Sometimes
even conspicuously bad news is an understatement. Though
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s violations of
Ukraine constitute “crimes against peace”
(“aggression”), “crimes of war”
and “crimes against humanity,” they are generally
understood only as numbered facts. Accordingly, (1) the
full measure of Ukrainian victim anguish remains incommunicable;
and (2) international law enforcement responses remain
inadequate.
This set of
limitations is not because of any reportorial or linguistic
shortcomings. Rather, it owes to a widely inconspicuous
failure, the timeless refusal by observers to experience
egregious international harms from “within.”
Though it would be impossible for such observers to feel
the same inflicted pain as the victims, this irremediable
incapacity could still serve a productive purpose: It
could remind observers that the perpetrated crimes are
even worse than the objective facts suggest.
In Ukraine,
victim sufferings scream silently, “from within.”
No matter how diligent or well-intentioned the world press
may be in covering these sufferings, the absence of an
interior perspective has left observers with just a superficial
understanding of cumulative harms.
THE PERSONAL
SUFFERING THAT ISN’T ON THE NEWS
Earlier, Sigmund
Freud explained this “phenomenological” limitation
in more expressly therapeutic terms. Among other things,
he recognized that psychological assessments ought never
to be exclusively “objective.” Whatever the
intrusive limitations of a specific healing enterprise,
Freud cautioned each therapist to pay close attention
to psyche, or “soul.”
Nonetheless,
this Freudian warning is not applicable to current military
analyses. By definition, no references to a human “soul”
could ever be taken as analytic or scientific. Of course,
one could readily acknowledge that Freud never even considered
the application of such a concept to the measureless flux
of world politics, but we could still reasonably imagine
that he would have been sympathetic to the idea.
Freud’s
overall understanding of science was never narrowly professional.
Always, it was broadly humanistic. Above all, it displayed
an imaginative willingness “to look at the world
other than from without.”
Following
every barbarous Russian attack on Ukrainian noncombatants,
we learn the number of fatalities and of those “merely
wounded.” What observers can’t ever truly
understand are the embedded manifestations of personal
suffering. Anterior to language or speech, these manifestations
represent what happens “inside” each affected
person. Freud would have agreed that even determined attempts
at experiencing weltschmerz (“world pain”)
through the suffering of other individuals must ultimately
come to naught.
What should
come next for those who would welcome a more genuine understanding
of Russian crimes against Ukraine, that is, an understanding
“from within”? Going forward, why should discrepant
and widely scattered observers try to discover interiorized
meanings of war and genocide if there is no plausible
chance of success? Wouldn’t such vain insights merely
underscore the immutable limitations of human understanding
in geopolitical matters?
Let candor
prevail. We humans, whether as observers, bystanders or
healers, can’t ever experience the full impact of
aggression and genocide inflicted on others. Correspondingly,
we ought finally to inquire: Doesn’t this incapacity
to put ourselves into the minds and “souls”
of suffering victims reveal a relentlessly permanent deficit,
one with significant foreign policy implications? At present,
might not such irremediable weakness undermine civilization’s
urgently needed anti-Putin strategies?
THE PRIVACY
OF PAIN
The most untranslatable
effect of a Russian attack on Ukrainian civilian populations
lies in the perpetual privacy of physical pain. Prima
facie, such pain is non-transferable. No human language
can accurately describe this pain. It is an “unnamable”
pain.
There is more.
We observers might prefer to think of ourselves as decently
empathic persons. Still, fundamentally, we are inevitably
“hard-shelled,” beings exiled from the deeply
felt suffering of all others. Even within families, boundaries
between one individual and another generally lie beyond
any personal will to navigate them. Like it or not, these
boundaries must remain fixed, daunting, intimidating,
and impermeable.
Grasping the
idea of the hard and impenetrable barriers of human feeling
is prerequisite to international law enforcement. Everyone
who is born has to endure physical pain, even when it
becomes unendurable. Everyone who lives will concur that
bodily anguish cannot only defy the banal syntax of ordinary
language; it can destroy such language altogether.
The patent
inaccessibility of others’ sufferings, the insufferable
privacy of human torment, has far-reaching social, political,
and legal implications. In the case of Russia’s
criminal assaults against Ukrainian homes, schools, hospitals,
and civilian victims – whether by face-to-face killings
and bombings or via orchestrated spasms of indiscriminate
artillery attacks – this inaccessibility stands
in the way of recognizing Putin’s assaults as inexcusable.
In the final
analysis, the “suffering distance” between
any one person’s own body and the body of another
is impossible to cross. Whatever else we may have been
taught about empathy and compassion, the unyielding membranes
that insulate individual bodies will trump any ritualistic
obligation “to care.” Inter alia, this means
that no person ought ever to consider Russian crimes against
Ukraine as defensible for any reason.
In world politics,
as in every other segment of human affairs, all things
move in the midst of death. However merciless a particular
Russian attack on Ukrainian populations may be on the
surface, the true pain of civilian victims remains hidden
at a “safe distance.” Never authentically
palpable, the full horror of such inflicted pain is blunted
by the unalterable shortcomings of human language and
human empathy.
Summing up,
Russian crimes against humanity in Ukraine are actually
more insidious than they appear. Whatever their alleged
justifications and scruples, Putin’s killers will
remain committed to “patriotic” deliveries
of belligerent harms. Unless the rest of the world –
especially the United States – takes more seriously
the lethal interrelatedness of world politics and the
correlative obligations of international law, this refractory
dedication will augur a perilous dance macabre.
Ultimately,
in all such matters of unique importance, science represents
the best method of seeking gainful conclusions. Nonetheless,
even science (especially science) must disregard l'esprit
de finesse, the most deeply human content of what
is being studied. In the current matter of Russian crimes
against Ukraine, however, this subjective content reveals
the greater measure of geopolitical and legal significance.
It ought, therefore, never be disregarded.
