[It is best to keep a clear mind and use precise vocabulary:
Russia has committed aggression, and its forces continue to commit
atrocities in Ukraine. The nation’s responsibility for these crimes
should not hide behind the label of “tragedy.”]
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CALLING THE WAR IN UKRAINE A ‘TRAGEDY’ SHELTERS ITS PERPETRATORS
FROM BLAME AND RESPONSIBILITY  
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Mariana Budjeryn
October 5, 2023
The Conversation
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_ It is best to keep a clear mind and use precise vocabulary: Russia
has committed aggression, and its forces continue to commit atrocities
in Ukraine. The nation’s responsibility for these crimes should not
hide behind the label of “tragedy.” _

,

 

Russia’s war against Ukraine continues to cause unspeakable,
unimaginable suffering. By now, the word “tragedy” is firmly
installed in the lexicon of the war and has become almost a cliche.

Journalists record
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tragedies
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in Ukraine in their many
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heartbreaking
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manifestations
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Marking the first anniversary of the war in February 2023, U.S.
President Joe Biden said, “This war was never a necessity; it’s a
tragedy
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The label of “tragedy” is liberally applied to most every
development in this war. Russia’s breach of the Kakhovka dam on June
6, 2023, and the humanitarian and ecological disaster it caused was
“the latest tragedy
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according to an Associated Press headline.

That “latest” was not the last: On June 27, a Russian missile
strike on a pizzeria in Kramatorsk
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killed 12, among them Viktoria Amelina
[[link removed]],
a 37-year-old Ukrainian writer and researcher of Russian war crimes.
Joining an outpouring of anguish and grief on social media, one
commentator wrote of Russia’s deliberate targeting of Ukrainian
civilians: “What Russia is doing is absolutely pointless, which
makes it all the more tragic
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Many more tragedies followed: the destruction
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of Odesa’s port infrastructure
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and UNESCO-protected Transfiguration Cathedral, a missile strike on an
apartment building in Lviv in July
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and a massive missile attack on a number of Ukrainian cities
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in September. On October 5, a Russian missile strike in northeastern
Ukraine reportedly killed 51 people attending a memorial service,
which was “a terrible tragedy
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in the words of Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko.

Tragedy is a word used ubiquitously by Ukraine empathizers discussing
the horrors of the war in Ukraine. But, it turns out, the word tragedy
is also popular with autocrats who are responsible for bringing those
events about – but have no intention of admitting their
responsibility.

Dictators and tragedy

In July 2014, after a Russian missile downed a Malaysia Airlines
airliner
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over eastern Ukraine, killing 298 people, Russian President Vladimir
Putin called the incident a tragedy
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Russian responsibility for it.

When Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered in 2015,
Putin referred to the “shame and tragedies”
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of political killings in Russia.

And in 2022, Putin unleashed an unprovoked war against Ukraine and
then went on to call it “a shared tragedy”
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Russia.

Similar to Putin, Ukraine’s own former president, Moscow-supported
kleptocrat Viktor Yanukovych
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protests in 2014 and complicit in Russia’s annexation of the
Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea that year, called the annexation a
tragedy,
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denying that either he or Putin were responsible for the land grab.

Earlier, in 2006, Yanukovych, then in opposition, had insisted that
the Holodomor of 1932-33, a famine that claimed the lives of about 4
million Ukrainians, was a tragedy
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not a premeditated genocide orchestrated by Josef Stalin and his
regime.

In dictators’ utterances, the invocation of tragedy is not
incidental. Designating something a tragedy is meaningfully different
than calling it an atrocity or a crime, for which the wrongdoer must
be held responsible and punished. Calling it a tragedy serves to
minimize the human responsibility, typically their own, from the
causes of the “tragedy.”

[A flame burns in wreckage near a group of people at the site of a
destroyed airplane.]
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Russian President Vladimir Putin called the downing of Malaysia
Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014 a ‘tragedy,’ though it was
shot down by a Russian missile. Dominique Faget/AFP via Getty Images
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Choosing words with care

Words are not just passive descriptions. They create meaning in the
world and help people understand how to think about events. This is
particularly true of abstract concepts we use in political
conversation.

In everyday speech, people use the word tragedy to describe anything
deeply upsetting and unfortunate. Merriam-Webster’s online
dictionary defines
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as a disastrous event or misfortune. Merriam-Webster’s thesaurus
offers further synomyms
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catastrophe, misfortune, mishap, misadventure, accident. Most of those
synonyms refer to or imply the working of forces beyond human control.

Those connotations come from the origins of the word tragedy and its
meaning. Tragedy originated in ancient Greece as an art form that most
poignantly reveals the mystery of interplay between fate and free will
[[link removed]]. A classical
tragic hero is a man, usually of noble birth, who is fated to doom and
destruction by the gods. During his rebellion against that unjust
fate, a tragic hero nevertheless commits errors.

In his Poetics [[link removed]],
the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle argued that the tragic
hero’s flaw is not due to his wickedness but merely an unwitting
error of judgment: After all, he is not an omniscient god but only
human. And so the tragic hero’s plight ends either in his demise or
the humbling of his pride.

In his famous 1949 New York Times essay “Tragedy and the Common
Man,” American playwright Arthur Miller described the tragic
hero’s plight as active retaliation against circumstances he deems
demeaning and unjust
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According to Miller, the “tragic flaw” is ultimately the hero’s
“inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he
conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful
status.” In Miller’s words, the lesson of the tragedy is the
discovery of a moral law.

Tragedy, then, in its deeper original sense, implies inadvertence and
inevitability: Unintended consequences of individual choices,
originally driven by a noble quest for justice and personal dignity,
ultimately crash against the firmament of divine designs and systemic
factors beyond human control.

Russia’s war on Ukraine is first a crime and only then a tragedy

In contemporary politics, the invocation of tragedy has the
unfortunate effect of masking the responsibility of perpetrators who
cause injustices and human suffering through malicious intent and
deliberate wrongdoing.

Ukraine’s fight for its survival is indeed heroic, but not in a
tragic sense. It is engaged not in a struggle against unjust fate
decreed by the gods but against a criminal aggressor
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Russia led by President Putin, who has claimed
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right to exist as a political entity and a people and set out to wage
a cruel and destructive war against it.

There is nothing inadvertent about the killing of Boris Nemtsov in
2015 or Viktoria Amelina in 2023. There is nothing inevitable about
the Russian onslaught in Ukraine, about the killing, maiming and
raping of its people and kidnapping of its children
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Russia’s behavior and the suffering it brings about is a brazen
affront to international law and the basic human dignity this law
seeks to uphold. So far, 80,000 alleged war crimes have been
documented
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for prosecution before a court of law and an international tribunal.

Until that happens, it is best to keep a clear mind and use precise
vocabulary: Russia has committed aggression, and its forces continue
to commit atrocities in Ukraine. The nation’s responsibility for
these crimes should not hide behind the label of “tragedy.”[The
Conversation]

Mariana Budjeryn
[[link removed]],
Research Associate, Project on Managing the Atom, _Harvard Kennedy
School
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This article is republished from The Conversation
[[link removed]] under a Creative Commons license. Read
the original article
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* Ukraine
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* Russia
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* war crimes
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