A COMICAL TOUR

The blurred lines between fact and fiction of Washington's favourite far-right populist

 

By Sidney Hey

How did a clown become the first president of a country? Well, although this was the subject of a lighthearted film called “Bananas” released in 1971 by the American filmmaker Woody Allen, his screenplay about the delirious adventure of a foolish and unlucky in love who becomes the leader of a revolution in a Caribbean country, it seems that someone in Eastern Europe has plagiarised the plot.

Yes, you guessed it. That someone is none other than the comic actor Volodymyr Zelensky, now president of a country like Ukraine, which was already fractured by a coup in 2014 that forced Russia to counter-coup in Crimea and is now plunged into war. Is there anything funny in all this? Not at all. Tragedy is the main protagonist and the simple Ukrainian inhabitants (Westerners and those of the Donbass) are the most affected.

As for the backlash in Crimea, I mean that when the CIA succeeded in getting hooligans and Nazi cells -assisted by marksmen on nearby rooftops- to overthrow Yarnukovych, the next (and probably most important) step was that NATO would land on the peninsula and force the Russian naval base in Sevastopol to be deactivated. But Vladimir Putin manoeuvred more quickly than expected (surprisingly) and so Washington and those in Brussels froze when they saw Russian troops intervene and disarm Ukrainian regiments. The Americans were left with blood in their eyes.

For the media and the paid pens of the collective West, the need to embellish with false epics the regime that worships Stepan Bandera Banderism, the Ukrainian branch of Nazism whose symbology adorns all its battalions, has become a titanic task, leading even to blatant attempts to change history, especially about who crushed the Nazis in 1945. This is where the figure of Zelensky, an Ashkenazi Jew, became central to counterbalance this opaque political reality as the media would try to avoid such inconvenient questions as "Can a Jew lead a pro-Nazi regime?

Through a false discourse adulterated by a dialectic imposed by Anglo-American propagandists, the meaning of words is ridiculously changed and thus, a covert operation to create a coup d'état is called "revolution" by the media and neo-Nazi battalions like “Azov” and “Aidar”, “patriotic militias”. This is a Slavic re-enactment of the shenanigans we saw with the jihadists in the Arab world used to foul the resistance in Iraq, assisting NATO to overthrow Mohammad al-Gaddafi in Libya and failing miserably in Syria. So it is that the Maidan Square Coup of February 2014 is called the “Revolution of Dignity” by the US Establishment media. 

But it is not only these contradictions that doom the aspirations of Washington and its Atlanticist partners to failure. Indirectly speaking of good Ukrainians who are subordinate to the regime and bad Ukrainians, the Russian-speakers who, despite having been part of the national population, were persecuted after the coup instigated by Kerry, Nuland and Brennan for not wanting to bow down to the imposed regime.

For a year now, in the course of the Russian Special Military Operation, Ukraine's comedian-turned-president has been extolled and aggrandised by the media of the collective West, proving that he is a product, the new product of the Anglo-Saxon powers that will discard him when his usefulness expires. The examples are many: Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Banzer Suarez in Bolivia, Pinochet in Chile, Videla in Argentina, Noriega in Panama, Shah Reza Palevi in Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and so many others are a reflection of what happens with the temporary and dispensable products of the US State Department. Why would Zelensky believe that he will not suffer the same fate?

Apart from his personal vices, which are quite bizarre (and, let's just say, in line with those of his sponsors), this comedian who plays a tragic sequel to “Bananas” and, like Woody Allen's character, is a distracted man whose Washington-driven events put him where he is today and who, beyond his performances for the cameras, doesn't know where he stands.

In terms of his political leadership skills, but especially as a military commander, his role is more akin to that of the pusillanimous and cowardly Boris Grushenko, also played by Woody Allen, than to that of a leader committed to reality.

His personality has been turned into a major asset in Washington and Brussels political merchandising aimed at convincing the public that we are dealing with a pro-democracy hero in a country ruled by outright corruption and far-right militarism. But despite the fact that the actor continues to act and, in his role as a comedian, to go on tours such as the one to the Vatican, there is no way he can explain (apart from the money) where all the donated war material is and when he intends to launch his much-heralded counter-offensive.