THE SHOOTDOWN

Like any loss of innocent human life, the shootdown of the Malaysian airliner en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was a terrible tragedy. It is too early still to judge what really happened there, because there is too little objective evidence at this preliminary stage of investigation. Clearly, nobody has been caught red-handed, and the normal judicial questions of motive and opportunity immediately put us on shaky ground and cry out for caution before jumping to conclusions.

I admire the American system of justice, and it pains me when this noble creation of enlightened minds gets trampled by the hogs of rampant propaganda, both in government, but even more so in the media, whose modus vivendi seems to be indeed jumping to ready-made conclusions before the facts are in.

It pains me when allegedly responsible persons in positions of power are ready and willing (or often forced into these uncomfortable positions) to disseminate propaganda, rather than to suspend judgment and call for an unbiased, cool-headed search for the truth.

But, alas, Propaganda is the queen of our day, and her servants have no shame and are an affront to human dignity.

Knowing that I am Russian-born and perhaps mistrusting the official media bias, people are asking me what I think about what may have happened. To which I naturally reply that I do not know who did what, as very few facts are known at this stage.

But regardless of the earliness of this stage, two very important points can be made and must be made.

Making my first, utterly indispensable point, I am making no friends, because what I am going to say is too shocking, much too shocking for the sensitive stomachs of our philistine generation who lives in the quiet enjoyment of relative comfort and hears about wars from media reports, which of course are not as gory as the action movies people watch every day.

Our precious philistines are overexposed to pulp violence, but they have no comprehension of the concept of real war.

War is when normalcy is death and destruction. War is when your family, your wife and children are never safe, and even less so in the sacred privacy of their home. War is when death hails on you from the sky. When an airplane is your mortal enemy, and your mission in life as husband and father, as protector of life, is to preempt death by causing death.

Life in a warzone is like this. It is governed by a wholly different set of moral laws and cannot be judged by the yardstick of peace. The heroes of the American War of Independence, the generations of the two World Wars, knew it. The dwellers of warzones in our time all know it. The spectators of television wars have no idea of what I am talking about.

And so, here comes the terrible shocker. The outcry is loud among even the most benign and most moderate callers for justice:

“We must find out who these people are who shot down the civilian airliner, and bring them to justice!!!”

But what is justice? Are we judging justice by the standards of peace and quiet of a nation at peace, or do we ever take into account that we are talking about Ukraine, the nation of different, mutually hostile ethnic and cultural entities that used to coexist quite well under the USSR (like the entities of the former prosperous nation of Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito), and more or less tolerably after the fall of the USSR, until the recent coup overthrowing the very flawed, but still legitimately elected government of Yanukovich and bringing to power a group of nationalistic extremists who started their reign by critically undermining the human rights of the Eastern and Southern Ukrainians, directly causing a bitter civil war by their actions…

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, unless you failed to comprehend it, there is a bitter civil war going on out there as we speak. Men, women and children are dying there every day, bombarded from the air by a government that essentially wants to break and dehumanize them, and if we listen to the rhetoric of Yulia Timoshenko, to physically annihilate them. (Incidentally, I am not repeating anybody’s propaganda here, I am quoting facts which are open for everybody to see, unless of course they do not wish to see…)

And so here is my shocker. Before the facts start coming in, I am willing to consider one hypothesis, for the sake of the argument, although still insisting that this is merely a hypothesis…---

What if the airliner was shot by the rebels? Not because they wanted to hurt innocent Dutch, Malayan, and other civilians, including women and children, but simply because the sky over their war-torn land is their enemy, bringing down death on their own civilians, including women and children…

What If?!

As far as I am concerned, no missing facts are needed. My verdict is in:

NOT GUILTY.

***

But I am not done yet, and I have an unquestionably guilty party in my judgment, guilty before the fact.

My guilty verdict in this particular case goes to those who had sent all those innocent people into harm’s way, who had allowed a civilian airliner to enter a war zone, where lethal fire is admittedly dispensed up and down, where any aircraft without exception is justifiably presumed to be an enemy aircraft, with the intent to kill before being killed…

What pathetic madman would send civilians to an almost certain death? Or perhaps, the reason why this plane had found itself in that particular horrible place at that particular awful time ought to be thoroughly investigated (had the flight path been changed in any way, and if so-- why?, etc.), as an even more important clue than who actually shot it down...