Castration Here and There, Castration Everywhere

CASTRATION HERE AND THERE, CASTRATION EVERYWHERE

Since the beginning of the war for Ukraine, President Zelensky repeatedly addressed Russian soldiers in Russian, promising them safety and decent treatment if they were captured or surrendered to the Ukrainian Army. In stark contrast to this stance is what Gennadiy Druzenko, the owner of a war zone mobile hospital in Eastern Ukraine, said on Ukraine-24 TV channel on March 21, 2022: He instructed his medical staff to “castrate captured Russian soldiers” because they are “cockroaches, not people,” Russian news agency RT reports. “Trust me, Putin’s military hardware burns well. The corpses of ‘Putinoids’ may stink, but they become unthreatening,” he said, according to RT. Druzenko, a constitutional lawyer-turned-volunteer frontline medic, apologized for his words after receiving death threats. In a short Facebook post, Druzenko took back his words and added a screenshot that appears to be a threat addressed to him. He said his hospital “does not castrate anyone and is not going to. Those were the emotions. I’m sorry. We are saving lives. Period.”16 The immediate reaction to this news should be: Is this how Ukraine defends Europe? Even the apology is ambiguous. Druzenko apologized after receiving death threats, as if doing it just to protect his life, not because he sincerely changed his mind and understood the horror of what he said. Such ideas should be unambiguously condemned, and any comparative “understanding” (in the style of “this is a minor incident compared to the Russian Army’s mass murder”) is obscene. We should also look closely at the Ukrainian side, because here we get hints at what Ukraine will be if it retains its independence. For example, in 2019, Ukraine’s State Committee on Television and Radio Broadcasting banned the translation of The Book of Thieves by Swedish historian Anders Rydell in a Putinian style. The decree claimed the book’s appearance would be “inciting ethnic, racial, and religious hatred.” How? The ban is because of Rydell’s critical analysis of the actions of Symon Petliura, a nationalist whose troops murdered countless Jews in pogroms.17 There are other dark signs, like the prohibitive measures applied on the Ukrainian Left, as if it is automatically pro-Putin.18 Such critiques should in no way undermine or limit our commitment to Ukrainian freedom. Plus, it would be easy to find dozens of similar obscene statements and acts on the Russian side. For example, Aleksandr Dugin insisted that Russia should have intervened much earlier, at least after the Maidan events (the large protests on the main square in Kyiv in February 2014, which overthrew the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych). Missing that opportunity “is the sign of profound, profound hatred of our president of the violence … he hates the war … Putin is liberal democrat, he is very Western in his opinion, he is very careful about global rules … that means he has no other solution in his very liberal democratic, globalist almost, vision of the world.”19 With “liberal democrats” like this, who needs neo-Nazis? The reason I mention the incident with the Ukrainian medic is because of an interview with the pro-Putin movie director Emir Kusturica who, believe it or not, declared I was the inspiration for the Ukrainian medic’s threat. Here are his exact words: “We saw how the other day a Slovene philosopher inspired the Ukrainian doctor and said that all prisoners should be castrated … that the imprisoned Russians should be castrated.”20 Let’s clarify this accusation. In my first reaction to the Russian invasion, I mentioned castration and rape, but my source was Putin himself. Back in 2002, Putin replied to a Western journalist’s question with: “If you want to become a complete Islamic radical and are ready to undergo circumcision, then I invite you to Moscow. We are a multidenominational country. We have specialists in this question [circumcision]. I will recommend that they carry out the operation in such a way so that afterward, nothing else will grow.” This is a rather vulgar threat of castration. And rape? The source is Putin again. During the press conference on February 7, 2022, Putin noted that the Ukrainian government does not like the Minsk agreement and then added: “Like it or not, it’s your duty, my beauty.” A clear reference to rape. In accusing me of advocating the castration of Russian soldiers, Kusturica is referring to my comment in the Spectator magazine.21 True, in the conclusion of my article, I recommend that the international community carries out a “castrative” operation on Russia (and to a certain extent, the U.S.!) that entails ignoring and marginalizing the two countries. You might debate whether my metaphor is too provocative, but two things are clear. I borrowed the analogies of castration and rape from Putin, and I do not propose castration of real people but a “castrative operation,” the meaning of which I specify as international isolation. And I include the U.S. because to some degree, they are also to blame for the situation in Ukraine.