Even as the world witnessed newly liberated Syrians desperately searching Syria’s notorious Saydnaya Prison where Basshir Al Assad had routinely jailed and tortured many (or even any) who vocally opposed his tyrannical rule, Vladimir Putin granted Assad asylum in Russia “on humanitarian grounds.” Embracing Assad’s humanitarianism? Even in the era of misdirection, misinformation, and falsehoods parading as truth, Putin’s gaslighting here hits a new low. He might as well claim that up is down and down is up.
International humanitarian law (IHL) is a set of rules that seeks to limit the ill-effects of armed conflict. It protects persons who are not, or are no longer, directly or actively participating in hostilities, and imposes limits on the means and methods of warfare. If IHL had a Twitter account (sorry, an X account), Putin would have un-followed years ago.
One man’s brutality gets another brute’s blessing, with the claim that asylum is being granted for “humanitarian” reasons. And if Putin is the gold medalist of brutality and non-humanitarianism, Assad would be a close second.
https://apnews.com/article/syria-prison-saydnaya-assad-098ff58bb6d5cd3c343f16dfee04accd
As a child growing up in New Jersey, my classmates and I had mandatory drills to prepare for incoming nuclear-tipped missiles from the Soviet Union. Nikita Khruschev, Stalin’s successor in the 1950s, had stridently proclaimed to Americans, “We will bury you.” It wasn’t hard imagining being under a pile of nuclear rubble; we were just 25 miles from downtown Manhattan come on surely an inviting target for missiles. Surely, those Soviets were fearsome and terrible!
We also learned that Joseph Stalin, Khruschev’s predecessor, had killed more people in his prisons and torture chambers than Hitler had managed against millions of European Jews. In 1962, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, detailed the horrific conditions in the Soviet Union’s “gulags,” forced labor camps (usually in Siberia) where prisoners were often “worked to the bone” and died.
https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/one-day-in-the-life-of-ivan-denisovich
Now, as Putin’s war against Ukraine has been grinding on, we also learn that gross brutality is simply a way of life for Russian soldiers.
Also,
Putin’s grant of asylum turns humanitarian law on its head. But then Putin only loves ruling by strength, not the rule of law or any kind of accountability.
Let’s draw a revealing contrast here: more than a few Trump supporters see “tyranny” in any U.S. government where “Democrats” have control or influence. Outside a Trump Rally in August of 2024, I saw a pickup truck with a large decal in the rear window that told me “When Tyranny Becomes Law, Rebellion becomes a Duty.” Overlaid on this saying were “1776,” two automatic rifles, a red, white and blue skull, and the U.S. Flag.
A cursory search on the internet did not yield a list of the tyrannies that this Trump supporter may have had in mind, but I suspect that the 1776 litany of wrongs by the signers of the Declaration were far more oppressive to freedom than teaching about the history of U.S. slavery, allowing abortions in the first trimester, taxing citizens and corporations to pay for needed public goods, or recommending masks and vaccines during a pandemic.
Some of the “right wing” fearmongering about loss of liberty is clearly over the top. Did you know that back in September of 2024, “top Democrats” openly announced their plans to confiscate guns, ban free speech, arrest Trump supporters en masse and put them in re-education camps? (I sure didn’t! Thank you, social media!)
Okay, so there’s no actual tyranny is being cooked up by “top Democrats.” (No matter; saying something is so is so . . . well, very much a sign of our times.) Tyranny can come in many forms, but it surely wasn’t in the actions of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, and its most brutal forms have been practiced by both Assad and Putin. Which is why the admiration of Putin by many political “conservatives” in the U.S. is so bizarre.
https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/political-scene/how-the-american-right-came-to-love-putin
It is also why Americans who care about freedom, and oppose tyranny, should not follow the false claims and siren songs of isolationists like Tucker Carlson, who cozied up to Putin in Feb. 2024 for a softball interview, Putin’s first with “Western media” since 2019.
Even before this interview, Carlson had basically been a “fan boy” for Putin, and many of his viewers seemed to agree that the U.S. should stay out of the Russia/Ukraine conflict and let Putin be Putin.
Coming back to Putin’s embrace of Assad (and the likes of Kim Jung Un), you have to be a fervent GOP isolationist to ignore the danger to people and nations by this kind of affirmation of brutality, one that (again) turns reality upside down.
If Trump and his followers care so much about “invasions” and “evils” in the world, they would defend Ukraine from the brutal atrocities of a Russian military, a Russian victory and a Russian occupation.