Horror comes on quiet feet

Every era has its own challenges.

One must recognize them and face them.

It was Sunday, April 2. I had just had coffee with my wife—shortly before, I had commented on Ralf Fücks from Zentrum Liberale Moderne, who pondered why the West is afraid of a Ukrainian victory and wondered why "we are not throwing all our resources into the balance"—and was about to drive her to the train station. I quickly checked t-online on my cell phone to see how Magdeburg had played against Rostock. My gaze fell on an article on the home page: Ukraine announces "detoxification" of Crimea. I scrolled down and swallowed.

After dropping my wife off at the train station, I drove to the gym. In the parking lot, I searched TWITTER in vain for further reports with the headline—even t-online had not yet tweeted about the article. But I did find something because there was a report from WELT in the timeline: "Kiev publishes 12-point plan for the liberation of Crimea." My situational comedy immediately struck a chord. Contrary to my long-standing experience that all my tweets are sorted under "Show more replies, especially those that may contain offensive content" and placed at the bottom of the list – which ensures they receive a lot of attention – this time, the tweet was not sorted there. No, it had obviously been deleted by the WELT editorial team.

In the evening, I continued my search. I found what I was looking for at TAGESSCHAU, ZDF, Süddeutsche Zeitung, FAZ, Focus, Deutsche Welle, and Merkur. Except for Deutsche Welle, the word "detoxification" can be found in all of the texts. An example is quoted from TAGESCHAU – for those readers who are reluctant to follow links (I love links – update from 04/19/23: Ukraine's 12-point plan was published on Facebook on April 1 by the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Olexiy Danilov, and point 9 refers to "detoxification").

Since 2014, the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea has been under Russian control. Now Kiev has presented a twelve-point plan for its "liberation." There is talk of "cleansing" and "denazification."

The secretary of the Ukrainian Security and Defense Council has presented a plan for what Crimea should look like after the end of the occupation. He published the twelve-point plan on Facebook.

...

"Purge modeled on denazification"

He described the representatives of the Moscow power apparatus as "trash." Danilov said that civil servants in Crimea who had collaborated with the Russian occupiers during the annexation would be subjected to a purge modeled on the denazification of Germany after World War II.

He also made special mention of judges, prosecutors, and members of the security forces who sided with Russia in 2014. Ukrainians who worked for the regional government installed by Moscow are to be prosecuted, lose their state pensions, and be excluded from public office.

According to the plan, all Russian citizens who moved to Crimea after 2014 are to be expelled. Land purchases and other contracts are to be annulled.

In addition, all political prisoners, including many Crimean Tatars, should be released immediately. "A comprehensive 'detoxification' program will be implemented to neutralize the effects of years of Russian propaganda on the public consciousness of part of the peninsula's population," Danilov writes in point 9.

In line with this, TAGESSCHAU concludes:

Danilov's reflections come at a stage of the war when Ukrainian forces are believed to be preparing an offensive to recapture Russian-occupied territories. This could also involve the use of battle tanks and other modern weapon systems supplied by the West. Russian troops are currently concentrating their attacks on the city of Bakhmut in the Donbass region. The fighting has been going on for eight months without them having completely captured the city.

What is striking about all the articles is that they are presented as pure reports without any emotion or commentary. This was quite different when another 12-point plan was reported in February: China's peace initiative.

There is no crime, no trick, no ignorance, no complacency, no stupidity, no ruse, no deception, no fraud, no vice that should be withheld from discussion and disclosure. Meet their lack of respect with respect, reveal their silence as cowardice, their logic as dishonest, their speeches as serving their own interests rather than the common good, their scheming rather than their integrity, but do not ridicule them in front of everyone, because we are a people who only have a future together: do not associate with them, but change yourselves by confronting them. And sooner or later, public opinion will recognize the value. Confrontation and truth alone are probably not enough—but they are the only means without which all others fail.

At the time, TAGESSCHAU said that it was "by no means a comprehensive peace plan," while on ZDF, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said that "China's twelve-point plan ignores the fact that the aggression is coming from Russia." DER SPIEGEL called it "China's useless plan," ZEIT ONLINE recognized that "China is an accomplice of the aggressor," the Süddeutsche Zeitung was certain that "Peace in Ukraine? That was never Beijing's goal," and the FAZ saw only "China's meager peace paper." And something else stands out: in contrast to the debate surrounding China's plan, this time one searches in vain for comments on the Ukrainian plan from the political or journalistic establishment: the country of the clueless does not need to be unnecessarily disturbed beyond a few reports with which journalistic duties are fulfilled on Sunday afternoon between 2:19 p.m. and 4:28 p.m.

Actually, any reasonably educated German should stumble over the term "detoxification" when it is used in connection with people. In his speech to the German Reichstag on March 23, 1933—known as the Enabling Act speech—Adolf Hitler said: "The government is determined to carry out the political and moral detoxification of our public life." The rest is history, which explains what I wrote in the tweet mentioned above immediately after seeing it on my cell phone:

Have we already reached the point, Mr. @UlfPosh, where the media is promoting fascist ideology: instead of detoxifying Germany from the Jews, detoxifying Crimea from pro-Russian Russians by Ukrainians? https://m.hausarbeiten.de/document/318169

The mainstream media's outrage over such an inappropriate comparison can be countered. On October 14 last year, the TAGESSPIEGEL ran the headline: "Rumors about dealing with collaborators: Zelensky seeks to build trust in occupied territories after recapturing them." The subheading already lets the reader know that "The Ukrainian president emphasizes that only those Ukrainians who support the occupiers have anything to fear," and sensibly adds: "Russia had apparently stirred up fear beforehand." On November 14, ZDF showed a beaming president visiting liberated Kherson. After sentences about the celebrating but suffering population, one also finds this:

Russian soldiers who remained behind when their military commanders left the city last week were arrested, according to the Ukrainian president. The Ukrainian police have also called on the population to help identify individuals who collaborated with the Russian armed forces.

If you want to know what happened next in Kherson, you have to resort to sources such as ANTI-SPIEGEL. If you want to cast doubt on the war crimes discussed at length in the article, you stumble across a photo from Associated Press, among other things, and can speculate about what the Ukrainian president means when he calls the "neutralization of saboteurs" an ongoing project for Ukrainian soldiers.

What is manifested in the 12-point plan for Crimea is reminiscent of the Wannsee Conference and the Commissar Order. Sure, one can speculate that the current publication serves the purpose of explaining the current troop concentrations in the Zaporizhzhya area—whose goal would also be to approach Crimea—and thus prompt Russia to make even greater efforts to defend Crimea, but to attack at a completely different location during the expected Ukrainian offensive. But the paper is in the drawer, and if Ukraine actually succeeds in conquering Crimea, the soldiers know what to do.

Ukraine can be sure of the support of the West, and Germany in particular. In January last year, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock responded to the question of whether her declared will that Ukraine must win the war also included the recapture of Crimea: "Crimea belongs to Ukraine and was occupied by Russia in 2014 in violation of international law." At the Crimea conference in August, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz then assured Ukraine that he would support it for as long as necessary and said that the international community would "never accept Russia's illegal, imperialist annexation of Ukrainian territory." — which today means supporting Ukraine until it is in a position to implement the 12-point plan.

To understand what this means for the population of Crimea, one can look beyond the experiences in Kherson and examine the living conditions in Crimea. Here, too, we must refer to ANTI-SPIEGEL, which reports on a tripling of salaries and pensions after the 2014 referendum and repeatedly provides insights into the Russian standard of living (1, 2). This contrasts with reports about Europe's heavily armed poorhouse and the new Mexico, from which Europe draws cheap labor. One can imagine how the Russian population views German involvement from such a perspective. It can also be taken for granted that the international community is closely monitoring how the West is escalating its fight for peace and freedom and wondering when a 12-point plan for its own territory will be on the agenda, given the increasing number of recent experiences.

A Sunday in Germany in April 2023: In the 34th year since the fall of the Berlin Wall – in which I have been wondering for a while how long it will take us to reach the 39th year. I woke up around 1 a.m. and my thoughts were racing around the information from the previous day. Around 2 a.m., I got up, made myself a cup of tea, and sat down at the computer. Around 6 a.m., I went back to bed for an hour. Then a new day began.

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