tea Party Explained

Russia’s anti-Ukraine propaganda targeting the West is pervasive and mendacious

Recently, Donald Trump Jr. responded to a question by Timcast IRL co-host Luke Rudkowski about Ukraine.

Trump Jr. said, “We’re creating a class of billionaire oligarchs in Ukraine” by way of the country’s corruption.

Previously, he mocked Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky for seeming ungrateful for the aid received. Earlier, Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis described Russia’s full scale invasion as a “border dispute,” then backtracked.

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On the Day of Calamity

A strange story from my workshop days has been republished on NHNovella. It originally appeared in the now defunct Steel City Review.

“2010. It was a warm November second or first. The clouds spent the day gathering and breaking apart and gathering again.

The Democrats were poised to take back Congress, and even though we didn’t know too much about politics, my friends and I were all jazzed. We were grad students, and smart enough to know the obvious — that Bush and friends had started a war for oil, that he was evil and/or stupid, and that things were about to change.

I think America felt guilty about our illegal war. I know I did, and a big Republican defeated would vindicate us all.

Anyway, I was en route to a belated Halloween party.” (Read more on NH Novella)