Freedom of expression includes the freedom to publicly make a fool of yourself.

Alexander Nitzberg, an Austrian author and translator, makes extensive use of this freedom with the kind support of the Viennese newspaper Der Standard.

An interview with him in "Standard" actually belongs in a category that Karl Valentin is said to have said is not even worth ignoring.

You don't have to know either Nitzberg or the interviewer.

But some of Nitzberg's "arguments" are pure Kremlin propaganda, which we are likely to encounter more often - and so it is unfortunately important to deal with them.

Michael Martens

Correspondent for Southeast European countries based in Vienna.

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This applies above all to Nitzberg's insinuation that the Ukrainians are possibly shooting at themselves, i.e. pursuing a self-destruction program - presumably to win the sympathies of the world over to their own side.

Nitzberg doesn't say the latter directly, but it comes from his question: "If you're sitting in a high-rise building and watching a shell hit, how do you know which side the bullet came from?"

Invasion from Ennui?

In other words: the pictures from Kharkov, Cherson, Mariupol, soon probably also from Kyiv and Odessa - don't they perhaps show a work of destruction by the Ukrainians themselves?

Has Putin mobilized 200,000 troops from Ennui, complete with artillery, fighter-bombers and the Black Sea Fleet, and now Ukraine is kindly doing the job for him?

That something like this comes from the aggressors is known from the war in Bosnia, in which around 100,000 people were killed from 1992 to 1995.

More than 10,000 perished in the siege of Sarajevo alone by Serbian troops.

Serbs who had stayed in the city also fell victim to Serbian snipers or grenades in the encirclement.

To this day, cheerleaders of Serbian war criminal Ratko Mladić claim that the Bosniaks shelled their capital

Historian Holm Sundhaussen, who died in 2015, said the needful: “For everything we don't know or don't know for certain, one fact remains: It was definitely not the Bosniaks' tanks and artillery pieces that were posted on the mountains surrounding Sarajevo.

And that the city was shot at from these positions (...) is also certain." (...) The fact that "it cannot always be unequivocally reconstructed where a bullet came from does not change anything.

But despite all the uncertainties, all the doubts and some inconsistencies, it remains undeniable that Sarajevo was a besieged city.

And we also know who the besiegers were or who commanded them.”

Sundhaussen's words still apply now.

Who is attacking whom in Ukraine is undeniable – at least for those who do not work with Putinian propaganda.

The cascade of inhuman stupidity that Nitzberg spreads goes even deeper.

When he says that he "actually didn't hear" Putin's February 24 declaration of war denying Ukraine's right to exist and a Ukrainian nation's right to exist, one can only advise listening to the speech again.

As "proof" that Putin means well with Ukraine, Nitzberg cites: "Russia's Foreign Minister Lavrov recently said that the Russian people respect the Ukrainian people and see them as their brother people." The bloody trail of destruction by Russian soldiers in Ukraine is an impressive testament to the "brotherhood".

Stalin's foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, is said to have said that the Soviet bombardment of Finland in the winter war of 1939/40 was for supplies of food.

Until shortly before Russia's invasion, Putin's master propagandist Lavrov helped fabricate the lie that no one had any intention of invading Ukraine.

Using one of his sentences as evidence for something other than the opposite of what was said requires a special logic.

As a result, Nitzberg also devalues ​​his statements, against which nothing can be objected.

There is no doubt that the reaction to Putin's war has exaggerated when calls for a boycott of Russian literature.

But why is it "unworthy" or "disrespectful" to demand of a star conductor like Valeri Gergiev, supported with tax money,

to take a stand on Putin's crimes?

It would be unworthy not to do so.

With Nitzberg it's easy: "Are you for Putin, against Putin?

Those are all simplistic attitudes.” If you replace “Putin” with “torture”, “Hitler”, “dictatorship” – the sentence loses nothing of its inhuman moral equidistance to good and evil.

But Nitzberg has one piece of advice to stop the killing: "A humane factor must guide action, in both directions." Neither Molotov nor Lavrov could have said it better.