© Sputnik / Maksim Blinovwoman lights a candle at a makeshift memorial near the Crocus City Hall in memory of the victims of a terrorist attack on the concert venue near Moscow on March 22, Russia.
Only a few days ago, one of the worst terrorist attacks in recent history occurred in Russia. The perpetrators stormed concert venue Crocus City Hall on the outskirts of Moscow, systematically and in cold blood massacring as many victims as they could, then starting a devastating fire that destroyed much of the adjacent shopping mall.
Numbers cannot convey the depravity of the attackers or the suffering of the victims - and of their families and friends - but they can convey some of the scale of this horror: As of March 25, 137 were reported as killed and over 180 as injured. As always in such cases, many more will have to struggle with severe psychological trauma.
Like numbers, comparison is inadequate yet necessary to try to grasp the significance of this event.
The 2015 Paris attacks that centered on a concert at the Bataclan venue, for instance, were similar in scope: They left at least 130 victims dead and more than 350 injured. The French government responded with an immediate countrywide state of emergency, massive security sweeps, and - as Encyclopedia Britannica sums it up - a "dramatic escalation of French military intervention in the Syrian Civil War" as well as an equally "dramatic increase in domestic security spending."There was also, of course, a great wave of international solidarity not only with the victims of the attack but, as was proper, with France as a nation. No Western or, for that matter, Russian commenters who care about their reputations would have dared make perverse claims about French authorities somehow being behind this horrific attack and prepared to sacrifice their own people and to, in effect, betray their country.
Yet, things have turned out differently after the Crocus City Hall massacre in Moscow.
While the Russian security services and authorities got to work in a manner fundamentally similar to the French response in 2015 (capturing 11 suspects, four of them "immediate" shooters who'd mass-murdered innocents at a concert, on the run towards the Ukrainian border), a disturbingly large number of Western politicians and media figures responded with a combination of glee, generally transparently concealed but at times stunningly open, with hypocritical equivocating, and, last but not least, with insane conspiracy theories. In other words, with anything but genuine compassion and respect.
A German X user (here anonymized) with over 30,000 followers delivered an example of pure sadistic pleasure by posting a picture of the Crocus mall in flames, with the comment "May it burn, may all of Moscow burn." Perhaps realizing he sounded as if tweeting from the Nazi Reich Chancellery, the over-excited user subsequently deleted this message. But without displaying any signs of remorse.
Comment: Starbird has been in the censorship game for a long time:
Interesting . . . .