Big old tough guys

Pavel Gubarev, in gubernatorial regalia. Photo by lenta.ru via Kiyiv Post.

From Sabrina Tavernise's astounding reporting for the Times:

Four rebels in fatigues were wandering through the ruins, looking through people’s belongings and riffling through guidebooks and bags. When asked who was responsible for the crash, they looked incredulous and said that it had of course been the Ukrainian military.

“This wasn’t ours,” said a rebel who identified himself only as Alexei, standing looking at an overhead bin in the grass with a rifle over his shoulder. “Why would we do this? We’re not animals.”

Oh, you wouldn't have done it because you're not animals? I don't suppose the poor kid would have been lying—he likely wouldn't have known, one way or the other. Just that he missed the logical flaw there.

I think of Aleksey as a kid for some reason, and not a bad kid, sincerely afraid of the Nazis over in Kiyiv, where he himself has never been of course, but he knows they're not just Nazis but animals, because some big old tough guy told him so.

And then deep inside he knows there's only one animal species that does stuff like that. When he finds out his comrades have just inadvertently murdered 300 people who have even less connection to Kiyiv than he has, he's going to feel bad, though he may not be able to acknowledge it, even to himself. The tension between knowing and not knowing is a major cause, I believe, of what we call PTSD. It's been affecting drone pilots in Nevada and upstate New York and South Dakota at the same rate as those in planes in Afghanistan, because it's a spiritual problem. It's not about the noise and the smell.

Then again big old tough guy Pavel Gubarev, the "governor" of the Donetsk People's Republic, advises you not to kill anybody with an axe if you're a beginner, according to his "Methodological Guide for Struggle Against the Junta" as reported in Foreign Policy:

"You don't have to shoot the man; you can strike him with an axe, with almost no resistance on his part. But it's better not to use cold steel until you've killed a few men: it could be risky if you're not morally prepared for such an action and your hand hesitates."

I haven't got much of anything to say about the crash of MH17 that isn't being said well by a lot of other people. It's clear to me that Putinist Cossacks did indeed shoot the plane down, I assume by mistake. Putinist commentator Ron Paul complains that the media

will not report that neither Russia nor the separatists in eastern Ukraine have anything to gain but everything to lose by shooting down a passenger liner full of civilians

like this is some kind of proof of the Cossacks' innocence, but the strawman he's arguing against is less a strawman than a pile of lawnmower rubbish. They shot the plane down because they are stupid, not to "gain" anything. They didn't know what they were doing. Incidentally Paul uses the Russian spelling "Lugansk" instead of Ukrainian "Luhansk" as does nobody in the Western media, suggesting his ghostwriters are either dependent on the propaganda outlet RT or actually Russian agents themselves.

That said, I really can't understand the tone of bluster and belligerence on the part of some anti-Putinist figures. What exactly does Senator Lindsey-Woolsey Graham think President Obama would accomplish by calling Putin a thug? Or as the Bobblespeak translators put it,

Graham: Obama is failing all across

the globe and soon Americans will be killed

Gregory: what should Obama do?

Graham: first he should call Putin a “thug”

Gregory: what else?

Graham: well basically that would

solve all the world's problems

Or, does big old tough guy Roger Cohen know what he's saying when he regrets that people nowadays would rather have summer vacations than a do-over of World War I (the "suns of August" vs. the "guns of August")? He's as crazy as Governor Gubarev!

Lon Chaney in The Penalty, 1920.