By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

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.

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