In a perfect world, not.
The thing is that nobody lives in a perfect world, we are all real world dwellers. And in this real world, with Russia a part of it, we see crime being normalized everywhere.
The scene:
Moscow, Russia, May 20, 2005.
A Volkswagen Polo hits a woman, retired, 68, named Svetlana Beridze, while she was crossing the Lobachevskogo street at her green, in the pedestrian zone. She dies immediately.
The driver gets out of the car but doesn’t approach the victim. There are several witnesses looking at it at the crime scene.
Later, several cars appear at the site, people get out and encircle the driver, protecting him from the protesting and desperate woman’s relatives as she lived nearby. By the way, this street is not far from the place I lived back then, it was my block.
The curtain falls.
Now the facts.
The hitman was Alexander Ivanov, a son of Sergey Ivanov, then Minister of Defense and Vladimir Putin’s close friend and ally. Later in November, the same year, the criminal case was closed and Ivanov Jr. was cleared from all accusations and he was pleaded not guilty.
Probably, the victim’s family was made to strike a deal, accepting a financial compensation from the hitman’s side. But there is no evidence of it. Such settlement is also not regulated by the Russian criminal code. The fact is that the victim’s family was against the court’s rule. One of the witnesses has disappeared, too.
It was yet quite a vegetarian time in Russia, politically, so the scandal was in the media.
I had plenty of doubts about Putin before. I voted against him in 2004 as the least thing I could do. At that point, I made a final conclusion: Russia is ruled by mob, a gang of former KGB/present FSB operatives.
Now I say it for this blog: This is how crime was finally normalized in Russia. Since then, to me, we in Russia had ‘the nobles’ and ‘the peasants’. A simple woman was killed by a noble, a son of a strongman, one of the state’s rulers.
‘The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative.’
Benito Mussolini
Are We Normalizing Crime?
It’s an interesting question. Obviously we can’t paint in broad strokes, people are people and everybody is different. The interesting thing to me is that there is a movement towards normalizing crime and the people leading that movement are not the ones traditionally associated with that moral makeup.
I’m going to stereotype here, forgive me for a moment. When we think of crime, we often think of social outcast, folks who are just outside the margins of society. People on drugs or those who can’t keep meaningful jobs. When we think of conservatives, we think of those who hold morals and family at the core of their beliefs.
Look around the world today, everything is upside down. Conservatives in Hungry don’t give a damn about free speech; the press must be controlled. In the US we see the rise of MAGA Christian Nationalists. That’s an oxymoron: there is no way Jesus would condone nationalism in any form whatsoever. You’re not Christians at all.
As I’m most familiar with the US, I’ll stick to what I know. Used to be, conservatives promoted family values and there were groups like The Moral Majority. These same people don’t even pretend now: They have given up any pretense of family values. Their standard bearer is a man who is a convicted felon and must win the election or he most certainly will end up in prison.
Not only is the behavior normalized, it’s actively defended. All, and I mean everything, is dismissed with a hand wave: “Oh, he is only getting prosecuted because of politics.” When you can simply excuse 90 something felonies with a magical hand wave, there is literally nothing you cannot excuse. Nothing. So, if the son of a liberal President is rightfully prosecuted but any prosecution of a conservative is simply politics, you end up in a rather awkward position. Not only is that exactly where we are, those making these statements seem utterly unaware of the irony.
If this were only true in the US, that would be bad, but it’s the case across the planet. It looks like Israel’s conservative leader will remain in office and out of jail. Russia’s conservative leader will not visit The Hague anytime soon. Turkey’s conservative leader ordered a murder of an American, so what? India’s conservative leader ordered the murder of a Canadian. FU Canada – bunch of damn crybabies. Are we normalizing crime? You betcha’.