Monday, May 2, 2022

A Crime of Passion?


Is Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine a crime of passion? Certainly, the Russian president cannot be accused of premeditated murder. If he’s ever brought to trial in the Hague, the charge would have to be manslaughter since he apparently didn't grasp the consequences of his behavior? In one decisive moment he succeeded in making Russia a rogue nation, an outlier state on par with North Korea while killing its economy, committing genocide and bringing about the very thing he feared the most, i.e. encroachment by NATO. Finland and Sweden, have both applied for membership and will likely be admitted. For the first time in 200 years, Switzerland broke its neutrality in the face of a Russian land grab that appeared to have far-reaching implications not only for Ukraine but all the nations in the former U.S.S.R. Spurned lovers can become murderers.The case of Putin is more occasioned by the aftermath of Glasnost and Perestroika when the Berlin Wall fell and the former Soviet Union was dissolved, along with a dream of an Imperial Russia going back to Peter the Great. Should Russia’s threat to use nuclear weapons be taken seriously? Any rational leader would recognize the horrors deriving from such a no-win situation. But it’s difficult nigh impossible to appeal to reason, when a crazed individual is about to pull the trigger. Remember the senseless death of Baron Tuzenbach at the hands of the disaffected soldier, the perversely romantic Solyony, in The Three Sisters?

Read "A Murder in Forest Hills" by Francis Levy, TheScreamingPope

and listen "Reason to Believe" by Tim Hardin


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