Washington Robot
Zelensky is the West's perfect Bad-Idea Man, opening the doors for everything from killing free speech to launching nuclear war. But he's not long for this world and neither are his backers
Volodymyr Zelensky is the West’s ideal vessel for laundering its worst ideas. Forget fighting till the last Ukrainian - this canary in the filthiest ideological coal mine the international banking cartels could build might just lead the empire all the way to that great mushroom cloud in the sky.
Despite the Ukrainian president’s profound lack of geopolitical awareness, his declaration over a month ago that the “international community” must help Taiwan resist Chinese “aggression” now, before Beijing attacks the poor little heavily-armed island, served to open the door to the absurd spectacle the world beheld this week. US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tottered around the wayward province visiting silicon chip factories in order to fluff up her stock portfolio and maybe even goad Xi Jinping into launching a military campaign to retake Taiwan that would quickly flatten US forces.
Seven months into Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, Zelensky remains the darling of the western intelligentsia, rolled out at every opportunity to demand more money for the weapons his soldiers are quietly offloading on the dark web, more sanctions against those dastardly Russians, more martial-law-style crackdowns at home, and more calls for violence against civilians.
The shoulderless thespian is thriving in his position as NATO’s golden boy, and both parties seem quite happy with what amounts to the world’s most expensive fin-dom (that’s “Financial Domination”) relationship in human history. Clad in man-of-the-people olive drab, Zelensky plays the role of solemn warrior-monk, convincing the US and Europe to open their hearts and wallets for the war effort to the point of adopting ruinous, self-sabotaging sanctions they clearly cannot afford in order to Save Democracy. Who knew that Uncle Sam, perhaps grown bored of enjoying the riches extracted by force from other countries, really just wanted to be told to bend over and open his wallet like the dirty little cash-slut he was? How many lives would have been saved in Libya if Muammar Gaddafi had just whipped out one of those petrodollar-imperiling gold dinars and told Barack Obama to suck on it?
But it’s all fun and games for Zelensky to declare Biden a dirty little debt pig and send him down to the ATM every hour to withdraw more funds. Washington and its NATO partners are faced with a thornier crisis. One can print unlimited amounts of money, if one doesn’t mind inflating the currency and triggering a recession death-spiral the likes of which the industrialized West may not survive. But one can’t just print HiMARS rocket launchers, or Javelin missiles, or any of the other expensive toys Ukraine has been consuming for eight years now. Even the most skilled disinformation architects cannot fight fire with bullshit.
Because Zelensky has been wedged into every pop culture event of 2022, from the tripping hordes at Glastonbury to a recent much-mocked Vogue photoshoot by Annie Leibowitz, the herd animals of the West have long since forgotten all about the media establishment’s slew of relatively recent warnings that the country NATO was propping up was not only the most corrupt in eastern Europe but also a hive of wannanazi thugs bankrolled by incongruously Jewish billionaire Igor Kolomoisky.
Far from the corrupt puppet of capital he was revealed to be in the Panama Papers, Zelensky has been reinvented as a Hero of Our Democracy™, just as the diminutive dictator Dr. Anthony Fauci came to embody “the Science” during the mini-Dark Age from which much of the West has yet to emerge. The wisdom of neither figure can be questioned, unless one wants to risk social exile. Thus anything the Kiev regime says or does is automatically anointed with the fairy dust of Democracy.
This has given the West a magnificent opportunity to shred what’s left of the Enlightenment-era notion of human rights. Zelensky unveiled an all-digital state that serves as a turn-key social credit score? Nice, let’s go full Minority Report at home! Zelensky outlawed opposition parties? Cool, fewer names on the ballot means voters have less chances to make a mistake! Zelensky has banned Russian music and art? Awesome, let’s burn all the nasty cultural artifacts that make us ashamed of our uncultured ignorance! Zelensky has declared it a war crime to demand accountability in how he spends US taxpayers’ money? Chuck Schumer’s already got it covered! Zelensky wants to go to war with China?
[record-scratch]
Coming from any other eastern European kleptocrat, such a suggestion might have been shrugged off as the egotistical bloviation of a spoiled child, dismissed with a nervous chuckle and appeased with another eight-ball. But Zelensky has the ears of every self-disrespecting “democracy” on the planet, and what he says is lapped up by the narrative managers of western media as gospel. If the man wants war with China, he will find some NATOad willing to hop to it.
Zelensky’s June call for a preemptive strike against China was picked up by no less than the Washington Post, which acknowledged that while the comments risked “upsetting Ukraine’s delicate balancing act with China,” they had emanated from the mouth of their Democracy Hero, who insisted that “aggressors must be confronted wherever they emerge.”
Never mind that the US, chief backer of the Ukrainian military effort, has long been the biggest and boldest aggressor on the planet - Zelensky’s paymasters knew not to take such rhetoric personally.
But Zelensky had raised the bar for Our Democracy with his geopolitical ambition. There’s a difference between duping Europe into starving itself of wheat and fuel for the coming winter and threatening China’s territorial ambitions. While Europe - its ruling class at least - is possessed by a self-flagellatory compulsion that ensures it will respond with only gratitude the more it suffers because of its Ukraine boosterism, Beijing has repeatedly made it clear that western interference in the Taiwan question will not be tolerated. Not by the US, and certainly not by the likes of Zelensky, a man who doesn’t know the difference between Chiang Kai-Shek and Shrek, a clown who just a few years ago was playing piano with his dick on TV for an excruciating 44 seconds.
Washington hemmed and hawed for a good long time trying to appease its shoulderless enfant terrible without incurring the wrath of Xi. Biden dribbled half-baked promises to protect Taiwan from big bad China only for his cabinet to hurriedly walk them back lest someone in Beijing take the old man’s ramblings seriously. But after the very public canonization of Democracy Hero, surely Washington couldn’t refuse both his longstanding plea for a no-fly zone in Ukraine (which even the most simpering yes-men had acknowledged would amount to a declaration of war against Russia) and his plea for aid to Asian Ukraine-equivalent Taiwan (which would amount to a declaration of war against China)! The US was caught in the awkward position of having two invites to the nuclear-armageddon ball, thanks to Zelensky’s unerring instinct for deploying other people’s money, but not even enough ammo for one great-power war after shipping years’ worth of stockpiles to Ukraine.
Eventually, Mark Esper - the former Raytheon lobbyist who served as Defense Secretary under Trump - went rogue and declared there should be an end to the “One China” policy that had essentially served as a “don’t ask/don’t tell” for the Taiwan question for nearly half a century. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took the war machine’s cue and hopped on a plane to visit the contested island, claiming to be interested in inspecting its “vibrant Democracy” but actually setting up tours of semiconductor factories whose stock she wanted her hubby to buy. Such an unabashed display of the great American political virtues - greed, hypocrisy, and sheer bull-headed stupidity - had Democrats and Republicans alike hard as they braced for the eeeevil Chinese to shoot down her heroic plane. When Beijing failed to live up to their (utterly baseless) prediction, there were eruptions of bipartisan high-fiving and fulsome media tributes. Biden came out looking like a cowardly stick in the mud for refusing to go along with the pointless provocation and instead cautioning his sister in dementia that the Pentagon “didn’t think it was a good idea right now.”
And Zelensky? While he did his job well in paving the way for the US to try to start a world war with yet another superpower against which it’s hopelessly unmatched, the Ukrainian leader is sounding more and more like his American counterpart every day, hopelessly in over his head. Both are figureheads for the neocon policy apparatus that takes its orders from BlackRock and Vanguard, the asset managers that control the global economy; neither man can be said to have any real role in his country’s governance, or understand how to function in such a role should he somehow be thrust into one; both are supposed to, when in doubt, shut up and look presidential.
But neither Biden nor Zelensky have been able to manage that last directive, and both are rapidly reaching the end of their usefulness with the people they were assigned to hoodwink. Even if Zelensky still commands the worshipful adulation of the West, a growing number of Ukrainians are sick of what look for all the world like efforts by his handlers to turn the war tearing their country to pieces into a luxury product. A hologram of the man recently made its debut in a bizarre Star Wars-themed broadcast at a London tech fair.
While it was ostensibly aimed at selling the idea of Ukraine as the digital democracy of the future, the high-profile introduction of a synthetic version of the West’s Democracy Hero carried more than a faint hint that the man himself might be getting to be too much trouble, especially after he fired both the head of the SBU and his chief prosecutor last month, claiming they were traitors. At best, NATO was merely constructing a contingency plan in case their golden boy ended up a headless, limbless torso floating in the Dnipro; at worst, they might help that plan along, given his plummeting popularity at home. With no real allies left in Ukraine outside his own inner circle, Zelensky is singing not just for his supper but for his life.
It’s only natural Zelensky, like Biden, would be drawn to the sort of geopolitical catastrophe that could hide his rank incompetence beneath a greater chaos - say, a shooting war between the US and China over Taiwan. Just as Zelensky tries to drag the US into a standoff with Beijing, so is Biden trying to pull Europe into such an unwinnable conflict with Russia. But a scheme by the UK and Europe to bar Russia from the global shipping insurance market, which would have (theoretically) kept the bulk of its oil from reaching overseas customers - a tactic hailed as genius by the media establishment just two months ago - has thus far failed to launch. Indeed, European countries appear to be getting cold feet - literally - regarding shoveling their increasingly finite supply of wealth into the bottomless pit the war has become. A recent survey indicates that for Europeans, the looming possibility of dying on Democracy’s freezing-cold hill has become decidedly less appealing as it becomes more likely.
After all, no matter who “wins” these unwinnable conflicts, the victor will be expected to serve up his own country on a silver platter for foreign investors to gorge themselves. A recently-published paper by think tank RAND Corporation titled “Rebuilding Ukraine” describes how “state enterprises…are a chokehold on the economy,” reducing “public confidence in government and deter[ring] private investors.” The document is a love-letter to rampant privatization of the same strain that nearly sank the Russian economy post-USSR and which international financial cartels are eager to unleash everywhere, especially China, and serves as a handy reminder that Kiev’s vaunted “digital state” is all programmed and run by a private company, one that is ironically quite cozy with Moscow.
Whoever is duped into kicking off World War III - and Washington is already scraping bottom, trying to goad North Korea’s Kim Jong-un into playing that role by rubbing his faux-assassination in his face - the carnage will be used to justify the complex controlled demolition required to set the stage for the technocratic prison state the World Economic Forum has been gleefully advertising to us for so long. A global food shortage, a worsening international financial crisis, a few flashy natural disasters, some more bogus pandemics and maybe an asteroid threat to top it all off will be causally linked not only to the war itself but to our shameful consumption habits, which will have to go. Despite the scientific battering it’s taken over the last several decades, ‘climate change’ remains central to this societal shift, as it is only through linking our enjoyment of the material world to a crippling guilt over having somehow destroyed something beautiful through that enjoyment that we can truly be alienated from our own emotions, that which makes us human. While we’re being reprogrammed, the ruling class must create such an all-encompassing sense of crisis that it can dupe at least a few of us into believing that a 24/7/365 real time panopticon surveillance system, central bank digital currencies, an international biometric control grid and a social credit score are the only logical response. Such a system will unlock all kinds of monetizable assets in the newly-standardized, soulless human. All wars, as the saying goes, are bankers’ wars, and when your hopelessly corrupt financial system is hanging by a thread, turning human suffering into gold is always a safe bet to subsidize whatever Great Reset you have waiting in the wings.
Ultimately, for these types, it really doesn’t matter who wins the war, because the war is never really over. It might retreat behind the scenes from time to time, but a bloodthirsty hegemon with hundreds of military outposts and bioweapons labs holding the planet hostage cannot simply be switched off - it is an ecosystem larger than many governments, requiring tremendous amounts of capital to merely exist. Nevertheless, this empire’s grip is slipping. Beneath the grandstanding about Democracy and the caricatures of Evil menacing it lurk the same centuries-old vultures, the same deep-rooted financial cartels fighting over the same scraps of flesh. Whoever rises to take the place of the US had better have a plan to deal with them.
(this article began as a much shorter and rather differently-focused oped for RT here)
As always, your writing makes me think. And sometimes that hurts, as in when I don't entirely agree with your points. But darn if that video of Speaker Pellagra didn't make my stomach turn. I'm not a young person any more, but I wish there were age limits on persons who could hold elective office in this country. She and Sniffy are embarrassments to this country.