It’s time to close the Overton window__***__ on crimes against humanity. Putin is obviously using Stalinesque tactics in Ukraine, as he has done repeatedly during the 21st Century. The rest of the world has allowed it, just as in the 20th Century, the world allowed Stalin to engage in barbaric, inhuman, and outrageous practices, including the following:
Forced population transfer.
Soviet archives documented 390,000 deaths during kulak forced resettlement and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported to forced settlements during the 1940s; however, Nicolas Werth places overall deaths closer to some 1 to 1.5 million perishing as a result of the deportations. Contemporary historians classify these deportations as a crime against humanity and ethnic persecution. Two of these cases with the highest mortality rates, the deportation of the Crimean Tatars and the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush, were recognized as genocides by Ukraine (plus 3 other countries) and the European Parliament respectively. On 26 April 1991 the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic, under its chairman Boris Yeltsin, passed the law On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples with Article 2 denouncing all mass deportations as “Stalin’s policy of defamation and genocide.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov…
The intentional targeting of civilians and mass killings.
Stalin killed millions… Mass killing is still the way a lot of governments do business. The past few decades have seen terrifying examples in Rwanda, Cambodia, Darfur, Bosnia. Murder on a national scale, yes – but is it genocide? “The word carries a powerful punch,” said Stanford history Professor Norman Naimark. “In international courts, it’s considered the crime of crimes.”
…Naimark, [Stanford professor and] author of the controversial [2010] book Stalin’s Genocides, argues that we need a much broader definition of genocide, one that includes nations killing social classes and political groups. His case in point: Stalin.
The book’s title is plural for a reason: He argues that the Soviet elimination of a social class, the kulaks (who were higher-income farmers), and the subsequent killer famine among all Ukrainian peasants – as well as the notorious 1937 order No. 00447 that called for the mass execution and exile of “socially harmful elements” as “enemies of the people” – were, in fact, genocide.
https://news.stanford.edu/2010/09/23/naimark-stalin-genocide…
Putin got away with using Stalin’s tactics in Chechnya and Syria because the West didn’t deem those war crime victims sufficiently economically important to justify the risk and expense (as well as abject fear) of confronting Putin.
The US, Europe, and others among the UN’s civilized, industrial nations turned a blind eye to the victims of many atrocities in Asia, Africa, and the Soviet Union during the last half of the 20th Century for many reasons. The same civilized nations and advanced economies have tolerated similar abhorrent practices in the first two decades of the 21st Century.
The United Nations long ago established what wartime and peacetime practices are considered the absolute minimum in acceptable behavior from its member states. In addition to many smaller or less influential UN members, the governments of some large and influential nations (including members of the UN Security Council) have breached international law numerous times.
It’s time to put a stop to such abhorrent practices. If such behaviors continue, the 21st Century may end up being as horrific to the human race as the last.
Ruthlessness and tyranny have a way of spreading as each abhorrent act moves the “Overton window” toward dictatorship.
***The term is named after American policy analyst Joseph Overton, who stated that an idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians’ individual preferences. According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
Putin must be stopped.