Joseph Sabino Mistick: We can't afford to look away from Putin's carnage

Do not look away. The evening newscasters warned us that we may not want to see the images of Vladimir Putin’s slaughter of citizens in Ukraine. But we learned a long time ago that we cannot afford to look away from crimes like these.

On Tuesday, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke to the United Nations Security Council and described the carnage left behind in Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol by retreating Russian troops. Whole families were destroyed, and city streets are strewn with the charred and mutilated bodies of civilians.

Some were crushed to death by Russian tanks as they sat in their cars. Many bodies show signs of torture. Schools and hospitals and apartment buildings — all with no military purpose — have been leveled. A lone bicyclist’s contorted dead body lay next to his bike where he fell dead in an instant.

“They cut off limbs, cut their throats. Women were raped and killed in front of their children. Their tongues were pulled out only because their aggressor did not hear what they wanted to hear from them,” Zelenskyy told the gathered diplomats as he showed them the evidence to back up his claims.

These words are hard to read and hard to write. The photographs and video are harder to watch. That is the point. Apparently, the lesson must be learned every generation.

On April 4, 1945, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower and Gens. Omar Bradley and George S. Patton visited the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald, the first camp liberated by American troops. There they found the burned remains of bodies, evidence of torture, starving prisoners and mass graves.

Similar discoveries were subsequently made at all the other Nazi concentration camps, but, at Buchenwald, Eisenhower already knew what he had to do. He suggested that Joint Chiefs Chairman George C. Marshall in Washington send members of Congress and the media to Buchenwald so they could document the truth.

Eisenhower then ordered soldiers who were not on the front lines to report to Buchenwald to witness what he had witnessed. “We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, we know what he is fighting against,” Eisenhower said.

Eisenhower then forced all the neighboring townspeople to walk the camps, exposing them to the horrid sights and smells so they could never again deny what had happened there. In some places, they were forced to bury the dead, to make a small public penance for what they had willfully ignored.

In “Crusade in Europe,” Eisenhower wrote that he felt it was his duty “to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.” He knew then as we know now that “The Big Lie” is our enemy, too.

If you were one of those Americans who criticized President Biden for calling Putin a war criminal last month — a claim he repeated after the world learned of Putin’s crimes in Bucha — you must have been looking for things to complain about. Try that now, after what we saw this past week.

Like Eisenhower, Biden knows the lesson of the past: We must never look away.