In the slow agony of this war another macabre dance advances. Nothing to do with strategy or tactics. Simply a psychological move, cynical and vulgar propaganda. If it weren’t for the fact that men risk the death penalty, it would not even have the density or splendor of drama, only the filthy air of imposture.
In the Mariupol theater, low-grade work is underway, iron cages are being erected where the accused will find a place, carpenters set up benches for the audience and benches for the judges. Because this is where the public trial launched by the Donbass secessionists against the “Nazis” of Azovstal, the Ukrainian fighters who surrendered to the Russians after a long siege, will be staged. In the photos the cages appear huge as if they were to house not humans but the zoo for gigantic and dangerous beings of some lost race.
It is useless to wait for the charges, the results of the investigation, the list of witnesses against them. Talk about codes, international laws and national laws (an even more slippery matter in a republic that is recognized only by the Russians who keep it standing by dint of cannon fire). This is a process that resembles the dismal rites of the castle of Verona, when the Mussolini Social Republic settled its accounts with the traitors of the Grand Council and of 25 July. Here we are in the dark and violent territory not of law but of revenge. This trial, which I imagine of the will of those who organized it, is intended to be the response to the condemnation in Kiev of a young Russian soldier accused of killing a civilian, just like the other on the absolute level of justice. It belongs to another unacceptable territory, namely that of the instrumental use of the law continually denied to mark bloodlines in history and to propose ferocious collective catharsis.
It is all too easy to enumerate the reasons why, as in the case of the hasty Ukrainians, this cannot be a smooth process. The impossibility given that it takes place while the war is raging for the accused to freely sue witnesses in defense. Nobody would have the courage to come and bring evidence to excuse the accused, risking revenge in turn.
And then the right of defense: it is impossible for the Azovstal soldiers to choose defenders who would have to cross the front line to watch the trial. There will be, as in the Ukrainian case, evidently biased official lawyers. Without forgetting the problem of the climate in which the trial will take place which is imagined as a gigantic propaganda operation: even a Ukrainian Nuremberg that should bring elements in support of the Russian thesis according to which the defenders of the steel mill and the militias to which they belong are committed Nazis. in the ethnic cleansing of everything that was Russophile in the eastern provinces of the country.
In a war like the Ukrainian one, a furious hatred is conceived, a hatred that reaches Punic proportions and this, if you will, is its only greatness. A wild hatred for the enemy, an endemic and desperate execration that sharpens knives, poisons the past, attacks civilians and fighters and then piles them on the edges of all the paths of reason and human history.
Terrible poisons are administered on both sides. Therefore, even the ambiguous and exploited heroes of Azovstal are judged on the basis of this hatred. Propaganda needs a new tragic spectacle and claims it with mighty and unanimous clamor. The sentence served, the organizers themselves know, will be very little and will not change the course of the war. After all, all the propaganda possibilities of that group of macerated and torn soldiers have already been effectively scraped off in the sequences of surrender, of stripping, of the exhibition of tattoos.
Reusing them for a war crimes trial belongs only to the sybaritism of revenge.
However, the Azovstal soldiers will have a tragic fate once again to be used for purposes they may not have consciously chosen. After playing the heroism they are stuck in the role of the murderers, the bloodthirsty responsible with their Kiev bosses for having unleashed the tragedy; which, if anything, belongs to the imperialist and totalitarian designs of Putin and his Donbassian squislings.
Unless they have the courage, with vindictive stoicism, to overturn the script, the cheap play, which the accusers and judges have set up for them, that is, they do not know how to build the scenario, difficult and doubly and dangerous for those who know how to risk. the death penalty, of the revolutionary process. In this case, the propaganda operation would backfire on those who imagined it. It would offer the Ukrainians, who in recent times for arrogance and self-confidence in the victory seem to have lost the talent and imagination of communication, an extraordinary stage to accuse the real culprits of the war.
For this reason, Azovstal’s defendants need to reject at the root the procedural logic chosen by their inquisitors and therefore to defend themselves within the artificial legal system that is imposed on them: for example by contesting the testimonies or denying the crimes that are attributed to them. That is, let them slide the process onto another level: you do not have the right to judge us because you do not exist, you are a state, territorial, juridical fiction!
They should thus break the back of the juridical pedantism of revenge and, with sacrilegious improvisation, demolish the very right of the false judges of the self-proclaimed free Donbass. What a bloody mockery it would be for the pro-Russian transibulation if their intended victims immediately declared in front of the public and the cameras: your charlatan robes represent nothing, you are but murderers on commission, you offer the most incontrovertible anthropological proof that the reasons for this war camped out by your Moscow masters is nothing but lies. You can execute us but only in the name of the power that comes from having defeated us, not in the name of a right that does not exist.