Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky was the star this week in a carefully orchestrated - yet cringingly obvious - real-life drama.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky was the star this week in a carefully orchestrated - yet cringingly obvious - real-life drama.
The warmongering spectacle, falsification of history, and manipulation of public emotions were worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster. Yet it was also dripping with superficiality and cheesy contrivance in the best tradition of Hollywood schmaltz.
More seriously, though, the sobering takeaway is that the United States and the Kiev regime that it sponsors have absolutely no intention of negotiating a political end to the war in Ukraine with Russia.
Far from it, the U.S. rulers are driving their country to evermore war in a way that makes it almost impossible to end through diplomacy. The definitions and purpose of the war in the minds of American politicians and media are so distorted and removed from reality that a realistic solution is increasingly elusive.
A potentially realistic solution is for all sides to treat each other with respect and consideration of mutual strategic security concerns. This is what Russia had promulgated in the months before the conflict in Ukraine erupted on February 24 this year. Some saner American and European voices recognize that reality, but for the most part, the politicians in Washington and Brussels as well as the Western mainstream media are wedded to a delusional view of the war as being all about "defeating Russian aggression" and "defending the free world".
To keep this theater of absurd going, Zelensky was brought to Washington this week in an audacious pro-war propaganda stunt. This was no "surprise visit" or "daring wartime trip" but rather "an elaborately executed plan by U.S. and Ukrainian officials", as reported by Associated Press. The Ukrainian leader was flown from Poland to Washington on board a US Air Force jet normally reserved for senior American officials.
Dressed in green military garb, Zelensky was whisked from Andrews Air Force Base and greeted in the Oval Office by President Joe Biden. Photo-ops followed of fireside chatting before a joint press conference at the White House. Zelensky then delivered a speech before a joint session of Congress. It was obvious that the comedian actor-turned-president was mouthing a speech written for him by his American handlers.
He whooped about "victory" over Russia and compared the Ukrainian troops to the American revolutionaries fighting against the British Empire in 1777 as well as to American soldiers overcoming the Nazi Wehrmacht at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944.
No doubt honorable American patriots are turning in their graves from such an insult to their memory and sacrifices.
Of particular disgust was Zelensky's comparison of the Russian "terrorist state" and Russian President Vladimir Putin to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler.
Ludicrously, the assembled Congress - with a few exceptions - gave standing ovations to such contrived falsification and historical nonsense.
"If ever a leader personified their nation it is Volodymyr [sic] Zelensky," gushed CNN. "That imagery encapsulated Zelensky's mastery of historical allusion and public relations theater."
The cable news channel inadvertently alludes to the latent reality of "manipulation" but nevertheless buys into it - lock, stock and barrel. The "mastery" of public relations it refers to isn't so much that of a comic president, it belongs to the U.S. deep state handlers behind the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.
This is what is so odious about the spectacle. Americans are deluded into thinking they are funding and arming a regime in Kiev that is "defending democracy". That regime was brought to power in 2014 through a CIA-backed coup against democracy. Zelensky was elected in 2019 as a peace candidate by Ukrainians sick of a civil war that Washington and its European partners were deliberately fueling, as former German chancellor Angela Merkel recently admitted.
Now Zelensky has been reinvented by his American scriptwriters as a "wartime hero" wearing green military fatigues (too neatly pressed mind you!) while regaling a Congressional audience of clapping seals who are signing off on a total U.S. aid budget to Ukraine of nearly $150 billion.
President Biden announced a Christmas present to the Kiev regime of Patriot missiles. The provocative step is bringing the U.S. into a head-on confrontation with Russia, as Moscow keeps warning yet keeps being ignored.
In Orwellian fashion, the warmongering in Washington is presented as "defense" of world peace.
In reality, what took place in Washington this week and the moronic words spoken were an abomination of Christmas. There is no goodwill for humanity, no desire for peace, and no celebration of transcending historical injustice. It's all about promoting war, death and human suffering with smug and deluded sanctimony. The antithesis of Christmas.
It is incredible how willfully gullible American politicians and the corporate media are. Of course, most of them are on the pay of the weapons companies that feed off the Pentagon taxpayer-funded trough. The deluded sense of self-righteous purpose is astounding. Only a culture that has been so thoroughly degraded with Hollywood-type trash would be so susceptible to such gross manipulation. That conditioning also makes the warmongering so dangerous. There is no limit to the folly.
Zelensky was applauded for comparing Russians to Nazi barbarians. The subliminal message was that Russians are subhumans whose "tactics are primitive... they destroy everything". Paradoxically, it is Zelensky and his American backers who are peddling Nazi ideology.
Zelensky, a nominal Jew, is the head of military forces that glorify Nazi collaborators with Nazi slogans, salutes and insignia. It is a vile distortion of history that the Kiev regime and its American paymasters are fighting for freedom. Zelensky's regime is the most corrupt in the world and even Pentagon investigators have expressed concern regarding the black market sale of American and NATO weaponry flowing into that country.
The charade being perpetrated on the American people is truly awesome. While American society degenerates from economic collapse and while poverty grows among U.S. workers, their effete elites are applauding a conman comic and funneling billions of dollars of more weapons to Ukraine which is leading to more war with Russia.
You couldn't make such a farcical storyline up - even in Hollywood. But it's a blockbuster in Washington.