Do You At Least Realize Now What You’ve Done?

There’s an online service called IFTT.* It allows you to set up various actions with other online services that are executed depending on certain conditions. For example, I’ve used it for many years in order to announce the approach of midnight and noon on Twitter.

But immediately after President Putin’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 28 of this year, I created a new rule on IFTT: to publish on Twitter every day, at 10:30 in the morning, a phrase that has mesmerized me: “Do you at least realize now what you’ve done?”

It’s not just that this phrase contains the quintessence of all of Putin’s foreign policy speeches in recent years. Before long, its enduring relevance became clear. Every day when these simple words appear on my Twitter feed, without fail they have an addressee. Every day they’re appropriate. Because every day we wake up in a world where someone has done something, but doesn’t yet realize it.

I should mention that I’m not alone in noting the invigorating essence of Putin’s phrase. People have put it in ringtones and alarms. And every time these ringtones go off, those around are sure to give a start. Because everyone has something to remember.

And here the words “Do you at least realize now what you’ve done?” appear on my Twitter feed (with more than 50,000 followers) the morning after a series of terrorist attacks in Paris. And people are suddenly … realizing! And they’re beginning to write about how it all began. There’s an infinite number of starting points.

An open society. A civic nation. Refugees and labor migration. Tolerance, and at the same time, criminal liability for denying the Holocaust. And, finally, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, shaking a small vial at the U.N. Security Council meeting on Feb. 5, 2003. “There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more ... My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

This is the most important speech for understanding the nature of the Middle East catastrophe, its fundamental principle.

Powell lied (or those at the CIA who gave him the vial lied). The most complex and one of the most important regions of the world was destabilized over a virtual indictment. And this virtual war with real victims continues to this day.

In the press, there are suggestions that the attack on Paris is a response to the extermination by American drones of Jihadi John, the well-known executioner from the banned-in-Russia Islamic State. Why the terror attacks occurred in Paris when Jihadi John is a U.K. citizen and the Americans supposedly eliminated him is an open question. But if you try to think through the situation, the choice of Paris as a target becomes a less strange thing.

After all, this Jihadi John is pure imagery. All that we’ve seen is something like someone with a covered face cutting heads off unfortunate hostages. Who it was and whether it was always a single person or whether there were different people are merely assumptions. The voice analysis that the American intelligence services told us about is that very same vial shown by Powell. That is, we seemingly see it, but we don’t know what’s inside of it.

And here the U.S. claims that a drone struck the place where the executioner Jihadi John was living. And there’s a “99 percent probability” he was killed. The whole world publishes the news and everybody’s happy. But after all, we don’t even know whether this is a real person!

Yes, they tell us he was a real person, but then they told us the same thing about the vial. And when a video surfaces tomorrow in which someone with a covered face cuts the head off yet another hostage, try to prove to us that it isn’t Jihadi John.

That is to say, a real, visible war is being carried out against some kind of nothing. The vial in Powell’s hands has been defining the targets for the use of force by the most powerful army in the world for more than 10 years now! And there’s only one way to stop this insanity: to realize, finally, who has done what and put a stop to the lies.

Because, as important politicians like to say, a military solution to the problem doesn’t exist. The last terrorist attacks in Paris didn’t happen years ago, but in January of this year. In other words, you could hardly now find intelligence services in Europe more prepared and mobilized for countering terrorism. And nevertheless, there was a total failure, with more than 100 victims.

And the intelligence services’ actions were so unsightly that if I had ended up a hostage in the concert hall, I’d have preferred the FSB** dealt with the problem, not the French police.

Alas, I’m not expecting any profound new understanding of the order of created things from the world’s governments. We can name the causes of what has happened as much as we like. We can’t name a single way of solving these problems.

The voice of Putin that cryeth for so many years now about only one thing — don’t interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign states — remains a voice that cryeth in a bazaar. Everyone seems to hear, but no one is listening. And, honestly, it’s already too late; everything got all mixed up after the interventions.

And even the radical words of a friend of mine, a serious person with a solid education that includes a Western education — “Ban Islam in Europe, demolish the mosques, and deport the rats” — looks like a more realistic plan of action than just more words about how we must unite in our determination to defend the ideals of democracy and human rights.

Unite against whom? Against Jihadi John? We just invented him ourselves.

*Editor’s note: The author may be referring to a service also known as IFTTT, which connects a user’s web sites and apps together.
**Editor’s note: FSB refers to the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation.