I have never been much for schadenfreude: It is always best to occupy one’s mind with worthier matters.
But I cave to temptation as Volodymyr Zelensky, the puffed-up buffoon who has paraded flamboyantly across the world stage as a hero these past half-dozen years, is publicly cut to size as President Donald Trump gets on with the business of ending the proxy war Zelensky has cynically sold to the Western world’s lumpen liberals while presiding over the monstrously corrupt, Nazi-infested regime in Kiev.
Let us sneer, let us snicker as the air hisses out of Zelensky’s balloon.
This thieving som-a-gom bears front-line responsibility — along with his masters, of course — for the deaths of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers somewhere in six figures and the ruination of the country and the citizenry to which he purports to dedicate himself.
Donald Trump’s démarche toward Russia and a determination to end the Ukraine war he shares with President Vladimir Putin, leave Zelensky marooned on an island made of out-of-date propaganda ops.
And now we find Europe’s neoliberal elites, having war-mongered their way into the Ukraine morass because the Biden regime told them to do so, wandering on the beaches with him.
As of Trump’s Feb. 12 telephone call with Putin and the Munich Security Conference, held in the Bavarian capital Feb. 14–16, the Continent’s leaders and their repellent mascot have been left holding a very big bag.
Zelensky’s fall is significant but was a matter of time. Europanic, as I call it, is the big news of the week.
This shapes up to be more fun than a rerun of an old Terry Southern movie, supercilious hypocrites with their pants down in every scene.
Zelensky has been the papier mâché creation of others since he was plucked from a sit-com and re-costumed to succeed Petro Poroshenko, a chocolate magnate — Is there not a serious pol anywhere in Ukraine? — who moved into the presidential palace after the U.S.–cultivated coup 11 years ago this month.
He, Zelensky, was financed by one of Ukraine’s countless megacrooks and coached by American image-crafters during the craven chicanery of his presidential campaign back in 2019.
As readers may recall, the propaganda got so far out of hand after Russia began its military intervention three years ago that Biden regime ideologues, with corporate media dutifully parroting the trope, had the great broad masses believing Zelensky was “a 21st century Churchill.”
Tell me, I recall thinking, somebody please tell me they are not serious.
In his now-famous dismissal of Zelensky last week, Trump marked him down as “a modestly successful comedian.” Sometimes even what we quaintly call reality has its appeal.
As Max Blumenthal astutely observed in The Grayzone the other day, Trump had it wrong when he charged in his contra–Zelensky broadside that the Ukrainian president started the war in Ukraine. No, he provoked it.
I like the distinction. The modestly successful comedian has effectively served — very effectively, indeed — as a sort of agent provocateur enabling those with the money and the guns to send extravagant amounts of both into the sinkhole of corruption over which Zelensky presides without the worry of domestic revolts.
Pleading & Complaining
With the regularity of a seasonal TV series, Zelensky would bleat that Ukraine needs more weapons, Ukraine needs more money and Ukraine needs it all now. I especially liked it when he would bark that Western leaders — President Joe Biden, the Europeans — were sloughing off their responsibilities. The impudent, scolding tone: You had to appreciate this.
That wasn’t meant for Biden or any of the trans–Atlantic clients. I have had a hunch all along that the Biden White House, which acknowledged daily telephone contacts with Zelensky, rehearsed him regularly as to what to say, when to say it and how desperately to make the assigned point.
No, Zelensky’s pleading-and-complaining routines, at times so rude Biden’s people told him to throttle back, were meant for the American and European publics — a perception management op to keep the blue-and-yellow flags drooping off millions of balconies and front porches.
Zelensky was a professional showman and his was a showman’s work. His other job was fully to harness Ukraine’s neo–Nazi fanaticism — in the political sphere, in the military — while dressing it up to look like a presentable democracy worthy of all the billions of taxpayers’ money wastefully lavished upon it.
And so to the bout of early-onset schadenfreude.
Zelensky in Munich was little more than a gadfly. It was minorly wonderful to watch: You saw in the video footage the face of an uncertain man who knew his star was falling, and his anxious features reminded you that the grotesque operation this nobody was oddly instrumental in sustaining was falling with him.
The European Turn
Let’s have a pivot, shall we — that overworked word the mainstream press has not been able to resist since Hillary Clinton’s celebrated-but-without-substance “pivot to Asia” way back when. Post–Munich, the suddenly desperate Zelensky — authentically desperate this time — pivoted on a dime to the Europeans.
The modestly successful comedian had not even departed from that lovely city of Biergärten and parks before he was calling for “an army of Europe” — this as if to imply he and his regime were, but of course, as European as the French or the Portuguese.
And now we have the spectacle of the European powers, ignoring the fact that Zelensky’s diadem just turned into tin foil, throwing in their lot with him and his regime once again — never mind the only two powers capable of negotiating an end to the war are about to do so over their heads (where, indeed, the U.S.–Russian talks ought to take place).
I absolutely loved an unnamed Trump administration official’s assessment of Zelensky’s new circumstances a few days after the Munich conference ended.
“It’s a shit sandwich,” this source said, according to Moon of Alabama (which cited a brief Axios report). “But Ukraine is going to have to eat it because he [Trump] has made clear this is no longer our problem.”
And now it is decided: The European powers are going to chow down with him.
We are now treated to a daily procession of chest-beating European leaders professing their determination to go it alone with the Kiev regime. Europe must “step up,” Keir Starmer said a day after the Munich gathering concluded. “It’s time for us to take responsibility for our security, for our continent.”
That is from The Times of London. The Telegraph subsequently reported the British PM plans “to defy Trump” with a “triple whammy” — vulgarity goes trans–Atlantic these days — that will include military support and yet more sanctions against Russian interests.
I am always on for more deluded silliness from Annalena Baerbock, the dependably deluded and silly German foreign minister. And she did not disappoint last week.
As RT International reported under the headline, “Germany issues warning to U.S.,” it quoted Baerbock offering this gem at a Potsdam campaign rally just before Germany’s national elections Sunday:
“We’re increasing pressure on the Americans [so they know] they have a lot to lose if they don’t stand on the side of Europe’s liberal democracies.”
I can do no better with this one than Tom Harrington, emeritus at Trinity College, Hartford, and an energetic blogger with that pithy wit for which we all appreciate the Irish. Under the headline, “The perils of method acting” he gives us this:
“If you are a chihuahua and you play a Doberman for many years on TV, you can forget you are actually a chihuahua. This can lead to much delusion when the director calls off the production.”
I loved typing those lines just now and wish they were mine. These people are blowing bubbles.
Neither Britain nor Germany — nor any other member of Ukraine’s European constituency — has the money, the military, or the domestic consensus to act consequentially in Kiev’s behalf.
They have been supine clients of the U.S. for too long. In Tom Harrington’s terms, they are yelping chihuahuas.
‘Into the Valley of Death’
The Euros and their Canadian cousins in the neoliberal cause, a dozen top officials in all, gathered in Kiev Monday to put their money — so wastefully and unwisely — where their mouths are.
European foreign ministers convened simultaneously in Brussels. And between them they considered sending Ukraine an additional €20 billion straight off the top — more coming is the implication— and a wide variety of additional sanctions — on energy, trade, financial services and so on — against the Russians.
So: The killing must go on more senselessly by the day, and the European citizenry must continue to suffer, ditto.
Why do I keep thinking of the Charge of the Light Brigade and Lord Tennyson’s mournful memorial to that catastrophic miscalculation — “Into the valley of death” and all that:
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said….
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die….
This new round of foolishness among the Europeans is not funny. This is not a Terry Southern script. Under the circumstances — a likely settlement somewhere in the offing — it is a criminally careless of human lives and the well-being of 450 million European citizens.
I see only one explanation for this. It is the diabolic outcome of the liberal authoritarianism I go on about in this space. The neoliberal order must must must prevail no matter what the cost, no matter how obviously irrational this repudiation of reason proves.
Keir Starmer is off to Washington this week for his first encounter with President Trump. We cannot know what will transpire when they meet in the Oval Office, but these two could not possibly be more opposite in their politics, their temperaments, their intentions.
Emmanuel Macron, who concluded his visit to the White House Monday, proved predictably ineffectual. He seemed, at least, to understand — a modest virtue — that he is no more than a chihuahua.
Taking as a guide the French president’s failure to get anything done, I see little coming out of Starmer’s small summit — perhaps, if Trump shuts down the famously spineless Brit, another occasion for the indulgence of a little schadenfreude.
I have waited decades — I go back here to the mid–Cold War years — for the Europeans to think and act for themselves, to stand as an independent force as de Gaulle and a few others urged, to serve as a bridge between the Atlantic world of which they are a part and the great East that is their neighbor.
How superbly moral the world order they could bring into being, I imagined. Václav Havel shared such a vision — or, I had better say out of respect, I shared his.
Now circumstances at last force the Europeans to go their own way. And they charge in precisely the wrong direction — clinging for dear life to the old binaries generations of Americans have long insisted upon even as America’s new leadership, countless objections to it notwithstanding, seems to begin looking beyond all that.
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