Americans in general aren't exactly a bunch renowned for their global solidarity but they really do seem to legitimately give a fuck about the besieged people of Ukraine. As a lifelong anti-imperialist who has spent the raw end of a lifetime trying to convince these same motherfuckers that Palestinians and Iraqis are people too, the temptation to roll my eyes at this sudden outpouring of empathy for the one population on the business end of a bomb that doesn't have "Made in America" stamped on the side of it is understandably high.
But I think this instinct is a mistake, both tactically and morally. People getting bombed are people getting bombed, regardless of what color cowboy hat the despot throwing the switch is wearing. The truth is that your average clueless American normie gives a fuck about Ukraine because it's the one place being bombed where CNN keeps the cameras rolling. People should give a fuck about Ukraine for the same reasons they should give a fuck about Palestine. Telling them not to does nothing to promote the suffering of other victims of international violence. What productive anti-imperialists should be doing instead is asking these bleeding-heart blue-and-yellow flag wavers, what happens when the bombs stop dropping?
No one on any side of any aisle seems to be asking this question. What becomes of the valiant martyr state of Ukraine if the war ends tomorrow? What will the result of western efforts in that nation be when the Russians finally pack up their jackboots and fuck off back to Moscow? The answer isn't pretty, but it is pretty clear if you read carefully between recent headlines. Congress has just recently approved another $3 billion arms package for Ukraine just in time for Orthodox Christmas. This latest deficit multiplying bundle includes 50 heavily armored Bradley fighting vehicles complete with 500 TOW missiles and a battery of America's deadliest Patriot missiles. That puts the price tag on America's aid for the current regime in Kiev at just over $112 billion during the last ten months alone. This is almost twice as much as Russia's entire military budget for 2021.
Volodymyr Zelensky, Time magazines man of the year and the fearless leader in charge of what has swiftly become one of the developing world's most colossal arsenals, brought in the holidays himself by signing a new bill into law that expands his government's censorship powers to print and online journalism. This after he already nationalized the country's broadcast media in 2022 with his "Unified Information Policy" that forcibly combined all of Ukraine's news channels into a single state-run 24-hour propaganda mill dubbed "United News." But Zelensky didn't limit his holiday revelry to Orwellian censorship. He also revoked the citizenship of 13 Orthodox priests for belonging to a sect accused of being a Russian front despite the fact that they cut all ties with that nation in the wake of last year's invasion and have consistently denounced the Kremlin's so-called special military operation since.
So, basically what Ukraine will inevitably be left with after fending off the rapacious advances of a violent autocratic gangster like Vladimir Putin is a nation armed to the fucking teeth and run by a violent autocratic gangster that marches a little more like Putin with each passing Patriot missile. If people in this country legitimately give a fuck about the Ukrainian people, and I want to believe that they do, then they need to put down the fucking Kool-Aid and recognize the fact that Volodymyr Zelensky himself has become an existential threat to whatever freedoms his people have left and America's support for his regime is what made that comedian a monster.
Volodymyr Zelensky began his meteoric rise to international fame as the star of a hit TV show about a pissed-off schoolteacher who unexpectedly becomes the president of Ukraine on the strength of a viral classroom rant against his nation's corrupt elites and that's essentially how he was packaged to the Ukrainian electorate during the 2019 presidential election. After suffering under the yoke of the same clique of hoods and neo-fascists that America put in power with the 2014 Maidan coup for half a decade, the Ukrainian people desperately wanted a change.
But more than anything they wanted an end to the gruesome civil war in the nation's eastern Donbass region that had already seen over 14,000 mostly ethnic Russian civilians killed and hundreds of thousands more displaced. The lion share of this dirty work was performed by private death squads with swastikas on their uniforms who had been integrated into their nation's newly American micro-managed National Guard after proving a willingness to joyfully slaughter their own former countrymen in the name of the master race.
Zelensky ran on a campaign to reign these savage berserkers in and hold them accountable with the Minsk Agreement that promised the Donbass autonomy and he won this campaign in a landslide victory that included the overwhelming support of his nation's understandably bitter Russian speaking community. The only problem is that the Zelensky campaign's number one doner was a boorish billionaire oligarch named Igor Kolomoisky who had also bankrolled some of the same bloodthirsty neo-Nazi militias that Zelensky was elected to squash, including the notorious Azov Battalion.
When the new president confronted his master's army in the occupied Donbass village of Zolote with a well-publicized attempt to get these racist gangsters to disarm, Zelensky was torn to shreds by Kolomoisky's phalanx of private news stations and even members of his own government openly joked about having him murdered. His poll numbers quickly plummeted and stayed on the basement floor even after he bravely called out his other masters in Washington for trying to provoke a war with the Russians on his border who had grown impatient with the new president's broken promises to rehabilitate the Minsk Agreement and end the incessant shelling of ethnic Russian civilians.
Few people in his current western fan club know that Volodymyr Zelensky was actually one of the least popular men in his nation before Vladimir Putin turned him into an overnight superstar with his reckless invasion and even fewer people seem to know that his lack of popularity stemmed largely from his inability to fulfill his promises for peace while also pleasing the violent men who financed his rise to power.
This all changed very quickly last February. Putin's invasion was met with an unexpected amount of resistance from Ukraine's disgruntled Russian-speaking population who it turned out appreciated the Kremlin's violent meddling about as much as they did Washington's. Meanwhile, the once locally despised and internationally unknown President Zelensky was treated to a high-powered corporate media make-over that rapidly built a global cult of personality around the myth of the Jedi who stood up to Darth Putin.
Volodymyr Zelensky's early attempts at negotiating a peaceful solution to this mess, largely built around the same Minsk Agreement that both he and his assigned nemesis actually agreed was basic common sense, were strongly discouraged by the same jerks who wagged NATO membership over his head in a provocative game of imperial keep-away. Thus, any hope of this bloodbath ending in its infancy seemed to crumble beneath the shadows of the growing egos of two men manipulated by Washington into fighting it to the last man, woman and child.
It's hard to say what kind of leader Volodymyr Zelensky might have become if Vladimir Putin hadn't taken NATOs bait and invaded a nation rigged up like the farmhouse in Straw Dogs but it's equally hard to deny that with each passing day that this pointless war continues to rage, this one-time reformer leads a little bit more like the autocrat the West urges him fight to a nuclear stand-off. Just like Putin, Zelensky has banned any meaningful opposition to his increasingly dictatorial rule while playing the victim card like a riverboat gambler, and just like Putin, he has also totally abandoned the diplomacy he once advocated in the form of the Minsk Agreement in favor of a Quixotic jihad to return regions to his nation that clearly want as little to do with him as the rest of the country does with the other despot in this proxy pissing match.
With all of these hideous things considered, it should come as little surprise that Volodymyr Zelensky's new geopolitical role model isn't Paris, London or even Washington but the apartheid Mecha of Tel Aviv. Zelensky has openly called for Ukraine to become a "Big Israel" while waxing fascistic about a brave new nation in which the armed forces maintain a permanent presence in every facet of civilian life, raving that in "all institutions, supermarkets, cinemas, there will be people with weapons." In a society like this, war becomes a way of life. Israel can only justify this increasingly oppressive style of existence long after their own Arab neighbors gave up on resisting it by inventing a mythical fifth column of permanent enemies in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Even when Putin leaves, and he will leave, the ethnic Russians of the Donbass will remain, and no one will be left to save them, or the people kept in a state of perpetual martial law justified by their lingering existence.
This is Ukraine's future if the Military Industrial Complex has its way. This is what the billions in American tax dollars are really going to fund. Not salvation for the Ukrainian people. Not peace or democracy. The money of the hard-working Americans who have finally decided to give a fuck about a bombed population will go to building the Ukrainian people a prison in the shape of a nation with an increasingly unhinged autocrat playing the role of warden. The best thing that Americans can do for Ukraine, perhaps the only thing left for Americans to do for Ukraine, is to demand that our so-called representatives in Washington stop funding this tragedy and hope that the equally besieged people of both Kiev and Donetsk recognize that they are both victims of one tormentor with two heads known as the war state.
Fuck Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky. If you truly care about the people of Ukraine who have been tormented by both of these bastards, then you'll stop turning Ukraine into another Israel by turning the latter despot into Volodzymandias.
Peace, Love and Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post
* Cult of Personality by Living Colour
* Celebrity Skin by Hole
* The Last of the Famous International Playboys by Morrissey
* Not by Big Thief
* TV Eye by the Stooges
* Posing for Bondage by Japanese Breakfast
* Surrender by Cheap Trick
* Natural One by the Folk Implosion
* Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins
* Goodbye Stranger by Supertramp
“Zelensky ran on a campaign to reign these savage berserkers in ... and he won this campaign in a landslide victory...”
ReplyDelete— Nicky/CH
“One of the most blindingly-obvious flaws in the Western democratic model is that elected government officials require no credentials of any kind whatsoever to qualify for their positions.”
— Larry Romanoff
I read this essay before I saw this editorial by Doyle McManus. To quote::" All of which leads some foreign policy experts to conclude that the most likely outcome isn’t military victory or a negotiated peace, but a “frozen conflict.”
ReplyDelete“Rather than assuming that the war can be ended through triumph or talks, the West needs to contemplate a world in which the conflict continues with neither victory nor peace in sight,” Ivo Daalder of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and James Goldgeier of American University wrote in Foreign Affairs last week.
“Not all wars end — or end in permanent peace settlements,” they noted.....
The plan would ask Americans to support aid to Ukraine for years or decades, even as Republicans, once the party of anti-Soviet resolve, complain about the cost.
But foreign policy is often a choice among options that are less than ideal — and a cold war is less destructive, and probably cheaper, than a hot one."
Jesus H. Christ, how fuckin convenient for the military industrial congressional complex! Use their editorial writers to ease us into accepting a frozen war like Israel, the Koreas! Maybe this will accelerate our inevitable collapse, when American basic needs to have a decent life are undermined by feeding this beast instead of the general welfare of the union.
Universally understood is the adage: “He who pays the piper calls the tune.”
DeleteAnother well understood adage is: “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”
The Lock Heed Martins donate a.k.a. bribe the politicians to keep the country at war and the venal Mitch Connells dutifully oblige with dedication to the rule of reciprocity.
“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”
― Samuel Johnson
Collapse is the best we can hope for at this point. I find myself praying for it lately.
Delete