When I visited Germany in 1973 I was approached by a young German boy who asked me if I felt comfortable visiting Germany after the horrors of the last war. I told him that all that happened before I was born, how could I feel hostility towards him, which lay at the root of his question. What I discovered was that he, as a German growing up in the shadow of the Third Reich, was ashamed of his heritage. The very thing that Hitler used to promote his ghastly regime had been made a thing of shame for this young man. He could not enjoy the rich and ancient mythical heritage of the Teutonic people because this was besmirched by the overlay of Hitler’s atrocities.
We see the same situation occurring again in Russia. Dreadful crimes are being committed in the name of the Russian people by a gang of thugs who have grabbed power at the top of that nation. Putin was an officer in the KGB, when the Soviet empire collapsed he entered politics and worked his way up to President.
It was widely held that when the Soviet empire collapsed, to the great relief and release of those nations who had been enthralled to that horrible regime, the instruments of terror of the Soviet rule, the KGB, became the core of the Russian mafia. The Russian mafia is among the principle organisations dealing in human trafficking, whether for sexual dalliance or fresh organs for transplanting. Humans become an expendable commodity. This is not to look at such things as arms trafficking and drugs, some of the principal sources of black revenue. For those who would look at the situation, from a less emotional standpoint than is perhaps presented here, can read Dervla Murphy’s book Silverland, in which she shows the desperate poverty of many young Russian men living in the mid-East of that country. The situation could be likened to that of young black men in America, if not today then certainly during the 1980s and beyond.
Nevertheless it is the case that a nation of good hard-working people have been held hostage by the criminal gang which guides policies and is afraid to allow freedom of speech because of the crimes perpetrated in its name. I hope the world will be big enough when, after the Putin government falls, it will embrace with compassion the plight of the Russian people forced to suffer the most dire sanctions placed against them due to current criminal actions. One has to view with cynicism the videos of ‘distribution of humanitarian aid’ to the public by Russian soldiers vaunted over the last day or so, when one carries the thought that these make ideal settings for human poachers to survey for likely candidates for their illicit trade.
