Filtration Camps is Putin Doublespeak for Holocaust
No Firm Dates When He Fires Up Ovens for Ukrainians
An update on the new concentration camps for Ukrainians who had their passports and documents and belongings stripped from them and then shipped out to Russia. I had published before on this holocaust topic but just got the correct euphemism, “Filtration Camps”. The satellite photos are in.
It appears “Russian Repatriation” camps for Ukrainians is just starting out. The “Filtration” may be the first step, where, like the clean water most of the prisoners are hoping for, they go through an initial intake system. Anyone that appears Ukrainian loyal or has a soldiering background gets “filtered” out. I believe the term used during the military violence in Argentina or in Peru under The Shining Path was “disappeared.”
But to those still not thinking this first level of camps is just some holiday tents of humanitarian purpose set up by Putin to “help” the civilians in the city of Mariupol he levels to the ground, and we should be comparing this to the German holocaust, well that is just historical blindness. Don’t let colorism or ethnocentrism, or whatever get in your way of clear thinking about a dirty subject.
As mentioned, history is rife with such atrocities, from the ‘famous’ photo of a prisoner being shot in the head in Vietnam (I’m not showing it, the Saigon Execution Photo of from the NYTimes) to the aforementioned Shining Path, to Pol Pot in Cambodia, or even the Vietnam War, where there were bad people on both sides.
That’s not fair to call patriotic Americans “bad people,” and I agree. But it’s not the soldiers, it’s the inevitable degradation of morale and horror of fighting that led to an overall mindset where the mind is actually not set, but instead unsettled, losing focus, taking orders in chaos to do unspeakable crimes. In Vietnam, it was the North Vietnamese committing all kinds of slaughter and atrocities as well, gone mad like the American jet pilots who dropped agent orange that caused dead jungles and crop lands, and a generation of deformed babies, or machine gun fighters in helicopters shooting villagers.
This Russian invasion of Ukraine is mad, the premise far flimsier than those wars about stopping the spread of an “ideology.” But as this one started out inside Putin’s brain, with no evidence of Nazism, and based on a feeling of over importance and delusion grandeur, it will get crazier the longer it goes on and the more frustrated Putin gets at losing.
He wanted to restore Russian dignity and empire; instead, Russian might is being humiliated, and the “Potemkin village” of his power revealed. I had to use that Russian expression; it represents putting a glittery front façade on an old building to impress the emperor, so he doesn’t learn he’s marching through a broken-down empire. It’s a Russian expression that happens to exactly fit this Russian situation.
The more Putin is humiliated by dragging this out more, the worse the atrocities will become.
What starts out as a “Filtration Camp” of lightweight tents and big soup pots for housing and feeding captured civilians could turn into work camps, could turn into mass graves to “get rid of the evidence.” We’ve already seen it starting, as Operator Starsky, a Ukrainian soldier who does daily YouTube reports from the front lines that I recommend watching, reported that Russian soldiers are looting Ukrainian stores and people — stealing rings, jewelry, food, money — whatever they can cash and carry. It reminded me of the German soldiers picking through the Jew’s belongs, extracting their gold rings and valuables before piling them into a train.
Putin himself just signed a bill for more conscripts, Russian teenagers, essentially a draft. Supposedly he is not under law allowed to send new soldiers to the front line, but you're not allowed to invade your neighbor under false pretenses either. And it’s his law.
Most wars are about numbers, people blindly shooting away. Many current Russian soldiers look untrained already, disorganized, looting. Every army in the midst of a foggy war does it: our own American Civil War saw Irish immigrants and freed black slaves rapidly turned into soldiers on the front line. They died at a higher rate than trained soldiers, but with victory achieved, it’s hard to look back in anger or disdain over this practice, or the “law” being broken.
The situation will go further out the window — if there are windows left not broken in Kyiv. The Afghanistan war the Russians fought saw 15,000 causalities in 8 years or so. Already in a month there has been that many Russian soldiers dead by some estimates.
Just be prepared to witness real atrocities.
Putin practiced in Syria bombing hospitals where women and children and the “enemy” solider were. Red crosses are apparently targeting symbols for his precision bombs to lock in on. But he also raised cities to the ground for Syrian dictator Bashar, like the Aleppo, leaving just rubble for Bashar to sweep up, and only vague hopes of getting devalued rubles to rebuild from his benefactor.
But Afghanistan serves as a better example: an estimate one to two million Afghans were killed in the 1980s by Putin’s Kremlin’s buddies. That’s a considerable number, not the German Nazi holocaust size of 6 million, but more like smaller Rwandan genocide size of 1.2 million. Still, quibbling about numbers in an atrocity is like handing out speeding tickets at the Dayton 500 Nascar race: With every driver breaking the limit, what’s the point of measuring?
Get ready to go a lot faster as Putin puts his foot to the pedal and drives new recruits to the front lines at record speeds.
Those Russian kids might even pass packed cattle cars of Ukrainians on trains going the opposite way as they rush to the front.
