https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/01/14/dnipro-missiles-ukraine-injured/
The article the above link carries us to appears in the Washington Post January 14 2023. It is entitled “When Russia bombs a building full of people, this is the aftermath” and is by
Siobhan O’Grady and Anastacia Galouchka.
The article describes the scene quite clearly. There were people living in the building who are now dead. The moment of death happened suddenly at the time of an explosion that destroyed the building. Many people are now dead and injured who were healthy and alive immediately prior to the explosion.
The cause of the explosion does not seem to be a natural disaster or a mishap, rather a deliberately aimed bomb, planned in advance as that bomb had to be delivered only with planning and careful aiming. Malicious forethought clearly seems to have been at play.
The deliverer of the bomb is a regime holding the reins of power in Russia. The motive for this attack is clearly to gain political power and has been admitted to by the regime’s operators.
This writer has no legal training, but it therefore seems clear that the definition of murder was met and murder was committed. However, who is the murderer? The Nuremberg trials in post WWII identified criminals as both those who gave the orders and those who followed those orders. Thus, in this case, the entire regime is charged with murder. The regime’s leaders have publicly taken credit for this murderous attack and many others like it. The leaders did not press the buttons, fly the bombers, pull the triggers, but they ordered this be done.
Is Russia, the state, a murderer? Russia, the state is an institution that has no more ability to pull a trigger than the line on the map that marks its geographical dimensions. It is those with their hands on the levers of power who actually have the ability to trigger murder. Hence, it is the people operating the current Russian regime that are charged with murder and with making the regime into a murder regime. The regime has thus become a murder weapon.
If the charge of murder holds in a court of law charged with responsibility for determining this, then it is indeed a murderous regime.
There are 193 nations in the United Nations. Each of these is governed by its unique governing regime. Each of these carries a label, perhaps self-labelled or labelled by others, to help understand what the regime is about. Examples of descriptive labels may be that it is capitalist, socialist, democratic, autocratic, agrarian, technocratic, corrupt, fair or any other of a number of adjectives. Would the adjective “murder” be useful to know? It might be at least as useful a descriptor as any other adjective.
(This paper abbreviates murderous regime to murder regime to denote active pursuit of murder rather than passively causing death, which may not be defined as murder.)
Of the 193 regimes governing the nation members of the United Nations, which are murder regimes and which are not? The case of the regime in Russia being defined as a murder regime certainly seems open and shut.
Does a regime have to attack other people with weapons to be considered a murder regime? Does a regime murder only by killing people of other nations? In other words, can a regime be fairly labelled as a murder regime for having deliberately killed its own citizens? Might a murder regime be one where groups are defined and singled out for death by regime sponsored death squads? Must this singling out be done overtly? Can murder regimes be identified by the outcomes on the ground, even where there is no overt policy of killing identified groups, but the identified groups experience a greater rate of violent death than other members of the society the regime in question governs?
What of the case of natural disasters such as droughts that produce famines within a nation’s borders, threatening the lives of its citizens. When other nations’ regimes step forward with food aid and the regime whose people face famine does not allow that aid to get through to one group or region or the other, is that a murder regime? Is that regime in the same grouping as the murder regimes who use weapons to deliberately kill people outside of its borders?
What of the case of natural disasters such as pandemics wherein people within a nation have their lives threatened by disease? How do we define a regime who acts against and in spite of the evidence of best practices in public health and safety with the result that many more people experience shortened lifespans because of the pandemic’s effects? What of the same case wherein people of other countries have their lives threatened because the regime with the epidemic does nothing to stop the spread within its own borders and allows free access and egress across its borders, thereby threatening the lives of people in other nations? Is every single person who dies because of exposure to the disease made possible by the regime’s public health policy, murdered?
Ecological disasters through exposure to harmful chemicals, sometimes by accident and sometimes deliberately, shorten the lives of many people affected by these disasters. Is the regime that does nothing to amend these practices a murder regime?
Do death penalties imposed on people who were posthumously found to be innocent, but died because there was clear mishandling of facts and process in the regime’s administration of justice, make that regime a murder regime? Does that regime compound its problem by continuing to apply death penalties using those same flawed procedures, thereby making these practices an innate character trait of that regime? In cases where the administration of injustice is delivered by a junior level of government of a nation such as a province or state, might that junior level of government be correctly defined as a murder regime? Might that senior level of government which enables that junior level’s administration of injustice then also be defined as a murder regime?
For clarity, this writer defines all those regime types mentioned above as murder regimes.
Which nation has a population proud to be known as citizens of a murder regime? Might that not brand every citizen within that nation as a murder citizen, a murderer? Can one imagine people travelling the world, or even going about day-to-day affairs of daily living at home, proudly wearing the label of murderer or even citizen of a murder regime? The instance of someone proudly self-identifying as murderer seems highly likely to be rare.
Is there any danger that finding out the incidents of murder are far more common than we have previously realised will make such practices more socially and politically acceptable? That might be a chance worth taking while somehow addressing that challenge effectively. The facts of these judgements of governance must be laid bare to enable judging on their merits, thereby further enabling effective correction.
Perhaps peer pressure can be made useful for the betterment of humanity through improving effectiveness of societal governance.
M G Klein January 16, 2023
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